Monday, March 21, 2011

Society for Textual Scholarship

March 16-18 I attended the Society for Textual Scholarship (STS) conference at Penn State. STS is an association of scholarly editors, bibliographers, book historians, librarians, digital humanists, and regular old literature scholars who are interested in textual criticism.

On Wednesday I taught a seminar to faculty on "Making Primary Sources Primary." We looked at the different skills students (especially undergraduates) need to build when they work with primary sources & assignments to develop those skills, with an emphasis on how to work with special collections.

Other highlights included:

* A really useful panel on data forensics, wherein I learned some of the latest thinking on taking in born-digital materials.

* A wonderful panel on platform studies, which included a presentation by Kari Krauss at University of Maryland (in the School of Information and Department of English) on the Preserving Virtual Worlds project head by the Library of Congress.

* A great panel on "Editing Digital Feminisms," which was followed by another great panel on Emily Dickinson. To attend, however, I had to miss the "Poetics of Metadata" panel; sad.

* Very cool plenary presentations by Will Noel of the Walters on the Archimedes Palimpsest; David Stork of Stanford and Ricoh Innovations on "digital connoisseurship of master paintings"; and by Lisa Gitelman of NYU on typescript editions of the 1930s, which focused on a strange creation of the Social Science Research Council called "Methods of Reproducing Scholarly Materials"--which turns out to have been published by the guy who went on to found UMI, which of course became ProQuest. Does this mean we need to start thinking more carefully about preserving out-dated research tools because of what they can tell us about the history of disciplines and scholarly information?

This year STS had a dedicated DH track curated by Matt Kirschenbaum at University of Maryland, this year's program chair. It was awesome, and the conference as a whole was excellent.

1 comment:

  1. Hi Gabrielle,

    I looked at the STS website and the program for the 2011 conference, and it looks like it was a very interesting conference. I have done some preliminary research on textual studies, and wonder if music (musical engraving) is ever included in this area of scholarship? Textual studies seems to encompass such a broad range of disciplines related to human culture and civilization – I just wonder if musical notation/engraving has a place in Textual studies too?

    Thanks,
    David (MSEL Reserves)

    ReplyDelete