Rebecca Niles is an independent digital humanities scholar and consultant with a special focus on developing digital tools and resources for the study of early modern texts and textual artifacts. As part of her longstanding relationship with the Folger Shakespeare Library, she is the lead developer for The Folger Shakespeare online (formerly Folger Digital Texts), as well as other Folger web resources such as DIY First Folio, DIY Quarto, and Before Farm to Table: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures. She is also the Managing Editor of the Folger Shakespeare editions.

Rebecca holds a master's degree in the joint English Literature/Book History and Print Culture program at the University of Toronto, as well as a second master's degree in Information Studies with a thesis focus on developing image-based research tools for the study of textual artifacts, also from the University of Toronto.

Projects

To request access to prototypes and works in progress, please email Rebecca.


Before Farm to Table: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures is a website dedicated to the research of the Andrew Mellon-funded multi-year Before Farm to Table research initiative. The site features essays, blog posts, videos, interviews, recipes, and interactive displays that seek to reveal the culture and meaning of food in early modern Europe.

Credits: Developer


Part of the Folger Shakespeare Library's DIY Quarto educational resource, the DIY Quarto Virtual Printing House is an interactive tool that models the building of the 1602 "Second Quarto" printing of Hamlet. As with the DIY First Folio virtual printing house, visitors learn how early modern printers arranged pages into sheets by doing it themselves in a drag-and-drop 3D tutorial. DIY Quarto also provides an opportunity to see how quarto quires were folded, through 3D "folding" animation.

Credits: Designer and Developer


Part of the Folger Shakespeare Library's DIY First Folio educational resource, the Virtual Printing House is an interactive tool that models the building of the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare's works. Visitors learn how early modern printers arranged pages into sheets, and sheets into gatherings, by doing it themselves in a drag-and-drop 3D tutorial.

Credits: Designer and Developer


Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO) provides transcriptions, metadata and images of manuscripts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Credits: Designer and Programmer, document browsing and reading sections


The Folger Luminary Shakespeare apps, created in partnership with Luminary Digital Media and Simon & Schuster, enrich the Folger Shakespeare Editions with unique audio and visual resources designed for 21st-century learning and teaching on the iPad.

Credits: Design and content supervisor


Free, high-quality digital texts of Shakespeare's plays, digitized and encoded from the Folger Shakespeare Library Editions.

Credits: Digital Editor, Interface Architect


ArchBook is an open-access, peer-reviewed collection of richly illustrated essays about specific design features in the history of the book.

Credits: Assistant Managing Editor, Encoder


Internet Archive (116 vols.)

116 digital facsimile texts made from source texts from various libraries in the University of Toronto network, including special collections such as the Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies and the Cheng Yu Tung East Asian Library.

Credits: Digitizer

Publications

Moving Parts: Digital Modeling and the Infrastructures of Shakespeare Editing

by Alan Galey, Rebecca Niles. Shakespeare Quarterly 68.1 (2017): 21-55.


Re-Modelling the Edition: Creating the Corpus of Folger Digital Texts

by Rebecca Niles, Michael Poston. Early Modern Studies After the Digital Turn. Iter Press, 2016. 117-144.


Imagining the Architectures of the Book: Textual Scholarship and the Digital Book Arts

by Alan Galey, John Bath, Rebecca Niles, Richard Cunningham, and the INKE Team. Textual Cultures 7.2 (2012): 20-42.


Digital Humanities Summer Institute: Reflections on Extra-Institutional Modes of Engagement

by Voytek Bialkowski, Rebecca Niles, and Alan Galey. Faculty of Information Quarterly 3.4 (2011): 19-29.


A Diversity of Creatures (editorial)

Descant 145: Private Worlds, Public Exigencies 40.2 (2009): 275-77.

Curriculum Vitae

To download Rebecca's full CV, click HERE.

Contact

Email: rebecca [at] rebeccaniles [dot] net

Copyright 2015 Rebecca Niles | Last Updated December 14, 2017