A talk by Janelle Jenstad, Associate Professor of English at the University of Victoria, sponsored by Penn State’s Department of French & Francophone Studies, Middlemas Arts & Humanities Library, and Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence.
Thursday, April 23 @ 6:00PM in Foster Auditorium
After the spatial turn in the humanities, we are seeking ways to map the texts we read. What are the capacities and limits of literary GIS? What is mappable and what is not? What kind of maps and technologies best serve humanities data? The Map of Early Modern London continues to wrestle with a map-like object that does not lend itself to georeferencing, toponyms that defy localization, and the tension between humanities methodologies and quantitative tools. Ultimately, the challenges of humanities data help us build better tools for further analytical work. Janelle Jenstad will document the building of the gazetteer, explain the stand-off georeferencing technique we have, and demonstrate the pedagogical value of the Agas map and its new interface. This talk is free and open to the public. No registration required.
Janelle Jenstad is Associate Professor of English at the University of Victoria. She directs The Map of Early Modern London (MoEML), a SSHRC-funded project that maps the streets, sites, and significant boundaries of late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century London (1560-1640). MoEML is producing a georeferenced critical edition of the Agas map, an encyclopedia of early modern London, a XML library of literary texts, and a versioned edition of Stow’s 1598, 1603, 1618, and 1633 Survey of London. She is also Associate Coordinating Editor of the Internet Shakespeare Editions, for which she is editing The Merchant of Venice. Her publications include essays and chapters in Elizabethan Theatre, The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, The Silver Society Journal, Institutional Culture in Early Modern Society (Brill), Shakespeare, Language and the Stage (Arden Shakespeare), Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA), Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate), New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge), and Teaching Early Modern English Literature from the Archives (MLA, forthcoming). With Jennifer Roberts-Smith, she is co-editing a volume entitled Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media (Ashgate).