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Your Portal to the Digital Humanities at the University of Virginia

Prof. Alison Booth

About Me: 

Alison Booth, Professor of English at the University of Virginia, specializes in transatlantic Victorian studies, biography, and women’s history as well as digital humanities. She is Academic Director of the Scholars’ Lab and director of Collective Biographies of Women (CBW), a database and study of networked nonfiction based on her book, How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (U. Chicago).  CBW http://cbw.iath.virginia.edu is supported by an ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship, an NEH Level II Start-Up Grant, the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, and the Scholars’ Lab, and it was peer reviewed by NINES.  It experiments with studying documentary social networks, or the prosopographies of representative persons and the cohorts and gendered typologies that emerge from these publications.  Using a stand-aside XML schema, Biographical Elements and Structure Schema, teams of editors assign controlled values to elements of short biographical narratives, a method of mid-range reading that complements other approaches to textual studies.  Collaborators include Worthy Martin, Daniel Pitti, Rennie Mapp, Jeremy Boggs, and numerous former and current students.  Booth’s books include Greatness Engendered: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf (Cornell) and Homes and Haunts: Touring Writers’ Shrines and Countries (Oxford). Along with co-editing a forthcoming PMLA special issue, “Varieties of Digital Humanities,” she is the editor of Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure and the Longman Cultural Edition of Wuthering Heights.