Keynote Address

"Finding and Indexing Digital Publications"

Speaker: Laura Estill
Time: Wednesday, May 16th, 4:45 pm
Location: Whitelaw, Library Room 246 

In this talk, Dr. Estill explores the challenges and opportunities afforded by digital publications, based on her experience as editor of World Shakespeare Bibliography Online. The WSB, like online library catalogues and other digital bibliographies, can offer users the tantalizing perception that they are searching a complete archive. As the saying goes, however, there is no such thing as a complete bibliography; the illusion of searching "all" leads to materials that are not just overlooked, but never able to be looked at in the first place. While some of the challenges facing scholarly publication are not uniquely digital (such as plagiarism, predatory journals, peer-review, and self-publishing), they have been exacerbated by digital platforms. Other issues, such as ensuring access to scholarship and considering the humanities as a global field, change dramatically when we consider digital publication. Ultimately, this talk considers scope, inclusion, and findability as ethical concerns that reflect our culturally-bound scholarly, bibliographical, and editorial practices. 

Who is Laura Estill?

Dr. Laura Estill is an Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University and editor of the World Shakespeare Bibliography Online (www.worldshakesbib.org). This fall, she will join the Department of English at St. Francis Xavier University. Her research interests include the reception of early modern plays (in print, manuscript, and online), digital pedagogy, supporting and crediting interdisciplinary digital research, critical analysis of digital tools, and digital bibliography. With Diane Jakacki and Michael Ullyot, she edited Early Modern Studies after the Digital Turn (2016). Her digital humanities publications have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ), Digital Studies/Champ Numérique (written with Luis Meneses and written with Michelle Levy, respectively), and Scholarly and Research Communication, as well as in book chapters in Shakespeare's Language in Digital Media (co-written with Andie Ailva, edited by Janelle Jenstad, Jennifer Roberts-Smith, and Mark Kaetherler) and Doing Digital Humanities 2 (edited by Richard Lane, Constance Crompton, and Ray Siemens, forthcoming). With Beatrice Montedoro, she is currently working on DEx: A Database of Dramatic Extracts.