Beyond Archives: Exploring Digital Humanities in English Early Modern Scholarship

Abstract

The study of corpora of ancient eras has always involved complex processes, essentially regarding access and handling. The digital repositories are erasing obstacles and generating a new kind of relationship between the works and the ones who deal with them, scholars or not: we can now visit libraries and museums from our computers, peruse private collections, and even spot details in texts and paintings that would otherwise remain hidden to the eye. Digital Humanities constitutes a vast, complex field which has had a remarkable development in the last years, within the broad conjuncture of computing and digital technologies. We will not focus on its definition, or on the theoretical reflection that is being produced, but rather on the most significant characteristics of Digital Humanities – its transversality and its potentialities. In a first moment, we will present a compilation of digital repositories that we consider relevant to Early Modern Studies; in a second moment, we will survey two of them, their characteristics and assets as digital tools used to expand our ability to study and undertake research in the Arts and Humanities, specifically in Early Modern Times: Primary Sources – Early Modern Resources; The Newberry – Medieval, Renaissance, and Early Modern Studies.