STEMMA: Systems of Transmitting Early Modern Manuscript Verse

Bluesky Map Interactive map of 3.4 million Bluesky users, visualised by their follower pattern.

I made a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users - see if you can find yourself!

bluesky-map.theo.io

I've seen some similar projects, but IMO this seems to better capture some of the fine-grained detail

Quote on a wall in The Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia: "After love, book collecting is the most exhilarating sport of all" - A.S.W. Rosenbach

Super Bowl Sunday who? #bookcollecting #librarytrips @rosenbachmuseum.bsky.social

Our postdoc researcher @caitlinburge.bsky.social is off on a manuscript adventure this week - and where better to do history than in historical locations! #earlymodern @rosenbachmuseum.bsky.social

Screenshot of bibliographical meadata for a poem that apparently begins, "Buckingham Buckingham Buckingham," and ends, "Buckingham."

Okay, we definitely need to read the full text of this one (@edunilibraries.bsky.social MS La.III.493, f. 67r–68r).

#earlymodern #dh #datacleaning #ManuscriptMonday

The @uniofgalway.bsky.social
's Digital Humanities Reseach Centre launches this afternoon! Come along and have a cup of tea with the STEMMA team (and some of our #dh friends).

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Very exciting week here at STEMMA as we welcome TWO new teammates: @meghankern.bsky.social and @leahveronese.bsky.social!

Friday morning call for abstracts!

We're looking for chapters for our historical network analysis edited collection, under contract with Bloomsbury Academic. See the cfp for more! Email us at interlocked.universe@gmail.com #dh #digitalhumanities #networkanalysis

Thanks to @siliconrepublic.bsky.social for highlighting our work!

Either an early modern scribe or a manuscript scholar got a little nasty transcribing this poem about Charles II

Contender for @stemma.bsky.social Transcription Error* of the Day

* Not our error but something I found while cleaning

Cleaning and Reconciling Literary Historical Data with AI: Reflections from the STEMMA Project - Research Institute for the Humanities

Join me (virtually) next Tuesday for a talk about @stemma.bsky.social and our ongoing data cleaning efforts.

rih.cuhk.edu.hk/news-and-eve...

ECR Bursary Blogs Voices from the Irish Digital Humanities Community DARIAH-IE ECR Bursary Awardees talk about their research. We’re excited to present this special four-part blog series featuring insights fro…

👀 Today we continue our series of blog posts from DARIAH-IE’s 2025 ECR Bursary awardees with Dr Caitlin Burge, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Galway (STEMMA) buff.ly/XpPSDtz

Guest Post: (Lack of) Disability Representation in Early Modern Literature Discover how disability was portrayed in Early Modern literature, with a focus on Thomas Randolph’s 1630 poem. Uncover the stigma and cultural views toward disability in this thought-provoking analysi...

New post on the STEMMA blog by our intrepid intern Cate Milley! stemma.universityofgalway.ie/early-modern...

Join the @stemma.bsky.social team! We've just advertised a two-year postdoc on WP2, "Networking Early Modern Poems." Apply by 30 September; details at link below. #earlymodern #dh #postdoc #jobfairy

www.universityofgalway.ie/human-resour...

Guest Post: Rethinking ‘Idea-Capital’ and Co-Authorship as Counter-Canon in Early Modern Manuscript Culture From the Devonshire Manuscript to Beaumont & Fletcher, early modern literature thrived on collaboration. What can co-authorship teach us about breaking hierarchies in academia today? A guest post from...

We're delighted to share a guest post on the STEMMA blog by Jordan Ho, who joined us as an intern this summer. Here, Jordan considers collaboration, co-authorship, and credit, both in the early modern period and today.

stemma.universityofgalway.ie/early-modern...

I bet this applies to poetry too. Lots to think about for @stemma.bsky.social. I’ll look forward to reading the full paper in the morning!

ECR Bursary Blogs Voices from the Irish Digital Humanities Community DARIAH-IE ECR Bursary Awardees talk about their research. We’re excited to present this special four-part blog series featuring insights fro…

🗣️ Beginning Sept 11th we’ll be publishing a blog series on our website from DARIAH-IE’s 2025 ECR Bursary awardees, Rachel McCarthy (UCC - CASCADE), Dr Caitlin Burge (UoG - STEMMA), Vera Yakupova (TCD - CLSINFRA) and Dr Izzy Fox (MU). Find out more here: buff.ly/tNp7PWE

An fun Friday observation from one of our Researchers – this wonderful little CELM entry describes John Evelyn’s “Note of the Books, Prints, Letters, Mapps, [etc.,]” that he lent Samuel Pepys with the important note “to be all returned me againe.” Every book owner has that one friend! 😂

Re-mediating the Early Book: Pasts and Futures (REBPAF) is a Marie Curie Doctoral Training Network coordinated by the University of Galway, which focuses on the ways in which 15th- and 16th-century book producers (scribes, printers, entrepreneurs) negotiated the dynamic relations between the manuscript and the printed book and adapted to the evolving challenges of the market. It also explores the continuing relevance of these cultural and economic negotiations to the modern world. The network will be hosting an international conference at the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin from 23-25 June 2026. We invite papers or posters on late medieval and early modern book culture, broadly conceived. Selection. What shapes a book producer’s choices in form or language? How do physical features reflect meaning or ideology? How do design and content choices reveal cultural values—and how are these reimagined in modern editions? Value. What determines the cultural or monetary value of certain texts over others? How do producers, sellers, and collectors influence these shifting values? How can citation, adaptation, or performance reshape a book’s worth? What is the role of canonicity, and how has it changed? Why and how do we reevaluate texts over time? Accessibility. How does changing a text’s medium—manuscript, print, or digital—affect its reading? How do material or linguistic changes interact with content? How does greater access reshape how readers interpret texts? What are the ethical issues around accessibility and cultural ownership? Can re-mediation serve as critique or recovery? How can we open historical texts to new audiences? Survival. Why do some texts survive while others do not? How do past choices shape their transmission today? What meanings are tied to survival, loss, or rediscovery? How do texts respond to fragility? What roles do preservation or adaptation play in ensuring their future?

CFP: @rebpaf.bsky.social’s “Re-mediating the Early Book: Pasts and Futures” With keynote speakers @wynkenhimself.bsky.social @renskehoff.bsky.social and Aditi Nafde

Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, 23-25 June 2026
Deadline: 15 December 2025

All info: www.rensoc.org.uk/event/re-med...

Some of our participants from the hackathon last month sat down to chat with our friends at @portershed.bsky.social about the project and their work during the hack - keep your eyes peeled for the footage!

But how better to start than to learn more about STEMMA from @erinannmcc.bsky.social herself?

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We're still buzzing over our STEMMA hackathon event - can't believe it's been almost a month already! Check out our hackathon event report - including details on our winners and (extra special treat) interviews with our developers!

stemma.universityofgalway.ie/stemma-hacka...

What a privilege to participate in this innovative research collaboration. Working with these amazing people from such diverse backgrounds has been a truly rewarding experience. @stemma.bsky.social

Another wonderful #networkanalysis presentation at today's #STEMMAhackathon from Prof. Jing Chen on a co-citation network of early modern Chinese poetry.
@stemma.bsky.social

Team 8 is isolating the circulation and arrangement of John Donne’s Satires as a trial run for analysing clusters of poetry in the dataset! #ERCFunded #STEMMAhackathon

Team 6 is employing vector embeddings to perform sentiment analysis on manuscript collections! #ERCFunded #STEMMAhackathon

Team 5 is using the poems of Philip Sidney as a case study of poem popularity over time! #ERCfunded #STEMMAhackathon

Team 4 is taking a deep dive on post-1700 content to see whose work gets perpetuated into the century beyond our data set! #ERCfunded #STEMMAhackathon

Team 3 is working on a method to identify poems and poem groups shared between manuscripts to aid in finding patterns and clusters of poems! #ERCfunded #STEMMAhackathon

Team 2 is generating poem stability scores to analyse degrees of variation in the first lines of poems in the STEMMA database! #ERCfunded #STEMMAhackathon