News

Dr. Maura Ives Appointed Director of CoDHR

After having served a successful year as Interim Director of the Center of Digital Humanities Research (CoDHR), Dr. Ives has been appointed by the College of Arts and Sciences as CoDHR Director, effective immediately.

Dr. Ives has been an advocate for Digital Humanities (DH) at Texas A&M for nearly two decades and a major supporter of the NVS. She was instrumental in transitioning the project into the English Department and thanks to her generous support, CoDHR has funded student researchers for transcription and ingestion error correction for the NVS. Student researchers this academic year are Jade Gooden (Anthropology, Undergraduate), Andrew Hoyt (Applied Mathematics with a Computer Science emphasis, Undergraduate), and Fernando Gonzalez Torres (Industrial Engineering, Undergraduate). Former student researchers include Mounika Balivada (CS, Graduate) and Shyam Prasad Nagulavancha (CS, Graduate). CoDHR will continue support for three student workers for the NVS through Summer 2024.  

NVS Board of Directors: Dr. Laura Mandell

Dr. Laura Mandell, who was instrumental in bringing the New Variorum Shakespeare project to Texas A&M will continue as a member of the NVS Board of Directors where she will guide the project as the team publishes NVS volumes online and directs new editors in building born-digital volumes. The NVS team is fortunate to have Dr. Mandell on the Board of Directors and will benefit from her expertise in the Digital Humanities and her experience as a prominent scholar and professor of English. She is the author of Breaking the Book: Print Humanities in the Digital Age (2015), Misogynous Economies: The Business of Literature in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1999), and, recently, “Gendering Digital Literary History: What Counts for Digital Humanities,” in the New Companion to Digital Humanities (Blackwell 2016). She is Project Director of the Poetess Archive, an online scholarly edition and database of women poets, 1750-1900 (http://www.poetessarchive.org), Acquisitions Editor of 18thConnect (http://www.18thConnect.org), and Director of ARC (http://www.ar-c.org), the Advanced Research Consortium overseeing NINES, 18thConnect, and MESA. She spearheaded the Early Modern OCR project or “eMOP” (http://emop.tamu.edu), a project concerned with improving OCR for early modern and 18th-c. texts via high performance and cluster computing and is currently at work on a text-mining project to discover emergent genders in essays and novels comprising the Feminist Controversy debates in England, 1788-1810. If you wish to learn more about the NVS Board of Directors, please see our NVS Contributors Page.

Presenting the NVS at the Renaissance Society of America Conference in 2024

Dr. Laura Mandell will present a paper titled "Building and Sustaining the Digital New Variorum Shakespeare" at next year’s Renaissance Society of America conferences, to be held in Chicago from March 21st through the 23rd. Her contribution will be part of the "Renaissance English Text Society: Hands, Attributions, and Digital Editions” panel.

Announcing Interim Director for CoDHR: Dr. Maura Ives

The College of Arts & Sciences has announced the appointment of Dr. Maura Ives as Interim Director of the Center of Digital Humanities Research (CoDHR).

Dr. Ives has been an advocate for Digital Humanities (DH) at Texas A&M for nearly two decades. In 2009, she assembled and led the interdisciplinary team that identified DH as a “landmark research area” for Texas A&M and secured initial funding for the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture (IDHMC).  A specialist in Victorian literature, critical bibliography and textual scholarship, Dr. Ives is the author or editor of four books and numerous articles in her research fields and has received research fellowships from the Princeton University Library, the Bibliographical Society of America, and the Bibliographical Society of the United Kingdom. For the past seven years, she has served as the Department Head of English.

She will begin her new position in CoDHR on August 1, 2023.

Bringing The New Variorum Shakespeare Online

DH 2023, Graz

Katayoun Torabi presented a short paper titled “Bringing The New Variorum Shakespeare Online” on the front- and backend features of the Digital NVS at this year’s Digital Humanities conference, in the Literary Challenges session on July 14th. The paper was co-authored by Laura Mandell and Bryan Tarpley and published in the Book of Abstracts.

The Digital NVS Presented at ACH 2023 in Virtual World

Katayoun Torabi presented the New Variorum Shakespeare project in a virtual poster session hosted by Work Adventure at the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) on July 1, 2023. The poster presentation included the NVS promotional video and the NVS website.

“Engaging Students and Empowering Research with the Digital NVS” Workshop at The Fifty-First Annual Meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA)

The Fifty-First Annual Meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA) is being held in Minneapolis, Minnesota from Wednesday, 29 March to Saturday, 1 April 2023. Dr. Katayoun Torabi will host a workshop titled “Engaging Students and Empowering Research with the Digital NVS” at SAA on April 1st, which will feature teaching modules developed for a Shakespeare course that utilizes the NVS. These modules, which were created as part of the research needed by Dr. Anne Burdick (NVS Designer) and Dr. Bryan Tarpley (NVS Developer) to design and program the NVS, are also featured in a book chapter that Drs. Mandell, Burdick, Tarpley, and Torabi authored, titled “Using Data and Design to Bring the New Variorum Shakespeare Online” in The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Interface (available for purchase in hardcover and ebook formats Here). Please join us for the workshop if you are attending SAA this year! The full conference program can be accessed Here.