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Bio
Teaching
Research
Conferences & lectures
Projects & blogs
Full cv
Contact:
alan.galey [at] utoronto [dot] ca
Alan Galey
Faculty of Information
140 St George St.
University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario
Canada M5S 3G6
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Bio
Alan Galey is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, where he also teaches in the collaborative program in Book History and Print Culture. His research focuses on intersections between textual scholarship and digital technologies, especially in the context of theories of the archive and the history of scholarly editing. He has published on these topics in journals such as Shakespeare Quarterly, Literary and Linguistic Computing, Early Modern Literary Studies, College Literature, and Archival Science, and has co-edited special issues of the journals Shakespeare (with Ray Siemens) and TEXT Technlogy (with Patrick Finn), as well as the book collection Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Form of the Book: Contested Scriptures (with Travis DeCook; Routledge, 2011). He has presented papers linking textual scholarship, book history, and digital technology at the conferences of the Modern Language Association, the Society for Textual Scholarship, the Shakespeare Association of America, the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, the Society for Digital Humanities/Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs, the Renaissance Society of America, the International Congress on Medieval Studies, the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing, and the University of Edinburgh's Centre for the History of the Book (Material Cultures 2010). He has also given invited lectures at the University of Toronto, the University of Victoria Digital Humanities Summer Institute, Texas A&M University, Northwestern University, Loyola University, Yale University, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. He is a member of the Textual Studies team of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments Project (INKE.ca), supported by a Major Collaborative Research Initiative grant from SSHRC. He currently holds a Standard Research Grant from SSHRC for a project titled Archive and Interface in Digital Textual Studies: From Cultural History to Critical Design.
I will be on a research-only term from July 1 to December 30, 2012. During that time I will be responding to email on a limited basis.
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Teaching
I will not be teaching any courses in Summer or Fall 2012, as I have a research-only term.
Past courses
Books 1001H: Introduction to Book History
A one-term graduate course, primarily for students in the collaborative program in Book History and Print Culture, introducing foundational concepts in book history, bibliography, editorial theory and practice, the sociology of texts, book production from manuscript through print to digital text, and the history of reading. Combines seminar discussions of key topics and case studies in book history with field trips to the Fisher Rare Book Library, Massey College Press, and Coach House Press. (Previously Books 1001 and its companion course, Books 1001, were taught as a single year-long course, Books 1000Y: Book History and Print Culture.)
INF 1005/6H: Information Workshop (topic: Architectures of the Book)
This 6-week workshop is one of the new core courses in our Master of Information degree program. All students spend 6 weeks in one workshop, followed by 6 more weeks in another to make up a complete course. Project-related Information Workshop topics range from health information in the age of "free," to virtual worlds and avatars, to the docx file format, to the history of universal libraries. The workshop I have offered since 2010, titled "Architectures of the Book," introduces students to the complexities of representing print and manuscript books digitally. We explore aspects of textuality from throughout the history of the book that present challenges for digital representation: possible subtopics include paratexts, mise-en-page, variant texts, marginalia, and the relation between text and image. Combining the study of book history, bibliography, text encoding, and visualization, we focus on eXtensible Markup Language (XML) encoding not simply as the application of a technical skill or technology to a problem, but rather as an intellectual exercise that makes a virtue of the constraints of digital representation. This course is based on INKE's Architectures of the Book project.
INF 2331H: The Future of the Book
A new graduate course I've developed for the Faculty of Information. This course considers the history and possible futures of books in a digital world. In this course "the book" is interpreted broadly, meaning not just an object with covers and pages, but also an evolving metaphor for conceptual frameworks for knowledge, and a metonym that brings together many different technologies, institutions, and cultural practices. The course introduces students to interdisciplinary approaches such as book history, textual studies, history of reading, and digital humanities, with an emphasis on balancing theoretical speculation with practical implementation. Readings will survey topics such as the ontology of born-digital artifacts, critical assessment of digitization projects, collaborative knowledge work, reading devices (old and new), e-book interface design, text/image/multimedia relationships, theories and practices of markup, the gendering of technologies, the politics of digital archiving, the materiality of texts, and the epistemology of digital tools. Students will also receive a practical introduction to XML markup and visualization tools.
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Research
As sole author of publications unless otherwise noted
Currently my research is structured by two SSHRC-funded projects. My individual research is supported by a SSHRC Standard Research Grant for a project called Archive and Interface in Digital Textual Studies (on which I'm the Principal Investigator), and my collaborative research is supported by a SSHRC Major Collaborative Research Initiative grant for a project called Implementing New Knowledge Environments (on which I'm a Co-Principal Investigator). Details about each project and their respective publication outputs are listed below.
Archive and Interface in Digital Textual Studies:
From Cultural History to Critical Design
This project is supported by a three-year SSHRC Standard Research Grant, and will have two forms of outputs: several scholarly articles and a monograph tentatively titled The Shakespearean Archive; and an open-source code library of prototype interface components for digital scholarly editing and visualization. Digital archives and interfaces significantly complicate how textual scholars read and represent human traces in texts. Textual scholars are now reckoning with a deepening separation of material form from idealized content in our tools at the very moment when literary critics have established the materiality of texts to be indispensable to interpretation. As digital textual studies takes shape as a field, it finds itself caught between these divergent trends in computational practice and cultural theory. This study responds to that problem by investigating the cultural history of the archive in scholarly editing, and by building an online library of interface components designed to be part of that cultural history. A detailed project description is available here, and publications resulting from the project are listed below.
- Visualizing Variation: an open-source code library of prototype interface components for digital scholarly editing and visualization
- Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Form of the Book: Contested Scriptures (Routledge, 2011): A book collection of articles by leading scholars in literary studies and book history, co-edited with Travis DeCook (Carleton U). The articles in the collection look at the different ways that Shakespeare and the Bible have been linked as mutually reinforcing sources of cultural authority. In addition to co-editing, I co-wrote the introduction and contributed a chapter titled "The Tablets of the Law: Reading Hamlet with Scriptural Technologies."
- "Digital Archives and Their Margins." Panel co-organized with Katherine Harris (San José State U) for the Modern Language Association conference in Boston, January 2013. Detailed description and abstracts available here.
- "The Enkindling Reciter: E-Books in the Bibliographical Imagination." Book History 12 (2012). (forthcoming)
- "Reading the Book of Mozilla: Web Browsers and the Materiality of Digital Texts." The History of Reading, Vol. 3: Methods, Strategies, Tactics. Ed. Rosalind Crone and Shafquat Towheed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 196-214.
- "Networks of Deep Impression: Shakespeare and the History of Information." Shakespeare and New Media, ed. Katherine Rowe. Special issue of Shakespeare Quarterly 61.3 (2010). 289-312.
- "Mechanick Exercises: The Question of Technical Competence in Digital Scholarly Editing." Electronic Publishing: Politics and Pragmatics. Ed. Gabriel Egan. Toronto & Tempe, AZ: Iter/Arizona Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2010. 81–101.
- full chapter in PDF (Note: at the publisher's request, copying and printing permissions are not enabled on this file)
- "The Human Presence in Digital Artifacts." Text and Genre in Reconstruction: Effects of Digitalization on Ideas, Behaviours, Products, and Institutions. Ed. Willard McCarty. Oxford: Open Book, 2010. 93-117.
Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE)
INKE is a large-scale, long-term, interdisciplinary project to study the future of books and reading, supported by a $2.5 million grant from SSHRC's Major Collaborative Research Initiatives (MCRI) program and contributions from participating universities and partners. INKE brings together activities that usually happen in isolation: book history and textual scholarship; user experience studies; interface design; and prototyping of digital reading environments. The project comprises 37 researchers (plus research assistants and postdocs) at 26 universities in Canada, England, the United States, and Ireland, and 20 partners in the public and private sectors -- all working together on a coordinated research program for seven years, from 2009-2016. I co-wrote the grant application along with six other colleagues under the leadership of project director Ray Siemens (U Victoria), and my present role is Co-Investigator and member of the Textual Studies team, as well as co-editor of a knowledge base titled Architectures of the Book. Listed below are selected publications from the project in which I've been involved:
- Architectures of the Book: an open-access, peer-reviewed collection of richly illustrated essays about specific design features in the history of the book
- Alan Galey, Richard Cunningham, Brent Nelson, Ray Siemens, Paul Werstine, and the INKE Team. "Beyond Remediation: The Role of Textual Studies in Implementing New Knowledge Environments." Digitizing Material Culture, from Antiquity to 1700. Ed. Brent Nelson and Melissa Terras. Toronto & Tempe, AZ: Iter/Arizona Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. (in press)
- Wendy Duff, Emily Monks-Leeson, Alan Galey, and the INKE Team. "Contexts Built and Found: A Pilot Study on the Process of Archival Meaning-Making." Archival Science 12.1 (2012): 69-92.
- Alan Galey, Stan Ruecker, and the INKE Team. "How a Prototype Argues." Literary and Linguistic Computing 24.10 (2010): 405-24.
- Ray Siemens, Claire Warwick, Richard Cunningham, Teresa Dobson, Alan Galey, Stan Ruecker, Susan Schreibman, and the INKE Team. "Codex Ultor: Toward a Conceptual and Theoretical Foundation for New Research on Books and Knowledge Environments." The Computer and Canadian Scholarship: Recent Trends in the Humanities and Social Sciences, ed. John Bonnet and Kevin Kee. Spec. issue of Digital Studies / Le champ numérique 1.2 (2009): http://www.digitalstudies.org/ojs/index.php/digital_studies/article/view/177/220.
Other publications
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Selected conference presentations and invited lectures
Upcoming
- "The New Media Prototype as Scholarly Genre: Past, Present, and Future." Society for Textual Scholarship Conference, Austin, 31 May - 2 June 2012.
- "Variant Stories: Digital Visualization and the Secret Lives of Shakespeare’s Texts." Modern Language Association conference, Boston, January 2013.
- "Digital Archives and Their Margins." Panel co-organized with Katherine Harris (San José State U) for the Modern Language Association conference in Boston, January 2013. Detailed description and abstracts available here.
Past
- "Visualizing Variation in Premodern Books: The Case for Small Projects." The Past Has Arrived: The Digital Middle Ages and Renaissance. New York University, 13 April 2012.
- "Approaching the Coasts of Utopia: Visualization Strategies for Mapping Early Modern Paratexts." Digital Humanities 2011, Stanford University, 20 June 2011.
- (with Jon Bath and the INKE Team) "Imagining the Architectures of the Book: Historical Perspectives on E-Book Design." Canadian Association for the Study of Book Culture (CASBC) Annual Conference, CFHSS Congress, Fredericton, NB, 1 June 2011.
- "The Shakespearean Archive: Critical Prehistories of Digital Editing." Shakespeare Association of America 39th Annual Meeting, Bellevue, WA, 9 April 2011.
- "The Enkindling Reciter: Performing Reading and Concealing Texts in the E-book Demo." Modern Language Association Annual Convention, Los Angeles, 6 January 2011.
- "Gutenberg Again?". Plenary roundtable with Jerome McGann and Kathryn Sutherland, moderated by Bill Bell. Material Cultures Conference, Edinburgh, 18 July 2010.
- "Architectures of the Book: Connecting Exemplars, Models, and Prototypes in the Development of New Reading Environments." Material Cultures Conference, Edinburgh, 16 July.
- "Prehistories of Digitization and the Afterlives of Books." Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 14 December 2010.
- "The Sense of Reckoning: Quantification versus Materiality in Digital Shakespeare Studies." The Future of Shakespeare's Text(s). Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities. Loyola University, Chicago. 7 October 2009.
- "Reading the Book of Mozilla: Web Browsers and the Materiality of Digital Texts." Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP) Annual Conference. Toronto. 25 June 2009.
- "Mechanick Exercises: Shakespeare Editing and Born-Digital Texts." New Directions in Editing: Papers in Honor of Barbara Mowat, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, 29 May 2009.
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Projects and blogs
I'm involved in a few digital project as well as some blogs and other publications:
An open-source code library of prototype interface components for digital scholarly editing and visualization, one of the outputs of my SSHRC Standard Research Grant project, Archive and Interface in Digital Textual Studies (see above).
ArchBook is a reference resource for textual features that serve as intersections between the material form and information architecture of books. This resource is open access and peer reviewed, and supported by SSHRC via collaboration between the INKE project and my Archive and Interface project. I serve as co-editor along with Richard Cunningham (Acadia U) and Jon Bath (U Saskatchewan). The project now has a blog at inke-archbook.blogspot.com
I'm a member of the journal's editorial board, and in 2008 co-edited a special issue titled Reinventing Digital Shakespeare (see Selected Publications, above).
In another life I might have been a Victorianist...
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