News

Dr. Robert Stagg to Join A&M’s English Department and NVS Team Next Year

The New Variorum Shakespeare is happy to announce that Dr. Robert Stagg will be joining Texas A&M University’s Department of English as a tenure-track Assistant Professor and NVS Principal Investigator and Director in the fall of 2024. Dr. Stagg is currently a Leverhulme Early-Career Research Fellow, Arden Shakespeare Fourth Series Fellow, and Associate Senior Member at St. Anne’s College, University of Oxford. At Texas A&M, Dr. Stagg will be joining Dr. Katayoun Torabi (Digital Editor of the NVS and Instructional Associate Professor of English), Dr. Kris L. May (Associate Digital Editor of the NVS), and Dr. Dorothy Todd (Associate Digital Editor of the NVS and Instructional Assistant Professor of English), Please read the full NVS announcement on SHAKSPER.

NVS Awarded a Prestigious Strategic Transformative Research Program (STRP) Grant

In an effort to support cutting-edge interdisciplinary research activities at A&M, the College of Arts and Sciences launched the Strategic Transformative Research Program. The NVS team applied for a Type-II $10,000 grant for edition gathering, transcription, and collation work for the second phase of the project and were awarded full funding!

NVS Team Update

The New Variorum Shakespeare project welcomes Grace Hoelescher, who started working on the NVS project as the Undergraduate Professional and Research Experience Program (UPREP) Student Researcher during the Spring 2024 semester. She will join the team as a student researcher beginning this summer. Andrew Hoyt (Applied Mathematics with a Computer Science emphasis, Undergraduate) and Fernando Gonzalez Torres (Industrial Engineering, Undergraduate) will continue work through the summer and Jade Gooden (Anthropology, Undergraduate), who is graduating this spring, will be leaving the project at the end of the month. The NVS team wishes to thank Ms. Gooden for her excellent work and mentorship of other student researchers on the project. She has been a valued member of the NVS team and will be missed! 

NVS Team Hits Transcription Milestone

The NVS team has transcribed 58,000 lines to date for several NVS plays, including Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, and Two Gentlemen of Verona. These clean transcriptions are being used by editors for witness collation and for training the newest version of Tesseract (OCR engine). Each training increases the accuracy of Corpora's integrated OCR engine, so that it will be able to handle the vagaries of early modern print with increasing accuracy. The more Tesseract 5 is trained using clean transcriptions of early modern texts, the more accurately the OCR engine will read these texts. This process will eventually become automated, thus making producing transcriptions by hand unnecessary.

Folio Futures: Editing Early Modern Plays for Tomorrow’s Audiences, 26 April 2024

In celebration of Texas A&M University’s designation as the host institution for the New Variorum Shakespeare (NVS) and in continued commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio, the symposium convened on 26 April 2024 to assess the history of and future possibilities for editing Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Traditionally, the editing of Shakespeare’s works has established the “best practices” that have been applied to early modern drama in general and provides the standards for digital humanities editions today. This symposium brought together scholars of Shakespeare’s works, digital humanists, and representatives from the NVS to discuss the challenges and opportunities of editing in the twenty-first century for new global audiences who read, perform, and teach in a variety of media.

Invited participants (including TAMU faculty, staff, and graduate students) convened into round table sessions. They presented brief formal remarks on the symposium’s topic and discussed the future of editing early modern texts to meet the evolving needs of teachers, students, and scholars around the world and across media. In addition, there were two longer keynote lectures—one delivered by an early-career scholar (Kristen Abbott Bennett) and another by an advanced scholar (Eric Rasmussen). This symposium was free and open to TAMU students, faculty, and staff, as well as to the general public. Beyond those who attended in person, Texas A&M University’s central position in modern Shakespearean scholarship and digital humanities were showcased to an anticipated global audience through synchronous live streaming. Learn more about the Symposium Here.

Folio Futures Digital Showcase, 25 April 2024

Three digital projects were featured in the Folio Futures Digital Showcase in the Humanities Visualization Space on April 25th. The NVS project was presented by Katayoun Torabi. Graduate Student Alexandra E. LaGrand presented Points Like A Man, a digital project she created that curates records of individual Shakespearean breeches performances by actresses from 1660 to 1900. Hannah Bowling, PhD candidate, presented her Blackspeare project, which collates educational material for early-career scholars invested in teaching Shakespeare and his afterlives through a premodern critical race theoretical framework in the format of an open-access educational resource (OER). Presenting alongside Hannah Bowling were two Texas A&M Student Researchers, Charlie Gopaul and Sydney Middleton, who have made significant contributions to the Blackspeare project. Learn more about the Digital Showcase HERE.

Making Shakespeare: Dinner, Screening, and Presentation, 25 April 2024

The Early Modern Studies Working Group and the Medieval Studies Working Group hosted a dinner and screening of the PBS documentary “Great Performances - Making Shakespeare: The First Folio” in the newly renovated Humanities Visualization Space on April 25th. After the screening, Eric Rasmussen shared his experiences of contributing to the documentary in his talk “Behind the Scenes of ‘Making Shakespeare.’” Learn more Here.