Washington Area Group for Print Studies lecture: Daniel Shore

Sept. 9 at 3:30 pm: "From Bacon to Edges: Remediating the Early Modern Social Network"

The first meeting of the Washington Area Group for Print Culture Studies 2016-2017 series will take place on Friday, September 9th, from 3:30 to 5:00 p.m. in the Rosenwald Room (LJ 205), 2nd floor, Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress.  Dr. Daniel Shore will deliver a talk entitled "From Bacon to Edges: Remediating the Early Modern Social Network."

Abstract:

As Jerome McGann has written, it is “a truth now universally acknowledged” that “the whole of our cultural inheritance has to be recurated and reedited in digital forms.”  In McGann’s account as in most others, this centrally involves remediating printed texts as digital texts, images on pages as images on screens. The Six Degrees of Francis Bacon website, by contrast, is a work of remediation that transforms the text of the Oxford Dictionary of Biography into a map of the social network for scholars and students not only to consult but to expand, curate, and correct based on their research and expert knowledge.  In this talk I introduce the methods that our team of humanists, statisticians, and programmers used to infer a social network of some fourty-four thousand associations between thirteen thousand early modern Britons alive between 1500 and 1700.  Transformative remediation, I argue, can produce new resources that support and preserve the ongoing research of humanities scholars.  I suggest that Six Degrees and projects like it change our understanding of the term “work of reference” in a way that has significant implications for libraries as well as research institutions more generally.

Daniel Shore is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University.  His first book, Milton and the Art of Rhetoric, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2012, and his second book, Cyberformalism, is forthcoming with Johns Hopkins University Press in 2017.  He has published widely on Renaissance literature and the digital humanities.
 
Please join us for Dr. Shore's talk and for dinner afterwards.
 
The Jefferson Building is located between First and Second Streets, SE in the District of Columbia. Nearest metro stops are Capitol South (blue and orange lines) and Union Station (red line).
 
 For further information, consult the Washington Area Group for Print Culture Studies website at http://wagpcs.wordpress.com/, or contact Sabrina Baron and Eleanor Shevlin at washagpcs "AT" umd.edu.

For their encouragement and support, the Washington Area Group for Print Culture Studies would like to thank Mark Dimunation, Chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections at the Library of Congress, and John Y. Cole,  Library of  Congress Historian and founder of the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress.