An Archive of Early Middle English

This grant will allow us to create a Scholarly Editions and Translations of the Archive of Early Middle English (AEM E), which will be made freely available to scholars, students, and the public. The project will be led by Scott Kleinman, Professor of English at California State University, Northridge, and Dorothy Kim , Assistant Professor of English at Vassar College. Initially, we will produce an electronic edition of two Early Middle English manuscripts: Oxford, Bodleian Library Laud Misc. 108 and Oxford, Bodleian Library Junius I. We also will begin substantive work on an edition of Oxford, Jesus College 29. Our new editions will contain not only electronic transcriptions but also encoded information on names, places, intertextual features, philological, paleographical and material features. All information and commentary will be searchable and easily adaptable to use in a variety of digital analytical forms. Digital editing permits a more dynamic edition than print; it can be interactive, serve multiple audiences, be extended, and facilitate different types of analysis, visualization, and comparison enabled by emerging computer technologies. This interactivity will allow more refined research analyses and the possibilities to pose and answer questions that a traditional print addition cannot support. Our editions and the archive will center on the question of how manuscript materiality affects textual editing through each edition and with in the archive's larger framework. Our project objectives arise directly from our team 's expertise and training in both digital and medieval studies, a rare combination of strengths that uniquely positions us to imagine simultaneously the digital practicalities and the possibilities for scholarship on the medieval world that can be made possible by undertaking a project like AEME. The Archive will be published online using a content management system containing text and image displays, as well as a plugin architecture for exporting texts and adding visualization and analytic tools. Texts will be permanently housed at Brown University in a repository now being set up by the TEI Archival Publishing and Accessing Service (TAPAS).