News & Events Details
REKn Joins World-leading NINES Initiative, ARC
It is with great pleasure that the UVic Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL) announces that its Renaissance English Knowledgebase (REKn) project will join the Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship (NINES), 18th Connect, and the Medieval Electronic Scholarly Alliance (MESA) initiatives in the Mellon-funded Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) this coming year.
REKn is founded on a research partnership, begun in 2003-4, among the most prominent holders of primary and secondary electronic academic materials relating to the text-based study of Early Modern England a partnership that ultimately allowed access to, and advanced searching of, these materials via a single gateway. Its Professional Reading Environment (PReE) facilitated access to this large knowledgebase, founded in scholarly activities in the areas of representation/remediation, analysis, and communication. The development of REKN and PReE has been funded by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI; 2004-10) and the Canada Research Chairs program, which led to proof-of-concept and research prototype work that has already seen incorporation into the electronic environments of its key partners and, via those partners, use by most working with these materials professionally today.
"The groundwork for REKn was laid by an international team in the previous decade, who envisioned it to be like what the Perseus Project [directed by Gregory Crane, Tufts U and U Leipzig] has become for its audience. A very notable first fruit of this earlier work is Early English Books Online [EEBO; U Michigan and Proquest], which has been a leading partner in the work we've done at UVic right from the start," project director Ray Siemens notes. REKn's new partnership with NINES, 18th Connect, and MESA in ARC brings REKn in direct contact with those engaged in similar work across the entirety of English literature and beyond and, as a group, even closer to the communities it is intended to serve. Of this move, Siemens says "This is exactly the sort of collaboration we imagined when we began work on REKn. In joining ARC, REKn finds its rightful home."
Research and development associated with REKn/PReE has taken place at Vancouver Island U's Centre for Digital Humanities Innovation (2003-4) and at UVic's ETCL (2004-present) under the direction of Ray Siemens, Distinguished Professor in UVic's Faculty of Humanities and in the Departments of English and Computer Science. Continued work is to be carried out at ETCL, Northwestern U, U Virginia, Texas A and M U, and beyond, with UVic support via CFI infrastructure and the Canada Research Chairs program (-2014) and, via ARC and its partners, the Mellon Foundation and many others. For more about ARC, NINES, MESA, 18th Connect, and REKn, please see the below:
"Underpinnings of the Social Edition? A Narrative, 2004-9, for the Renaissance English Knowledgebase (REKn) and Professional Reading Environment (PReE) Projects." Ray Siemens, Mike Elkink, Alastair McColl, Karin Armstrong, James Dixon, Angelsea Saby, Brett D. Hirsh and Cara Leitch, with Martin Holmes, Eric Haswell, Chris Gaudet, Paul Girn, Michael Joyce, Rachel Gold, and Gerry Watson, and members of the PKP, Iter, TAPoR, and INKE teams. In Jerome McGann, ed., with Andrew Stauffer, Dana Wheeles, and Michael Pickard. Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come. Houston: Rice UP, 2010. http://cnx.org/content/m34335/ 50 plus 461 pp (plus files).