Markup, Maps, and Multimedia: Building Digital Projects with COVE (DHSI 2026)

Description

This course introduces graduate students, university faculty, and independent scholars in the humanities to some foundational tools and critical frameworks within digital scholarship, with an emphasis on developing publishable projects. Using the open-access, scholar-led platform COVE (Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education), participants will explore how digital tools deepen analysis, expand communication, and support public-facing research—all without prior technical experience.

The course blends technical fluency, theoretical grounding, and collaborative creativity. Participants will gain accessible entry points into the digital humanities, including text encoding, spatial analysis, and introductory coding. Each will design a project—such as an annotated edition, dynamic timeline, map, or multimedia gallery—using COVE Studio and COVE Editions.

Hands-on sessions will introduce TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) for semantic markup and HTML for web publishing. Participants will also work with IIIF-compliant images to build interactive maps, timelines, and curated galleries, learning to upload, reorganize, annotate, and apply art historical metadata—skills especially valuable for scholars of literature, visual culture, and material history.

This multimodal approach highlights how visual, textual, and digital forms intersect to tell complex stories. By the end, participants will have developed a solid foundation in digital humanities methods and a project-in-progress for future inclusion in research, teaching, or public humanities initiatives.

Instructor(s)

Kate Faber Oestreich is Professor of English at Coastal Carolina University. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century British literature, adaptation studies, and the ways multimodal and digital forms reshape reading and teaching practices. She is co-author, with Jennifer Camden, of Transmedia Storytelling: Pemberley Digital’s Adaptations of Jane Austen and Mary Shelley (2018), and her articles appear in Adaptation, Brontë Studies, South Atlantic Review, Victorians Institute Journal, Nineteenth Century Studies, and several edited collections. Her recent work examines how immersive and interactive environments—from YouTube adaptations to collaborative digital editions—extend and transform nineteenth-century texts. She is Pedagogy Consultant for the Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education (COVE), where she has co-led international workshops on COVE Editions and Studio and developed resources for integrating annotation, timelines, and mapping into humanities courses. Her professional service includes roles as Executive Secretary for the North American Victorian Studies Association, Deputy Associate Director (Digital) for the Centre of Nineteenth-Century Studies International, and board member of INCSA, INCS, and NCSA. Through this work and her leadership with COVE, she has helped to develop and sustain the field’s digital and organizational infrastructure, from collaborative teaching platforms to membership and communication systems.