“Is Digital Editing really Editing? The Canterbury Tales Project and other adventures” Professor Peter Robinson (University of Saskatchewan)

Date: Monday 19 October
Time: 3:00-5:00pm
Venue: Rogers Room N397, John Woolley Building, The University of Sydney
Registration: For further information please contact mark.byron@sydney.edu.au

Please join us for a discussion by Peter Robinson, centred on a demonstration of the new system for collaborative online editing: textual communities (http://textualcommunities.usask.ca/). This project, developed out of the University of Saskatchewan, establishes a new model of partnership between scholars and readers everywhere in exploring texts. Increasingly, the base materials for research into texts are available on the internet: especially, as images of manuscripts, books and other documents. The huge volume of material now available, even for just one work (such as the 84 manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales) requires many people to research them to identify the documents, to make copies of them, to annotate them, to make transcripts of them, to compare and analyze them. This project provides an infrastructure and tools to allow anyone, anywhere interested in a text to contribute to its study, as part of a community working together.

Peter draws on decades of experience in developing digital tools for scholarly editing and has produced a number of landmark digital scholarly editions, including the Canterbury Tales Project.

Peter Robinson is Bateman Professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan. He has developed several computer-based tools for the preparation and publication of scholarly editions, and is active in the development of standards for digital resources. He has published and lectured on matters relating to computing and textual editing, on text encoding, digitization, and electronic publishing, and on Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. As well as his own editions of Old Norse and Middle English texts, he has collaborated with other scholars on the publication of editions of collections of historical documents, Armenian texts, the Greek New Testament and Dante’s Monarchia and Commedia. His current major interest is in the creation of online “textual communities.”

“Shipwrecks of the Roaring Forties”, Dr Corioli Souter (Adjunct Lecturer in Archaeology, UWA, and Curator, Department of Maritime Archaeology, Western Australian Museum)

Date: 4 November, 2015
Time: 6:00pm
Venue: Theatre Auditorium, University Club, University of Western Australia
Register: Free, but RSVP essential. For full information and to register, please visit: http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/lectures/bennett

Shipwrecks of the Roaring Forties is an Australia Research Council (ARC) funded project that is making a significant contribution to our understanding of Europeans active in the Indian Ocean and our region during the 17th and 18th centuries through the unique window into the past provided by these maritime archaeological sites. The project is led by UWA’s Associate Professor of Archaeology Alistair Paterson in partnership with researchers from the Western Australia Museum and other national and international partners.

The project builds on the early work by the Western Australian Museum which pioneered underwater archaeological excavations centred on shipwrecked Dutch United East India (Vereenigde Oostindishe Compagnie or VOC) vessels that passed through the Indian Ocean.

This early work set the international benchmark for excavation and management of post-medieval and early modern wreck sites. These historic events placed Australia at the forefront of maritime archaeology globally, and led to Western Australia enacting the world’s first underwater heritage legislation, followed by the Commonwealth, in 1976. Forty years on, the shipwrecks, associated terrestrial sites and artefact collections continue to be examined using new methodologies and technologies.

This lecture is an overview of the archaeological discoveries with a special focus on the 2015 excavations of the Batavia related sites.

Corioli Souter’s current research interests include remote sensing survey techniques for the discovery and mapping of shipwreck and terrestrial sites and the archaeology of contact between Aboriginal Australians and visitors along the Western seaboard. She has also established collaborations with terrestrial archaeologists for the investigation of shipwreck survivor camps and other maritime terrestrial sites such as those found in the Abrolhos, the Dampier Archipelago, as well as the South west and Kimberley coasts. Over the last few years, Corioli has developed and provided content for exhibition projects including Immerse: Exploring the Deep (2011), Lustre: Pearling & Australia (2015) and Indian Ocean Stories (2016), a collaboration with the British Museum.