News

Designing the Digital New Variorum Shakespeare

Since the Modern Language Association’s Executive Council awarded the Center of Digital Humanities Research at Texas A&M a generous grant to publish NVS editions online, the NVS design team has been hard at work to create the front- and back-ends of Corpora, the web application that will make publishing NVS volumes online and open access possible. The design team, which includes Dr. Laura Mandell (Director of CoDHR and NVS PI), Dr. Anne Burdick (Research Professor in the School of Design at the University of Technology Sydney and NVS front end designer), Dr. Bryan Tarpley (Lead Software Developer at CoDHR and inventor of Corpora), and Dr. Katayoun Torabi (NVS Project Manager) have been meeting twice monthly to build and improve the site’s performance in order to launch the digital NVS in July 2021 at the 11th World Shakespeare Congress, Singapore.

Digital Future for New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare to be with CoDHR

The College of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University (TAMU) announces that its Center of Digital Humanities Research (CoDHR) is the new home of the New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare (NVS) series from the Modern Language Association (MLA).  Texas A&M will make the NVS editions, works that collate notes by various editors and commentators of the texts, openly available to scholars on a richly resourced, fully networked digital platform and will become the editorial and governance center for the project, under the direction of Laura Mandell, Professor of English and CoDHR Director.  MLA is providing funds for the project transition.

“Collaborating with Texas A&M’s internationally renowned World Shakespeare Bibliography, we can publish Shakespeare’s plays as part of a richly networked digital environment.  We would like to be the Folger of the West,” said Dr. Mandell.

Started in 1860 and the only reference editions of their kind, editions in the NVS series offer not only complete text of Shakespeare’s plays but also centuries of scholarly opinion and interpretation, dating, sources, emendations to stage history, and influential interpretations of particular words. Through the resources of the Center of Digital Humanities Research at TAMU, new editions previously published in print will be freely available online and new digital editions in the series will continue to be produced, making them accessible to a wider audience of readers, scholars, directors, and performers across the globe.  New visualization tools and interface design will enable new forms of digital scholarly interpretation to emerge, now and well into the future.

TAMU, which is already home to the editorial offices of the World Shakespeare Bibliography and owner of a copy of the second folio (the 1632 edition of the collected plays of William Shakespeare), is honored to have an opportunity to use its expertise to make the NVS editions widely accessible to researchers and students.

Read more about the NVS series from the MLA here.