Bente Shoen Defends Dissertation
Congratulations to Bente Shoen for her successful defense of her dissertation project, titled Digital Picaresque Studies & the Academia Picaresca!
Bente’s dissertation consisted of an innovative digital humanities project to aid scholars involved in picaresque studies. From Bente’s abstract:
This dissertation strives to be a significant contribution to the Digital Humanities in general and to the study of the picaresque novel in particular. Its immediate goal is to coordinate and enhance the dialogue of scholars and readers of the picaresque, a field currently characterized by strong disagreement and a lack of communication. In order to accomplish this objective, I created an extensive digital bibliography and textual archive whose search capacity and structure were designed to host and foster the dialogue among critics and lay readers alike.
The bibliography and archive are presented in the form of a Zotero Group Library. Zotero is a free, downloadable software application that allows for crowd-sourcing and collaborative annotation of primary and secondary references and texts by scholarly communities. The group library I have developed and begun to annotate (and which contains over 1900 works to date) represents a living medium of exchange and will always maintain its essential status as a collective “work in progress.”