The University of Shadows

Linnea Brae is a university adjunct with a miserable life and an obsessive-compulsive disorder. Intrigued by strange messages appearing on the whiteboards and the disappearance of one of her students (Jay), she stumbles upon the University of Shadows, a parallel-world university which exists in the same space as the one in this world but which only functions at night. Everyone in the University of Shadows (students, professors, and administrators) have received an invitation because there is something each of them needs to learn which is only possible within the confines of this alternative world. Since Linnea did not receive an invitation, the administrators are not prepared for her arrival. Despite that, Linnea is named Head Librarian, a post for which she would have been called if the previous librarian had not died unexpectedly. As Linnea takes her new post in the Imaginary Library, the books start to disappear. Simultaneously, there are attempts on Linnea’s life. Tricked into using the Room of Dreams, Linnea unknowingly unleashes a half-human creature, an actant, that starts to stalk and attack other campus inhabitants. Linnea needs to find out who is trying to kill her, why the books are disappearing from the library, and why she failed to receive an invitation to be part of this intriguing world. The novel deals with themes of rationality versus imagination, and technology versus mysticism, as the main character seeks to establish the reasons for her being there and understand the changes in her life brought up by this new place

Check Your Privilege: The Digital Privilege Game

This paper describes the background and development of Check Your Privilege (https://privilege.huc.knaw.nl/), a digital privilege game designed to create awareness in the context of diversity and inclusion workshops

Boundary Land: Diversity as a defining feature of the Digital Humanities

The theme of this session is the Digital Humanities as a "Boundary Land" - i.e. a locus in which such objects are common. As O´Donnell argues in his paper, this aspect is one of the defining features of contemporary Digital Humanities and an important cause of its recent rapid growth. As the field grows, DH workshops, panels, and journals see increasing work by practitioners trained in more and more traditionally distinct disciplinary traditions: textual scholars, literary critics, historians, New Media specialists, as well as theologians, computer scientists, archaeologists, Cultural Heritage specialists... and geographers, physicists, biologists, and medical professionals.It is the contention of the speakers of this panel that interpersonal diversity (i.e. diversity along lines such as gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, language, economic region, etc.) is as an important element of this aspect of DH. The Digital Humanities is not only a place where different disciplines work together (and at times at odds to each other): it is also a place where different people work together and at odds in developing our field. In other words, diversity initiatives in the Digital Humanities are important not only because they let more people into our field, they are important because they change the nature of our field as its practice widens.The papers in this session each approach the issue from a different perspective. In the first paper, O'Donnell looks at the theoretical background to this understanding of diversity as a component of DH as a boundary discipline, grounding his approach in early work on interdisciplinarity and boundary work. In the second paper, Murray Ray and Bordalejo discuss the ways in which efforts to promote diversity within DH can paradoxically undermine its theoretical importance to the field, before turning to different examples of diversity´s intellectual importance. In the third paper, del Rio and González-Blanco examine the institutional and social pressures that promote and hinder dialogue among researchers in developing and developed countries and across linguistic and other boundaries before proposing new approaches in Digital Humanities that go beyond lingüistic diversity focusing on theories such as Sociology of Culture and Education and other reformulations.Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET

Pressed for Space: The Effects of Justification and the Printing Process on Fifteenth-Century Orthography

There is a long-held belief that, prior to the standardisation of written English, printers altered spellings to justify their type. I investigate this claim through an analysis of spelling changes in William Caxton’s two editions of the Canterbury Tales—by examining text within one book, written by one author, and set by one compositor, the only difference between the sections of verse and the sections of prose should be the requirement for justification within the latter. Were the compositors altering spellings to justify their type, we would expect to see a greater number of altered spellings in the prose sections of text. This is not what the results of this study show—instead there is no statistically significant difference between the frequency of spelling changes in justified and non-justified text. However, there is a significantly higher number of abbreviations introduced into the justified text. These results suggest that the compositor of Caxton’s second edition Canterbury Tales did not change spellings to justify his type

Special issue of Ecdotica: Work and Document

status: publishe

The Texts We See and the Works We Imagine: The Shift of Focus of Textual Scholarship in the Digital Age

The process of editing a text is, in the first instance, an act of imagination. An editor who has collected materials, gathered evidence, and compared variants eventually has to decide what does it all mean, who will care about it and how to present it; but most importantly how those materials relate to each other. The answers to these questions are not in the documents that preserve versions of the texts, but in the minds of the scholars who have carefully studied the physical documents, their texts and the variant states of the text they represent. In this essay, I present my working definitions of the text of the document, the variant states of the text and the work, show how they relate to each other and how they have been affected by digital technologies or how they have arisen from them. I also conclude that while some concepts might remain unchanged from the days of print, others are fundamental only to born-digital texts.status: publishe

The Encoding System for the Commedia

status: publishe