The Early Modern Visual Reader: A Framework Main Menu Introduction Editorial Approach Methodology

Introduction

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First, providing direct evidence of connections between early modern texts and images is not the goal of this project. As noted by scholars during the initial boom of visual culture as a topic in early modern studies, direct connections are extraordinarily difficult to prove with the fragmentary evidence left to us. Instead, this project aligns more with the goals of Judith Dundas in Pencils Rhetorique, concerned with the “poetic imagination,” the suggestion that certain types of images “inhabited the imagination of the poets” due to their experience in the world (20-21). Likewise, the EMVR attempts to illuminate “evocations of the pictorial reality against which the poets were writing” (21), but in an entirely different way than Dundas suggests in her book. The proof-of-concept—and to a much greater extent the full version of the platform that I hope to create in the future—will in its execution of that idea take as its inspiration the experimental qualities of electronic literature in order to provide an exploratory reading experience for its users, one that will make use of the specific affordances of digital media that are unavailable or impractical to implement in print scholarship. As such, mine is a user-focused, as opposed to an author-focused, digital project. This platform emphasizes the vibrancy and relevance of the visual culture of early modern England and, importantly, makes engaging with that visual culture inseparable from the reading experience. Though it aims to address several audiences (or “user bases”) simultaneously, for all of them it should be a tool for discovery, a point of departure for further inquiry. In its attempt to provide a large volume of images related to a word or phrase, it does not attempt to prove correlation between specific words or phrases and specific images, something that the platform’s design language, “About” page, and navigation panes will make very clear. Instead, for some audiences it merely provides cultural context, while for others, it should not only allow for but encourage connections between texts and visual ideas that will lead its users to more in-depth and rigorous research.

Put simply, the digital platform provides a web-reading layout for poetry, such as Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and dramatic works such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and this reading layout sits next to a space where images from early modern England appear. As the user reads and “hovers” over key words and phrases, images automatically appear that are connected in some way to the word or phrase. The design goal is that images continuously populate this “illustration panel” next to the text dynamically during the reading experience, giving the sense that one is always looking through a “window” of sorts into the text’s world.

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