2  Texts

2.1 Sample Research Questions

• Are character types consistent across different plays?
• Who authored anonymous poems?
• Which texts contribute to the rise of literary criticism?

2.2 Tools and Websites

• EEBO-TCP
• EarlyPrint Library & Lab
• EarlyPrint Discovery Engine
• Oxford Text Archive
• Digital Miscellanies Index
• Manuscript Pamphleteering in Early Stuart England
• Early Modern Dramatic Paratexts
• Union First Line Index
• Reception Reader
• New Variorum Shakespeare
• The Pulter Project
• The Spenser Archive

2.3 Activities

2.3.1 Exploring Digitized Text

1. Choose an EEBO-TCP text that you care about. Maybe it’s a text you already know, but if not, how will you find something that interests you?

2. Use the Discovery Engine to find similar texts.

3. Download and assemble a small collection of texts.

4. Look at the reading copy of your text and consider the completeness of the transcription.

5. Find the text in Reception Reader and compare text reuse to what was shown in the Disco Engine.

6. Try to locate your text in a different database/archive. If you can’t, why not?

2.3.2 Comparing Search Results

1. Choose a search topic, and use the same terms to look for it across three search interfaces:

   • EEBO-TCP Search
   • EarlyPrint Library
   • EarlyPrint Corpus Search

2. Keeping in mind that all of these interfaces search essentially the same corpus, how are the results different? Are you locating books that contain your topic or texts that do? Are you able to find your results within those texts? How does the interface constrain what you’re able to find?

2.4 References

• Algee-Hewitt (2017)
• Heffernan and Sagner Buurma (2018)
• Eve (2019)
• Misek (n.d.)
• Gavin (2022)
• Burrows and Craig (2001)
• The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion (2017)
• Mueller (2008)
• Gavin (2016)
• Bode (2017)
• Basu (2025)

Algee-Hewitt, Mark. 2017. “Distributed Character: Quantitative Models of the English Stage, 1550–1900.” New Literary History 48 (4): 751–82. https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2017.0038.

Basu, Anupam. 2025. Shakespeare and Scale: The Archive of Early Printed English. Cambridge Elements: Shakespeare and Text. Cambridge UP. https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/shakespeare-and-scale/B3EB39E9F6049B8A203150FCB2DE4E5E.

Bode, Katherine. 2017. “The Equivalence of ‘Close’ And ‘Distant’ Reading; Or, Toward a New Object for Data-Rich Literary History.” Modern Language Quarterly 78 (1): 77–106. https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-3699787.

Burrows, John, and Hugh Craig. 2001. “Lucy Hutchinson and the Authorship of Two Seventeenth-Century Poems: A Computational Approach.” Seventeenth Century 16 (2): 259. https://doi.org/10.1080/0268117X.2001.10555493.

Eve, Martin Paul. 2019. Close Reading with Computers: Textual Scholarship, Computational Formalism, and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Gavin, Michael. 2016. “Historical Text Networks: The Sociology of Early English Criticism.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 50 (1): 53–80. https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2016.0041.

———. 2022. Literary Mathematics: Quantitative Theory for Textual Studies. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Heffernan, Laura, and Rachel Sagner Buurma. 2018. “Search and Replace: Josephine Miles and the Origins of Distant Reading.” Modernism/Modernity Print Plus, April. https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/search-and-replace.

Misek, Linda Douglas. n.d. “COMPUTING A CONTEXT: STYLE, STRUCTURE, AND THE SELF-IMAGE OF SATAN IN ’PARADISE LOST.’ (VOLUMES I AND II) - ProQuest.” PhD thesis. Accessed June 23, 2023. https://www.proquest.com/openview/9a2ce163529a5cae4b7385715a96751b/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y.

Mueller, Martin. 2008. “Digital Shakespeare, or Towards a Literary Informatics.” Shakespeare 4 (3): 284–301. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450910802295179.

The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion. 2017. New Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.