Scholars Lab

Atlas of a Medieval Life explores how network analysis and GIS can bring the medieval subfields of literary studies, cartography, and biography into fruitful dialogue. Researchers met in the Scholars Lab, utilizing its resources to delve into the documentary research underlying the project. The research centers on the career of Roger de Breynton (c.1290-1351), a historically obscure but widely traveled and well-connected Canon of Hereford Cathedral, in provincial SW England.

This project selects newspaper clippings from El Bejareño newspaper with a specific focus on Black life, labor, and servitude. In doing so, it highlights how periodicals function as archives that communicate ideas, create meaning, and tell us something about whose lives and stories are worthy (or not) of documentation and representation. The stories in this project demonstrate how even fragmentary mentions of a person and/or event enrich and complicate conversations about 19th-century life in Texas.

Explore the inter-textual relationship between Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea in this digital exhibit. Intemperate & Unchaste was researched and developed in the Scholars Lab, digitizing text in the Scan Tech Studio for quantitive analysis in R Studio. This research approaches the themes of empire, sex, and isolation critically examined in both novels, using sentiment analysis to compare how each interacts with the theme and draw conclusions about the lineage of feminist narratives that begin with Jane Eyre.