The newly formed Australian and New Zealand Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ANZSECS) exists to promote the study of the culture and history of the long eighteenth century within Australia and New Zealand. The Society encourages research in eighteenth-century studies on a broad interdisciplinary basis—its members work in fields including art history, history, literature, philosophy, bibliography, and the history and philosophy of science. It is an affiliate of ISECS, the International Congress for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Established in December 2014, the Society draws on a distinguished history of eighteenth-century scholarship in Australia and New Zealand. It advances the exchange of information and ideas among researchers engaged in eighteenth-century studies through various activities and events, including the 3-4 yearly David Nichol Smith Seminar.

For more information about the Society, membership, and related events, please visit the ANZSECS website: http://anzsecs.com

A major new research database revealing extraordinary data on immigration in England in the late medieval period is now available, thanks to the University of York, in partnership with the Humanities Research Institute (University of Sheffield) and The National Archives.

The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded the three-year project directed by Professor Mark Ormrod, of the University’s Centre for Medieval Studies, who headed a team of researchers based in York and London.

It reveals evidence about the names, origins, occupations and households of a significant number of foreigners who chose to live and work in England in the era of the Hundred Years War, the Black Death and the Wars of the Roses. The project contributes to debates about the longer-term history of immigration to Britain, helping to provide a deep historical and cultural context to contemporary debates over ethnicity, multiculturalism and national identity.

The database contains the names of a total of 65,000 immigrants resident in England between 1330 and 1550.

The database is accessible to all at www.englandsimmigrants.com and is a fully searchable and interactive resource, from which data can be downloaded. The website also supports the researcher with guides to the various counties and documents, and provides case studies of interesting individuals demonstrating just how much we can learn from our immigrant ancestors.

For more on the launch of this database, please visit: http://yorkmedieval.com/2015/02/17/englands-immigrants-1330-1550-launch-of-the-database.

Columbia University Libraries/Information Services’ (CUL/IS) Center for Digital Research and Scholarship (CDRS), in collaboration with the Department of Italian and CUL/IS’ Humanities and History Division, are pleased to announce the launch of the new Digital Dante website at digitaldante.columbia.edu, a publicly accessible digital research resource on Dante’s works with a special focus on the Divine Comedy and its translations.

Digital Dante was conceived of by Dr. Jennifer Hogan when, as a Columbia graduate student in the early 1990s under the advisement of Dr. Robbie McClintock, she collaborated on the original website with Dr. Teodolinda Barolini and others from the Department of Italian and the Institute for Learning Technologies, as well as with the poet and translator, Allen Mandelbaum. The website proved invaluable to the Dante community, relied on as a rich research resource by researchers and students all over the world.

Over twenty years later, this new iteration of the website was made possible by CDRS, the Department of Italian as guided by Digital Dante Editor-in-Chief Dr. Barolini, Dr. Hogan, CUL/IS’ Humanities and History Division, and numerous PhD students in Dante studies. The relaunched and greatly enhanced website seeks to provide a venue for collaboration with scholars at other institutions and for new research and perspectives from the next generation of Dante scholars. Along with a beautiful new design showcasing images from Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the website features a number of new digital projects, including the Intertextual Dante, a new tool for exploring intertextual relationships between Ovid’s works and the Divine Comedy developed by Professor Julie Van Peteghem, and recorded audio performances of sestina readings by students, performing the poems in the unique style explored throughout Professor Barolini’s courses. The new Digital Dante retains and expands upon many of the essential features of the original site: translations of Dante’s works with easily navigable primary and comparison texts, lecture audio and annotations, and criticism and context.

Read the Complete Introductory Announcement

To access Digital Dante, please visit: http://digitaldante.columbia.edu

Understanding Shakespeare is a collaborative project between JSTOR Labs and the Folger Shakespeare Library . It’s a research tool that allows students, educators and scholars to use the text of Shakespeare’s plays to quickly navigate into the scholarship written about them—line by line. Users simply click next to any line of text in a play and relevant articles from the JSTOR archive immediately load.

Currently, there are six plays available in Understanding Shakespeare: Hamlet, Henry V, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and Twelfth Night. All editions of the plays are from the Folger Digital Texts, which are electronic versions of the Folger Editions.

Understanding Shakespeare is a free resource that is open to the public. The Folger Digital Texts are free to use for all non-commercial uses. Each article title links to the full-text on the main JSTOR website, which is available to people at participating institutions or with individual access to JSTOR. Many articles in Understanding Shakespeare are also available for online reading with a free Register and Read account.

For more information, please visit: http://labs.jstor.org/shakespeare.

The British Library Qatar Foundation Partnership has launched the Qatar Digital Library – a new, bilingual, online portal providing access to previously undigitised British Library archive materials relating to Gulf history and Arabic science.

The portal makes the modern history and culture of the Gulf and wider region, particularly its connection with Britain, available through vividly documented personal and official archives, photographs, maps and recordings of traditional music held at the British Library.

The Qatar Digital Library, which is in English and Arabic, will improve understanding of the Islamic world, Arabic cultural heritage and the modern history of the Gulf providing researchers around the world with the opportunity to perform ground-breaking research in subject areas such as the history of Gulf trade and politics, key individuals in the Gulf and the history of science in the Arabic-speaking world.

For more information, please visit: http://www.bl.uk/qatar

To access to Qatar Digital Library, please visit: http://www.qdl.qa/en

The Shakespeare Reloaded website is an open-access resource for educators to explore new approaches to teaching and learning Shakespeare. We research the history, theory, and practice of education and literary studies. The website contains activities, workshops and research. Shakespeare Reloaded is part of a broader collaborative project between academics and teachers at the University of Sydney and Barker College (Hornsby).

For more information, please visit: http://www.shakespearereloaded.edu.au

Australasian libraries, galleries and museums hold many thousands of unique and irreplaceable European manuscripts, art works and historic objects dating from the eleventh to the eighteenth centuries. They are of great value to researchers – both in Australasia and in Europe – not just for their contents but for what they reveal about the persistence of the Early European heritage in Australasia. Collectively and individually, they are unique national treasures of Australia and New Zealand.

Europa Inventa (“Europe Discovered”) is the first systematic description of these Early European materials. The Europa Inventa database currently contains information about 1,700 artworks and 300 medieval manuscripts held in the major Australian libraries, galleries and museums. It is one of the digital services developed for the ARC Research Network for Early European Research (NEER).

For more information and to access the Europa Inventa database, please visit: http://europa.arts.uwa.edu.au/about

A new platform for humanities and creative arts research, HuNI (pronounced honey) has recently launched.

Located at http://huni.net.au HuNI (Humanities Networked Infrastructure) is the result of a massive three-year, multi-million dollar collective effort led by Deakin Uni in which a consortium of thirteen Australian universities and cultural organisations worked collaboratively with eResearch agencies to design a new digital door to Australian cultural information.

The HuNI platform collects and provides access to digitised information from over 30 significant cultural collections (e.g. AustLit, AusStage, CAARP, Design and Art Australia online, Circus Oz, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Australian Media History Database) which have contributed more than a million items to HuNI. But it also enables researchers to do a great deal more.

HuNI also allows people to combine, collect and connect cultural knowledge through an innovative technology application. HuNI encourages collaboration in the humanities and creative arts by allowing researchers to discover, share, and find new ways to use and re-use cultural knowledge. By encouraging creativity, imagination and a greater appreciation of our shared history, HuNI aims to transform Australia through culture.

You can see some aspects of HuNI’s contribution to online research in the humanities and creative arts in this short info-video: http://vimeo.com/bestqualitycrab/huniserendipity

Six Degrees of HuNI Competition (with prizes!)

Aware of the enormous value of HuNI as an online information and educational resource, the HuNI team is launching a competition at a nationwide level that encourages researchers to discover, share and create with Australia’s cultural heritage through HuNI.

The competition will remain open until 28 November. The HuNI jury will select up to three outstanding entries.

The competition rules and regulations can be found, together with all other relevant information on http://www.deakin.edu.au/research/src/cmii/huni.php

For any further information please contact Alwyn Davidson at: Alwyn.Davidson@deakin.edu.au

The University of California’s English Broadside Ballad Archive is a fantastic project, with a dedicated team making broadsides available to everyone.

The project provides high-quality ballad sheet facsimiles of the ballads as well as facsimile transcriptions (which preserve the ballad’s original ornament while transcribing its unfamiliar typeface into easily readable modern print). In addition, they supply recordings of the ballads whenever a tune is extant, extensive cataloguing of the ballads, including cataloguing of their illustrations or woodcut impressions, TEI/XML and MARC records, and both basic and advanced search functions that allow readers easily to find collections or individual ballads as well as their constituent parts or makers by a variety of means. They also offer background essays on the various ballad collections included in EBBA and on ballad culture generally as well as other helpful ballad resources.

For more information, visit the English Broadside Ballad Archive website: http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu.

The Making of Charlemagne’s Europe project is a database of prosopographical and socio-economic data found in the more than four thousand legal documents surviving from Charlemagne’s reign. It covers material from all areas that were ever part of Charlemagne’s empire, dating from 25 September 768 to 28 January 814 AD. The emphasis is on the extraction and systematic classification of data for maximum comparability between regions. This will make the valuable information on institutions, people, places and objects contained in charters and other legal documents more easily accessible to researchers via faceted browsing, search queries and a mapping tool.

The project, which runs from 2012-2014, is being carried out at King’s College London by the Department of History and the Department of Digital Humanities and is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

For more information, please visit: http://www.charlemagneseurope.ac.uk