Timothy Stinson
Bio
Timothy Stinson is Associate Professor of English and a University Faculty Scholar at North Carolina State University. He received his PhD in English Language and Literature in 2006 from the University of Virginia and was a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University for two years prior to joining the NC State faculty in 2008. He is a member of the program faculty for the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media Program and an affiliate faculty of the Genetic Engineering and Society and Jewish Studies programs.
Stinson’s research has garnered numerous awards and grants, including support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Council on Information and Library Resources, and the Bibliographical Society of America, and he has held fellowships from both the NEH and the National Humanities Center. He has published in leading journals in the field of medieval studies and book history, including Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies, The Chaucer Review,The Yearbook of Langland Studies, Manuscript Studies, and The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. His work has also garnered recognition and support from North Carolina State University, where he is a University Faculty Scholar and has received a CHASS Research Award, two Research and Innovation Seed Funding Awards, and a Non-Laboratory Scholarship/Research Award. His research interests include Middle English poetry, codicology, history of the book, and digital humanities.
Stinson is a leader in the application of digital technologies to medieval studies. He is co-founder and co-director of the Medieval Electronic Scholarly Alliance, director of the Society for Early English and Norse Electronic Texts (SEENET), co-director of the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, associate director of the Advanced Research Consortium (ARC), and editor of the Siege of Jerusalem Electronic Archive. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Fellowship and has received planning and implementation grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for his digital humanities work. He has served on the advisory boards of numerous projects in the field, including the Roman de la Rose Digital Library, Europeana Regia, and the Medieval Academy of America’s Digital Initiatives Advisory Board. Stinson has also collaborated with colleagues in the biological sciences to analyze the DNA found in medieval parchment manuscripts. This work has garnered international press coverage in outlets such as the BBC’s The World Today, National Geographic, Science, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Stinson is a devoted teacher and a recipient of the NC State Outstanding Teacher Award. He has helped to develop new curricula and courses in the fields of medieval English literature, history of the book, and digital humanities at NC State. He is a contributor to the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and collaborated on the creation of a history of the book teaching collection in the NC State Department of English.
Education
Ph.D. English Language and Literature University of Virginia
B.A. Medieval Studies, Echols Scholar, University of Virginia
Area(s) of Expertise
Genetics and Cultural Heritage
Grants
This proposal covers the implementation of the Medieval Electronic Scholarly Alliance (MESA), an online federation of electronic projects and resources in the field of medieval studies. The proposal follows and builds upon a one-year planning grant awarded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in December 2010 that explored the feasibility and need for such a federation within the field of medieval studies and developed recommendations for the social and technical infrastructure needed to support such an organization. The centerpiece of the planning grant was a planning meeting held May 2-3, 2011 that was attended by project directors, librarians, technologists, and representatives from scholarly societies. The participants expressed that the medieval studies community faces a pair of pressing needs that MESA could help to address. In response to this, MESA has developed two core goals: 1) to provide aggregated searching of a large number and wide variety of digital projects, including digitized manuscript archives, scholarly editions and projects, and bibliographical databases; and 2) to provide peer review of digital scholarship within the field of medieval studies. This proposal seeks funding for developing an infrastructure for aggregation and is divided into two phases: 1) aggregation of 12 pilot projects using Collex, a software platform for aggregation; and 2) the public launch of the federation, at which time MESA other projects may apply to become part of MESA.
The Medieval Electronic Scholarly Alliance (MESA) project proposes a one-year planning grant in the amount of $29,434 to begin the organization of a federation of digital projects in the field of medieval studies and to develop recommendations for the social and technical infrastructure to support this federation. Medieval studies is ripe for such an initiative, having a long tradition of digital projects dating back to the 1940s. Moreover, the interest in digital issues amongst medievalists is not limited to a select few, as each year witnesses a growth in the number of digital medieval studies projects and an increase in the number of papers and sessions with a digital focus at the annual International Congress on Medieval Studies. Although there is some structured support for medieval scholars who develop digital projects (e.g., the Digital Medievalist Community of Practice and the Medieval Academy of America?s Digital Initiatives Advisory Board), until now there has been no attempt to create either social or technological infrastructures that can be shared amongst the broad community of medievalists. The MESA project intends to remedy this, taking advantage of existing communities and initiatives both within medieval studies and in other disciplines that have already made strides in project interoperability and infrastructure development. The outcome of the one-year planning project we currently propose will be a full proposal to develop the federation.
My project, an electronic textual archive and critical edition of the fourteenth-century alliterative poem The Siege of Jerusalem, illuminates how this poem is both an important socio-cultural artifact and an unusually rich source of evidence of scribal transmission of alliterative verse, and simultaneously illustrates new possibilities available through electronic archives and editions of medieval texts. The historical event upon which the poem is based, the Roman siege and destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, is among the most popular of narratives for medieval English poets, theologians, historians and, presumably, audiences alike. Not only were numerous vernacular and Latin literary and devotional works composed throughout Europe that retold this event, but, as Stephen Wright has shown, the subject was very popular in medieval drama as well, with the total number of performances second only to the story of Christ's Passion from the mid fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. The poem I am editing survives in eight manuscripts and one binding fragment that together total 231 leaves of manuscript materials, making this the largest corpus of medieval English alliterative verse aside from Piers Plowman.
Large-scale digitization projects such as the Roman de la Rose Digital Library and Parker on the Web bring with them fundamental shifts in humanities scholarship by changing the types of questions posed by scholars, augmenting significantly the number of original materials to which these scholars have access and that they can mine to answer these questions, and providing new tools for conducting research. The aim of this proposal is to utilize these online repositories to revolutionize one of the most traditional forms of humanities scholarship - the journal article - and simultaneously to demonstrate benefits of these digital resources, particularly when used interoperably, to scholars, to academic publishing, and to the sustainability of the repositories themselves.