Lecture Series: Ray Siemens

Selection from The Devonshire Manuscript (Add. MS 17492), folio 2r.
© The British Library

Ray Siemens is Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Victoria, in English and Computer Science, and past Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing (2004-15). He is founding editor of the electronic scholarly journal Early Modern Literary Studies, and his publications include, among others, Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Humanities (2004, 2015 with Schreibman and Unsworth), Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Literary Studies (2007, with Schreibman), A Social Edition of the Devonshire MS (2012, 2015; MRTS/Iter, Wikibooks), Literary Studies in the Digital Age (2014; MLA, with Price), and The Lyrics of the Henry VIII MS (2017; RETS). He directs the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) project, the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), and the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, recently serving also as Vice President / Director of the Canadian Federation of the Humanities and Social Sciences for Research Dissemination, Chair of the MLA Committee on Scholarly Editions, and Chair of the international Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO).

Open Social Scholarship and the Scholarly Edition

This talk considers the nature of editorial methodological experimentation, in particular exploring the scholarly edition in the context of open social scholarship.  Open social scholarship involves creating and disseminating research and research technologies to a broad audience of specialists and active non-specialists in ways that are accessible and significant. As a concept, it has grown from roots in open access and open scholarship movements, the digital humanities’ methodological commons and community of practice, contemporary online practices, and public facing “citizen scholarship” to include i) developing, sharing, and implementing research in ways that consider the needs and interests of both academic specialists and communities beyond academia; ii) providing opportunities to co-create, interact with, and experience openly-available cultural data; iii) exploring, developing, and making public tools and technologies under open licenses to promote wide access, education, use, and repurposing; and iv) enabling productive dialogue between academics and non-academics.  Our example will be the social edition of the Devonshire MS (BL Add MS 17492), the first sustained example of men and women writing together in the English literary tradition, by a research team using crowd-sourcing technologies and operating in conjunction with an advisory group representing key methodological and area expertise.

See http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/The_Devonshire_Manuscript, for this edition’s Wikimedia publication, also published in fixed electronic format (PDF) via Iter Academic Press and, in print, in partnership with Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies.

Attending the event is free and open to all, but registration is required. Please register by sending an email to platformdh@uantwerpen.be.

participants: 14