The Archaeology of Reading

Johns Hopkins University

• Earle Havens
  Principal Investigator, Sheridan Libraries
  Earle is the Nancy H. Hall Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts, and Director of the Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book in the Renaissance, at Johns Hopkins University. He is responsible for all aspects of the conception, development, and implementation of the Archaeology of Reading project. His scholarly research focuses on the history of books and reading in early modern Europe. His recent book projects include (with Walter Stephens), Literary Forgery in Early Modern Europe, 1450-1800 (2018); and (with Mark Rankin), The Elizabethan Catholic Underground (forthcoming).
• Sayeed Choudhury
  Hodson Director of the Digital Research and Curation Center (DRCC)
  Sayeed is the Associate Dean for Research Data Management and Hodson Director of the Digital Research and Curation Center at the Sheridan Libraries. He is responsible for overall supervision of all software development, including the adaptation of the IIIF-compliant endpoint viewer and the work of DRCC team members.
• Mark Patton
  Senior Programmer, DRCC
  Mark’s role is to direct the generation of code in response to use case development, analysis, and adaptation of the IIIF-compliant endpoint viewer to be developed over the course of Phase 1 of the Archaeology or Reading project.
• Cynthia York
  Project Manager, DRCC
  Cynthia’s work focuses on the coordination of the Archaeology of Reading project activities among JHU, CELL, and the Princeton University Library. She collaborates with the project PIs and content development teams to schedule regular joint meetings, track project workflows and communications, and support project reporting.
• John Abrahams
  Software Developer, DRCC
  John’s work is coordinated with the software development activities of the Senior Programmer, and also includes the validation of digital images and metadata, as well as image ingestion and processing through the IIIF protocol.
• Christopher Geekie
  Research Assistant, Sheridan Libraries
  Chris received his PhD in Italian literature from Johns Hopkins University in 2017, focusing on sixteenth-century literary debates about epic language and style, with an emphasis on the Italian Renaissance poet Torquato Tasso. While at JHU, he also worked as a Research Assistant on the Archaeology of Reading project, transcribing and interpreting Gabriel Harvey’s marginalia across multiple books of Italian origin. He is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Observatoire de la vie littéraire (OBVIL) at Sorbonne University in Paris, working on early modern Italian literary polemics, including the transcription and digital edition of Lo ‘Nfarinato secondo (1588), a central text in late sixteenth-century Italian debates over epic poetry.
• Neil Weijer
  CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow, Sheridan Libraries
  Neil holds a Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) post-doctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University, where he completed his PhD in History. His research and publications focus on the intersections between legendary history, forgery, and scholarly practice in England from the fourteenth century to the end of the Elizabethan era. Neil works closely with Earle on various aspects of the AOR project, and has been especially interested in the historical books annotated by John Dee, and the development of pedagogical materials for students of all levels. Following the end of his fellowship, Neil will be the curator of the Hanson Collection of Rare Books at the University of Florida.
• Cathy Schaefer
  Graphic Design Consultant
  Cathy is a co-founder of Splice Design Group, designers of the visual experience across a spectrum of applications including identity and logos, interactive and web, printed publications, 3D projects and exhibition graphics. Splice is responsible for the design and programming of this AOR website as well as visual upgrades made to the new AOR viewer.

Data Analysis Team

[Go to the AOR Data Page]

• Claire Cropper
  Data Analysis Project Manager
  Claire managed the work of the data analytics consultants on both the Gabriel Harvey and John Dee corpora. She served as an interpreter and liaison between the humanities and data-analytics teams, and contributed to the project data analysis.
• Annie Takeuchi
  Lead Data Analyst
  Annie applies her expertise in statistics to direct quantitative analyses of AOR-marginalia hypotheses, initially formed by members of the AOR humanities content team. An iterative process is undertaken, whereby initial statistical results lead to additional questions and hypotheses that, in turn, require further stages of statistical testing. Annie has also supplied a summary of these results and the processes that produced them here, which hopefully will lead to additional research and experimentation.
• Teressa Bur
  Data Analysis Consultant
  Teressa provided analytical design and implementation expertise on the two large bodies of annotations captured in the AOR project, including descriptive and analytical statistical methods such as correlation and factor analysis. These helped the AOR team to understand where statistically significant relationships appear within frequently used terms and “concept groups,” both within the work of an individual annotator or across the entire set of AOR data.
• Maura Gaffney
  Data Analysis Consultant
  Maura provided analytical design and implementation expertise on the two large bodies of annotations captured in the AOR project, including descriptive and analytical statistical methods such as correlation and factor analysis. These helped the AOR team to understand where statistically significant relationships appear within frequently used terms and “concept groups,” both within the work of an individual annotator or across the entire set of AOR data.

Princeton University

• Anthony Grafton
  Co-Principal Investigator
  Tony is Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University. His special interests focus on the cultural history of Renaissance Europe, the history of books and readers, the history of scholarship and education in the West from antiquity to the 19th century, and the history of science from antiquity to the Renaissance. He has worked extensively on the reading practices of Gabriel Harvey and John Dee, and is responsible for all aspects of the conception, development, and implementation of the Archaeology of Reading project.
• Stephen Ferguson
  Associate University Librarian for External Engagement (2019-)
  Acting Associate University Librarian for Rare Books & Special Collections (2014-19)
  The Princeton University Library holds one of the most substantial collections of books annotated by Gabriel Harvey. As Curator of Rare Books and then as Acting Associate Librarian for Rare Books and Special Collections, Steve has worked with CELL and the Annotated Books Online project to create complete digital access to this collection, and has represented the Princeton University Library in all aspects of the Archaeology of Reading project.
• Jean Bauer
  Associate Director, Digital Humanities Center
  Jean Bauer was the Associate Director of the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University where she led a team of programmers, project managers, and DH consultants. CDH is research center in the Princeton University Library that collaborates with Faculty, Graduate Students, Undergraduates, and fellow library staff who are interested in combining humanities sources with computational tools and methods to enhance their research and enliven their scholarly publications. Jean blogs and tweets at @jean_bauer. For more information, see her website.

Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, University College London

• Lisa Jardine, CBE †
  April 12, 1944 – October 25, 2015
  Co-Principal Investigator
  Lisa was Professor of Renaissance Studies at University College London and Director of the UCL Centre for Humanities Interdisciplinary Research Projects, and the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters. She was the leading scholarly authority on the reading practices of Gabriel Harvey, and was responsible for all aspects of the conception, development, and implementation of the Archaeology of Reading project.
• Matthew Symonds
  Co-Principal Investigator
  Matt is a Senior Research Associate at CELL, directs the development of humanistic content, and serves as the primary point of contact and coordination between the humanities and technology teams for the Archaeology of Reading project. His research interests include the history of information, the miscommunication of ideas, and early modern cultural history.
• Jaap Geraerts
  AOR Postdoctoral Research Fellow
  Jaap had primary responsibility for the production of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) schema and transcriber’s manual that govern the transcription and machine-readable tagging of manuscript annotations in Harvey’s and Dee’s books. He transcribed and encoded annotations in XML, and supervised the Research Assistants. His research interests include the history of religious tolerance and intolerance, Reformation and post-Reformation culture, and the history of reading. His first book, entitled Patrons of the Old Faith: the Catholic Nobility in Utrecht and Guelders, c. 1580-1702 has recently been published. He currently works as a postdoctoral fellow at the Leibniz Institute for European History in Mainz.
• Lucy Stagg
  Centre Coordinator
  Lucy is the Centre Coordinator for CELL and the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (UCLDH). Her role is to manage the administration of the two centres, help promote their activities and ensure their smooth running in conjunction with the Archaeology of Reading project.
• Juan Acevedo
  Research Assistant
  Juan is a PhD candidate at the Warburg Institute, and works primarily on the transcription of annotations in classical Greek. His current research focuses on the complexity of the concept of element and its intrinsic relation to number, and to language as a phonetic, written and logical system.
• Finn Schulze-Feldmann
  Research Assistant
  Finn Schulze-Feldmann is a PhD student at the Warburg Institute (University of London). After receiving his undergraduate degree in History and Musicology from the University of Potsdam, he completed his Master’s in ‘Cultural and Intellectual History, 1300–1650’ at the Warburg Institute. His doctoral research is centred on the sixteenth-century reception of Sibylline oracles. In specific, Finn is interested in the interplay of non-Christian religious practices and the simultaneous changes in the intellectual landscape during the Reformation.
• Daisy Owens
  Research Assistant
  Daisy completed a BA in English Literature at the University of Manchester in 2013, and an MA in Shakespeare Studies at King’s College London and Shakespeare’s Globe in 2016. Her MA dissertation explored the role of voice in Shakespeare’s depictions of sexual violence, considering features such as vocal revelation and the connection between violence and acts of silencing. Her other research interests include early modern conceptions of gender, the body, the senses and mental health.
• Matt Beros
  Research Assistant
  Matt Beros holds an MA in Book History and Digital Media from the University of Leiden and a BA in English Literature and Continental Philosophy from the University of Auckland. He has previously worked at the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam as part of the hybrid publishing project. His current research interests include early modern print culture, the Hermetic tradition, bibliophilism and decadent literature.
• Kristof Smeyers
  Research Assistant
  Kristof graduated with a cum laude MA-degree in Cultural History at KU Leuven, Belgium in 2010. He specializes in the European history of ideas, from the early modern age to the 19th century. He worked in a senior position at Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries in the Inventory Control Project. After that he combined library roles with academic research at the Research Library of the National Bank of Belgium and at the Centre for Economic Studies of KU Leuven. He is currently writing an economic history of Belgium, due for publication in 2016.
• Amanda Brunton
  Research Assistant
  Amanda holds a BA in English Literature at the University of Sheffield, and an MA in English Studies (Early Modern) at Queen Mary, University of London and works with the Post-Doctoral Researcher on the transcription and tagging of Gabriel Harvey’s annotations. Her own research concerns the way in which manuscript epitaphs contribute towards an understanding of grieving in early modern England.
• James Everest
  Research Assistant
  James is completing an AHRC-funded PhD at CELL on practical optics in seventeenth-century English intellectual culture. His essay on light in the work of Francis Bacon is forthcoming in Intellectual History Review. He studied French and Arabic at Pembroke College, Cambridge, graduating in 2007, and completed an MRes in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at Queen Mary, University of London, in 2011.

Advisory Board

• William H. Sherman
  Advisory Board Member
  Bill is Director of the Warburg Institute. He was formerly Director of Collections and Head of Research at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where he was also PI on an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded project that is building the V&A Research Institute (VARI). His work on the history of books and readers includes John Dee and Used Books. He is currently completing a book on visual marginalia called The Reader’s Eye.
• Alexandra Gillespie
  Advisory Board Member
  Alex is Professor of English and Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, and Director of the Jackman Humanities Institute Digital Humanities Network. Her research is concerned with medieval and early modern texts and physical books, with particular interests in the shift from manuscript to print culture; the relationship between book history, literary criticism, and literary theory; and in issues arising from the digitization of medieval books. She is co-PI of Digital Tools for Manuscript Study, a joint project between the University of Toronto Libraries (UTL) and the Centre for Medieval Studies (CMS), funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
• Arnoud Visser
  Advisory Board Member
  Arnoud is Professor of Textual Culture in the Renaissance Low Countries in the Department of Languages, Literature and Communication at the University of Utrecht. He is also Director of Annotated Books Online.
• Heather Froehlich
  Advisory Board Member
  Dr Heather Froehlich is the Literary Informatics Librarian at Penn State University (University Park, PA, USA). She was awarded her PhD and MRes from the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow, UK), where she studied representations of social identity in Shakespeare and other Early Modern London plays. She is interested in digital methods for literary and linguistic inquiry and you can read more about her and her research at http://hfroehli.ch or on twitter (@heatherfro).
• Katie Birkwood
  Advisory Board Member
  Katie is the rare books and special collections librarian at the Royal College of Physicians, London, where she is responsible for the largest surviving collection of books from the library of John Dee. She curated the RCP’s popular 2016 exhibition ‘Scholar, courtier, magician: the lost library of John Dee’. Her research interests centre on library history in the 16th and 17th centuries.