PROFILE
Neil Fraistat
EDUCATION: Ph.D., M.A., Univ. of Pennsylvania (1979, 1976); B.A., Univ. of Connecticut (1974).
ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS: Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (2006-); Professor of English, Univ. of Maryland, College Park, (1991-); Associate Professor of English, Univ. of Maryland, College Park (1984-91); Assistant Professor of English, Univ. of Maryland (1979-84).
■ Selected Publications
PRINT BOOK-LENGTH PUBICATIONS: Editor, with Donald H. Reiman. The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Volumes I & II. (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000 & 2004);Editor, with Elizabeth B. Loizeaux, Reimagining Textuality: Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002); Editor, with Donald H. Reiman. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 2d edition. Norton Critical Edition (W. W. Norton. 2001); Editor, with Susan S. Lanser, Helen Maria Williams' "Letters written in France" (Broadview Press, 2001); Editor, The "Prometheus Unbound" Notebooks: Bodleian MSS. Shelley e.1, e.2, and e.3. The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, IX (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1991) [113 page introduction, complete transcriptions, and 173 pages of notes]; Editor, Poems in Their Place: The Intertextuality and Order of Poetic Collections (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); The Poem and the Book: Interpreting Collections of Romantic Poetry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985). Forthcoming in 2009: Editor, with Julia Flanders, The Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship; Editor, with Donald H. Reiman and Nora Crook, The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Volume III.
■ Message
I am delighted to have been invited to speak at the first International Symposium on Digital Humanities for Japanese Arts and Cultures and very much look forward to learning more about the situation of the Digital Humanities in Japan. As Co-Chair of centerNet, I hope to facilitate collaborations between Japanese digital humanists and those in North America and Europe.
Abstract
The Digital Humanities, Local and Global
The emergence of the Digital Humanities as a coherent field in the 1990s was accompanied by and largely a result of the concomitant evolution of the Digital Humanities Center as an institution. Such centers have become important laboratories for the application of information technology to the humanities; powerful advocates for the significance of such work; crucial focal points for the theorization of the Digital Humanities as a field; and local nodes for what is being called in North America “cyberinfrastructure.” I will discuss the history and function of Digital Humanities Centers, focusing especially on their role in cyberinfrastructure and on the centerNet initiative, which seeks to create a truly global network of local digital humanities centers.
