Center for the History of Print Culture
PRINT CULTURE COLLOQUIUM
"Data-Mining Early English Dramatic Texts from the Text Creation  
Partnership"

Michael Witmore, Professor, Department of English, University of  
Wisconsin-Madison
Thursday, February 17, 2011, 12:00 Noon-1:00 p.m.

SLIS Commons
4207 Helen C. White Hall
600 North Park Street
University of Wisconsin-Madison


In this talk, Professor Whitmore will discuss his work on digitized  
versions of early modern printed texts using multivariate statistics  
and a text-analysis tool called Docuscope.  His presentation will  
focus on the following question:  what can we learn from data-mining  
large numbers of early modern texts that we couldn’t learn by simply  
reading a representative sample of them?  Witmore is organizer of the  
Working Group for Digital Inquiry, a research collective that is  
mapping the prose genres of Early English Books online using  
techniques from bioinformatics and corpus linguistics. Results of  
this research can be found on his website, www.winedarksea.org, and  
an online edition of Shakespeare Quarterly: http:// 
mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/  
ShakespeareQuarterly_NewMedia/hope-witmore-the-hundredth-psalm/.  In  
this research, he is interested in the ways in which literary  
critical terms such as genre—which we apply to texts on the basis of  
plot, character and action—are visible linguistically at the level of  
the sentence. When working in this area, he collaborates with  
Jonathan Hope, Robin Valenza, Franco Moretti, and Susan Bernstein.


Professor Whitmore also is the author of Culture of Accidents:  
Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England (Stanford, 2001), which  
was co-winner of the Perkins Prize for the Study of Narrative in 2003  
and, more recently, Shakespearean Metaphysics (Continuum 2008) and  
Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance  
(Cornell, 2007).  In addition to serving as textual editor for the  
Comedy of Errors with the new Norton Shakespeare, he has just  
completed a collaborative study of Shakespearean scenes, characters  
and objects with the photographer Rosamond Purcell, to be published  
in fall of 2010 under the title, Landscapes of the Passing Strange:  
Reflections From Shakespeare.  He also co-edited, with Andreea Immel,  
of Childhood and Children's Books in Early Modern Europe, 1550-1800  
(Routledge, 2006).





--
Irene Hansen
Research Coordinator, Center for the History of Print Culture in  
Modern America