Digital Matters – RIG Speaker – Mattie Burkert, Assistant Professor of English, Utah State University

Digital Matters Speaker Series
Wednesday, January 16th 2:30 to 3:30 pm
In Digital Matters at the Marriott Library

“The London Stage Database: Recovering Past Digital Humanities Projects for Future Users”
Mattie Burkert, Assistant Professor of English at Utah State University

The London Stage Database is a new online database of performances that took place in London between 1659 and 1800, funded by an Advancement Grant from the NEH Office of Digital Humanities and scheduled to launch in 2019. While the database’s immediate purpose is to support research and teaching in British theater and performance history, it is not simply a niche tool for select scholars in a small field. Rather, our team is recovering and revitalizing a lost humanities computing project from the 1970s, and in the process, modeling best practices for recovering the numerous obsolete tools and datasets left in the wake of DH’s rapid expansion. This presentation will highlight the value of such media archaeological work, and in particular its unique potential to help all users of digital platforms for humanities research become more aware of the underlying assumptions that we make about our objects of study and about the nature of data itself.
Light Refreshments sponsored by CTLE as part of our faculty learning community.