Women of Digital Philology

I had a lovely chat today with friend and erstwhile co-author Patty Ingham about a fascinating new course she’ll be teaching this Fall 2019 on book history, digital humanities, and the humanistic formation of “the lab.” I was reminded along the way of some really great scholarship published in just the past year that collectively suggests (yet another) rewrite of philology’s  history. This chapter will be about the women who–well before 1950–imagined computational textual criticism for the English literary canon.

• Josephine Miles (1911-1985) on Dryden
  • Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan (2018): https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/search-and-replace
• Edith Rickert (1871-1938) on Chaucer
  • Brian Lennon (2018), Passwords: Philology, Security, Authentication
• Teena Rochefort-Smith (1861-1883) on Shakespeare
  • Ann Thompson (1998), https://www.jstor.org/stable/2902297
  • Alan Galey (2015), https://floatingacademy.wordpress.com/2015/01/23/teena-rochfort-smith-the-ada-lovelace-of-the-digital-humanities/

I don’t have any fresh research to add, but I wanted to take a moment to register the small list that has taken shape in my mind. Bonus reference:

• Melissa Terras (2013) on the women who collaborated with Roberto Busa.
  • http://melissaterras.blogspot.com/2013/10/for-ada-lovelace-day-father-busas.html

I’d love to know of more examples! And as soon as a connection to the Brut surfaces, you’ll be able to read about it here. In the Early English Text Society edition, Friedrich Brie recorded no thanks to any woman, not even to a “miss” or a wife for typing: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.hnged8