{"id":69741,"date":"2020-12-16T08:45:16","date_gmt":"2020-12-16T13:45:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/?p=69741"},"modified":"2020-12-17T10:26:53","modified_gmt":"2020-12-17T15:26:53","slug":"digital-poetry-project-wins-prestigious-award","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/2020\/12\/digital-poetry-project-wins-prestigious-award\/","title":{"rendered":"Digital poetry project wins prestigious award"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two professors\u2019 unique digitization of a little-known 17th century manuscript has won a prestigious award from the Modern Languages Association.<\/p>\n

The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making<\/a>, by Leah Knight, Associate Professor with Brock\u2019s Department of English and Wendy Wall, a professor of English at Northwestern University, encourages a fresh approach to literary history in its digitization of Hester Pulter\u2019s poetry. It has won this year\u2019s MLA\u2019s Prize for Collaborative, Bibliographic, or Archival Scholarship, which will be awarded Jan. 9, 2021.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were of course delighted to receive this recognition, and we\u2019re especially buoyed by the adjudicating committee\u2019s sensitivity to the way our project is not just about Pulter\u2019s poetry: it\u2019s also about ways of receiving and treating materials from the past,\u201d says Knight.<\/p>\n

The open-access project brings together scans of the original manuscript, a basic readable transcription of the poem, and amplified editions that provide more expansive and imaginative ways of presenting the poetry. Additional essays explore the scientific, theological, and cultural context of Pulter\u2019s work, as well as the poet\u2019s personal life.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Pulter Project is an exceptional example of textual and digital scholarship that is committed to being public-facing,\u201d said the prize selection committee in a press release. \u201cThe Pulter Project is a demonstration of the inevitable instability of textuality, as witnessed in competing manuscript versions, transcriptions, and editions.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Pulter project encourages international collaboration between scholars and students in editing, reviewing, and curating Pulter\u2019s poems and reflecting on how a writer\u2019s profile is created through scholarship.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs scholars and readers, the choices we make about how to represent texts and other artifacts are part of an ongoing, creative, cultural process,\u201d says Knight. \u201cOur project foregrounds that fact in order to provoke readers to see all texts as always open to new readings and representations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since the project launched in November 2018,<\/a>\u00a0Wall and Knight have completed elemental editions of each of Pulter\u2019s 120 poems and a host of contributors have created contrastive amplified editions. The project has also been incorporated into a number of courses at various universities and selections of the poems are being created for two anthologies.<\/p>\n

Pulter was born in 1605 in Dublin and her father eventually joined the aristocracy as the first Earl of Marlborough in 1626. Her poetry references the events of war-torn England in the 1640s, including the imprisonment and beheading of Charles I, as well as more personal themes such as the births and deaths of her own children.<\/p>\n