This session will address how study of the Renaissance in Europe, specifically England, can inform how we think about the discipline of technology studies today. Through an analysis of three digital humanities projects that highlight Renaissance women who were writing and publishing during an informational boom with the advent of the printing press, we can parallel Early Modern trends with 21st century pedagogical standards. Women Writers in Context, The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women's Writing, and The Pulter Project can help us collate a network of women writers who used both manuscript culture and early print realities. These three platforms can act as examples of both open access and proprietary standards. Why, in an era when accessing printed Renaissance primary sources can be costly and time consuming, do digital databases need to exist beyond a paywall.
By taking a sampling of three different genres in Renaissance Women's Writing: spiritual autobiography, mother's legacies, and science writing, I will show that digital platforms necessarily need to exist to bridge the gap between printer and reader. I also will introduce two textual analysis tools: Voyant and Wordcounter that mediate Renaissance writing in an era when OCR does not always yield high quality transcriptions.
Finally, I will address how best to incorporate Renaissance writers and book history into our 21st century syllabi. While much of this presentation spends time discussing women writers, I will close by looking back at traditional pedagogical choices to include in our curriculum: Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare. Open access apps that include manuscript pages and concordances can help us get Chaucer and Shakespeare into the palms of students. How can we encourage our students to be inventive with their inquiry into the Renaissance period, understanding that many genres exist including sonnets, epic poems, drama, science fiction, and more. What could it have been like to go shopping for new books near St. Paul's in London, a key hub for the book selling trade?
