Image of two people standing next to a river and looking at a globe. There is water flowing out from the globe and into the river.
Community over Commercialization: Celebrating Open Access Week with Giovanna Ceserani

Giovanna Ceserani’s latest book, A World Made by Travel: The Digital Grand Tour, is an open-access, digital publication released in June 2024 by Stanford University Press. This digital publication transforms the foundational Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701–1800 (published by the Paul Mellon Centre and compiled from the Brinsley Ford Archive held at the PMC) into a rich, interactive interface. In celebration of Open Access Week, Ceserani writes about her motivation to publish her book in an open-access, digital format. 

The Divers by Fernand Léger
Why Public Humanities?

I have been thinking of this essay as a road map to the ideas and practices of public humanities, a map that would help answer the title question, "why public humanities?" This essay will look at some beginning points for public humanities; work through definitions; talk about the stakes for faculty and students–and the universities and communities in which they work–and consider whether public humanities could be transformative rather than simply translational. No matter how you map public humanities, discussions of collaboration and social justice need to be at the center.

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Digital Technologies for Exploring Prosody: A Brief Historical Overview

What are the historical and existing efforts for employing digital technologies to explore or generate prosody? From the perspectives of information science and textual analysis, Setsuko Yokoyama works with literary scholars and archivists to facilitate critical dialogues on literary artifacts. One of her research aims is to highlight how digital technologies have informed the epistemologies of prosody. In this essay, she uses Hartman’s Scansion Machine to begin sharing her digital prosody projects and prosody-related visualization methodologies.