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Digital Future for New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare

The College of Liberal Arts announces that its Center of Digital Humanities Research is the new home of the New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare series from the Modern Language Association.

The College of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University (TAMU) announces that its Center of Digital Humanities Research (CoDHR) is the new home of the New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare (NVS) series from the Modern Language Association (MLA).  Texas A&M will make the NVS editions, works that collate notes by various editors and commentators of the texts, openly available to scholars on a richly resourced, fully networked digital platform and will become the editorial and governance center for the project, under the direction of Laura Mandell, Professor of English and CoDHR Director.  MLA is providing funds for the project transition.

“Collaborating with Texas A&M’s internationally renowned World Shakespeare Bibliography, we can publish Shakespeare’s plays as part of a richly networked digital environment.  We would like to be the Folger of the West,” said Dr. Mandell.

Started in 1860 and the only reference editions of their kind, editions in the NVS series offer not only complete text of Shakespeare’s plays but also centuries of scholarly opinion and interpretation, dating, sources, emendations to stage history, and influential interpretations of particular words. Through the resources of the Center of Digital Humanities Research at TAMU, new editions previously published in print will be freely available online and new digital editions in the series will continue to be produced, making them accessible to a wider audience of readers, scholars, directors, and performers across the globe.  New visualization tools and interface design will enable new forms of digital scholarly interpretation to emerge, now and well into the future.

TAMU, which is already home to the editorial offices of the World Shakespeare Bibliography and owner of a copy of the second folio (the 1632 edition of the collected plays of William Shakespeare), is honored to have an opportunity to use its expertise to make the NVS editions widely accessible to researchers and students.

Read more about the NVS series from the MLA here.