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.

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