From David Schloen:

All are welcome to attend the CEDAR Project workshop on Friday, May 4, from 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. in the Regenstein Library, Room A-11 (on the lower level). Lunch will be provided. Please RSVP to David Schloen (dschloen@uchicago.edu) if you plan to attend so we know how much food to order.

The ongoing CEDAR Project is described below. On May 4 there will be presentations by project participants—mainly Ph.D. student research assistants—about the computational features that are enabling the work and the progress to date on the initial corpora, i.e., the Sumerian version of the Gilgamesh Epic; the Book of Genesis, chapter 1; and The Taming of the Shrew (presented in that order). Each 45-minute presentation will be followed by 15 minutes for questions and discussion, and we will reserve 45 minutes for general discussion at the end. For more information, contact David Schloen.

More information on CEDAR:

CEDAR (Critical Editions for Digital Analysis and Research) is a digital humanities project based at the University of Chicago. This project makes use of OCHRE (the Online Cultural and Historical Research Environment), a powerful computational platform for managing, analyzing, and publishing scholarly data. The OCHRE platform is currently used by dozens of academic projects internationally. The OCHRE server is professionally hosted by the University of Chicago Library and technical support is provided by the staff of the OCHRE Data Service in the university’s Oriental Institute. OCHRE support for CEDAR and some other projects is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation’s Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure. The CEDAR project team will use selected materials from three well known literary corpora that have had great cultural impact and long histories of transmission and translation: the Gilgamesh Epic, the Bible, and Shakespeare’s plays. CEDAR will test and refine new methods of digitally representing, viewing, and analyzing manuscripts, textual variants, and divergent editorial readings—in all their complexity and interrelationships—in order to support the most rigorous textual scholarship, on the one hand, and the teaching of these texts and their histories to students, on the other. The first chapter of the Book of Genesis has been chosen as a test case from the Bible and The Taming of the Shrew from Shakespeare. (In the case of Shakespeare’s plays, “manuscripts” includes the earliest printed editions, with all their variants.) CEDAR will show how the same underlying data model and software can be used for three very different literary corpora written in different historical periods using different languages and writing systems and which today are studied by different communities of scholars. Facsimile images of original manuscripts and scholarly transcriptions, translations, and commentary will all be stored in OCHRE, which will serve as the primary repository for a large body of well curated and reusable data. Researchers will be able to build, enrich, and analyze the CEDAR data in OCHRE. Meanwhile, an open-access CEDAR Web browser application will be provided for easy viewing and searching of this material. The result will be a new kind of online critical edition which can grow and be supplemented by related commentary, translations, and images.