It is our great pleasure to announce that the Renaissance English Knowledgebase (REKn) project will become the next node within ARC (Advanced Research Consortium), joining NINES (Nineteeth-century Scholarship Online), 18thConnect, and MESA (the Medieval Electronic Scholarly Alliance).
REKn, an electronic research database that contains a large quantity of both primary and secondary materials related to the Renaissance period, is a dynamic, emerging resource for professional readers and scholars. The project, initiated in 2003-4, was developed at Vancouver Island University’s Centre for Digital Humanities Innovation and at the University of Victoria’s Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL) under the direction of Ray Siemens, Distinguished Professor in University of Victoria’s Faculty of Humanities, and in the Departments of English and Computer Science. The project ultimately established an interface (currently at proof-of-concept stage) for professional reading across large data sets. REKn’s Professional Reading Environment (PReE) facilitates access to and advanced searching of the knowledgebase. The REKn project and PReE are archetypal of database research and development projects that enable digital scholarly activities, and the IDHMC is pleased to announce that it will participate in continued work on the knowledgebase.
REKn’s new partnerships within ARC will continue project development at ETCL, Northwestern University, University of Virginia, Texas A&M University, and beyond, with support from the University of Victoria via CFI infrastructure, the Canada Research Chairs program, and, via ARC and its partners.
For more information about ARC, NINES, MESA, 18thConnect, and REKn, please see the following:
REKn Joins World-Leading NINES Initiative, ARC
Electronic Cultural Studies Lab at UVic
18thConnect
NINES
MESA-ARC Meeting
Texas A&M to House Digital Literary Research Consortium
“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).