What can we learn about the structure and history of classic texts when we can study them on a single digital platform?
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.
CEDAR is a multi-project digital humanities initiative involving literary corpora that have complex histories of composition, revision, and dissemination. The first phase of the project focused on three corpora written in different historical periods using very different languages and scripts. The initial projects involved the Gilgamesh Epic, the Hebrew Bible, and Shakespeare’s plays. This phase adds four more projects: one ancient, on the Egyptian Book of the Dead; one medieval, on the Middle English poem Piers Plowman; one modern, on the works of Herman Melville; and a project on indigenous American sign systems that is not easily categorized under traditional rubrics of Western literature. This diverse and growing group of projects demonstrates the practical benefits of a shared computational platform for scholarly research and the corresponding intellectual benefits of jointly addressing a shared conceptual challenge faced by scholars in very different fields. The challenge is to design digital editions of literary works that preserve the hard-won achievements of traditional philology but open these works to new readings and new modes of analysis. CEDAR does this via a state-of-the-art database representation of both the internal epigraphic and discursive structures of texts, in all their complexity, and their external relations with one another and with other cultural media through time and space. By the end of Phase Two, CEDAR will be ready to welcome scholars in all fields to contribute to a new University of Chicago series of online critical editions.
To learn more, please visit the CEDAR website.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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This symposium focused on digital text editing and analysis of literary corpora.
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
This symposium focused on digital text editing and analysis of literary corpora.
