Beyond the Facsimile: Early English Books Online (EEBO) and the Text Creation Partnership

Abstract

Do you use the Early English Books Online (EEBO) database? Have you wondered why you can search the full text of some books, but not others? Did you know that the full-text searching feature is the result of work done right here at UM? Can you imagine making uses for these texts that go beyond searching in EEBO? This workshop will introduce you to the Text Creation Partnership (TCP), the project that generates fully searchable, XML-encoded digital editions based on the 15th, 16th, and 17th century English books represented in EEBO. We’ll look a bit at how this work is done, and how the resulting digital text archive can be used in your research and in your classrooms.

We’ll also look “beyond EEBO” at how the digital editions produced by the TCP can be used on their own–independent of the EEBO database–in many different ways, from serving as the base text for a new scholarly edition to helping students think critically about how the structure of the book and conventions of print impact their understanding of a work.

No prior knowledge of EEBO or the TCP is assumed (though it is welcome!). This workshop will be most useful to those interested in early modern English literature and history, book history, digital humanities, or all of these!