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Research Project

CEDAR Phase Two: Critical Editions for Digital Analysis and Research

2022 – 2023
Screen shot of the CEDAR digital platform

Key Question

Project Summary

This project extends a multi-year digital humanities initiative that is producing critical editions of canonical texts. In the first phase, the research team built a database that includes the Gilgamesh Epic, the Hebrew Bible, and Shakespeare’s plays. In this phase they will add the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Middle English poem Piers Plowman, the works of Herman Melville, and Indigenous American sign systems. They will also develop new modes of digital analysis and collaboration for scholars across different fields of expertise.

Research Team

Edgar Garcia

Edgar Garcia

Associate Professor of English; Director of Undergraduate Studies in Creative Writing

University of Chicago

Edgar Garcia is a poet and scholar of the hemispheric cultures of the Americas. His most recent book, Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2022), is a collection of nine essays that show what this foundational creation story of the indigenous Americas ...

Ellen MacKay

Ellen MacKay

Associate Professor of English

University of Chicago

Ellen MacKay's interests tend to cluster at the uneasy conjunction of performance and history. Broadly construed, as everyday concepts, the first of these is live, fleeting, insubstantial, and imitative while the second is dead, lasting, weighty, and real. When one category serves as the medium of ...

Julie Orlemanski

Julie Orlemanski

Julie Orlemanski

Associate Professor of English

University of Chicago

Julie Orlemanski teaches and writes about texts from the late Middle Ages and theoretical and methodological questions in present-day literary studies. What distinguishes medieval thought from our own, and what links it, are of persistent fascination to her. Accordingly, she has longstanding ...

Miller Prosser

Miller Prosser

Associate Director, Digital Studies of Language, Culture, and History

University of Chicago

Miller Prosser is the Associate Director of the University of Chicago’s program in Digital Studies of Language, Culture, and History in which he teaches courses on data management and data publication for the humanities. He earned his PhD in Northwest Semitic Philology from the University of ...

Foy Scalf

Foy Scalf

Foy Scalf

Research Associate; Head of Research Archives; and Head of the the Integrated Database Project

Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, University of Chicago

Foy Scalf studies the intersection of people, materials, texts, and beliefs in ancient Egypt. In his UChicago dissertation, Passports to Eternity, and in a subsequent article, “From the Beginning to the End: How to Generate and Transmit Funerary Texts in Ancient Egypt,” he argued that the ...

Jeffrey Stackert

Jeffrey Stackert

Professor of Hebrew Bible; Associate Faculty in the Department of Classics and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations; also in the College and the Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies

University of Chicago

Jeffrey Stackert is a biblical scholar who situates the Hebrew Bible in the context of the larger ancient Near Eastern world in which it was composed. His research focuses especially on the composition of the Pentateuch, ancient Near Eastern prophecy, cultic texts, and ancient Near Eastern law. His ...

Project Narrative

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