The Public Digital Humanities for Lunch (PDH4L) series continues its look at information technologies and archives with an examination of how print artifacts transition to databases. Matthew Lavin will present “Digital Biographies of Books: Death Comes for the Archbishop as a Case Study” from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. Thursday, May 2, in 1117 University Capitol Center, Conference Room A.

Lavin’s presentation will focus on the Willa Cather Archive at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and will provide attendees with a visually rich and critically rigorous publishing history of Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).

According to Lavin, the Willa Cather Archive represents one such example of the growing movement from print to digital text that is changing academia, publishing, and print culture.

“The digital project represents a series of material objects in multiple forms, including but not limited to manuscript fragments, notable editions, and notable copies,” he says.

Lavin also stated, “The site will function as a repository for knowledge about the creation, production, distribution, and reception of Death Comes for the Archbishop and is designed as a test case in creating digital representations of print culture artifacts, textual variances, and bibliographical relationships among items.”

The Willa Cather Archive is an ambitious endeavor to create a rich, useful, and widely-accessible site for the study of Willa Cather's life and writings. The researchers on the project are providing digital editions of Cather texts and scholarship free to the public as well as creating a large amount of unique, born-digital scholarly content.

The project originated in 1997, and over the years has digitized and published hundreds of thousands of words of Cather-authored texts and Cather scholarship. The archive is a product of a partnership between the archives and Special Collections, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries, University of Nebraska–Lincoln Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, The University of Nebraska Press, and the Cather Project at the University of Nebraska.

Lavin is a Council on Library and Information Resources Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Digital Research in Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He completed a doctorate in English at the UI in 2012. He earned a master’s degree in American studies at Utah State University in 2006 and a bachelor’s degree from St. Lawrence University in 2002.

For his doctoral work relating to turn-of-the-century American literature and the history of the book, he received the Lilly Library’s Everett Helm Fellowship in 2010 and the UI’s Frederick F. Seely Distinguished Dissertation Fellowship for Teaching and Research in 2011.

His scholarly work has appeared in Western American Literature and Cather Studies 9: Willa Cather and Modern Cultures. His research interests include 19th- and 20th-century American literature, bibliography/book history, history of fine press, digitization, data curation, digital ontologies, digital text models, Text Encoding Initiative, and Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records.

The PDH4L series is sponsored by the Digital Studio for Public Humanities. All lectures are free and open to the public. Lunch is not provided, but participants are welcome to bring their own.

PDH4L talks throughout 2013 have focused on the nature and role of public digital humanities in contemporary culture. Over the course of this series—which will be continuing into the fall 2013 semester—audiences will interact with prominent public digital humanities researchers and help shape the discussion of this rapidly rising field of study.

Individuals with disabilities are encouraged to attend all UI-sponsored events. If you are a person with a disability who requires a reasonable accommodation in order to participate in this program, contact Kyle Moody in advance at 513-593-9487.