We are very excited to announce that Richard Snyder, our Assistant Director and Metadata Specialist, successfully defended his dissertation yesterday (March 10) and so completed his PhD at Washington State University. His dissertation, “Word and Image in Early Modern Literature: A Digital Approach to Reading in Context,” is a hybrid one where he built a tool called the Early Modern Visual Reader (EMVR) that allows readers of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Marlowe’s Hero and Leander to visualize concepts found in each work. Ultimately EMVR will be enhanced so that it can be used for a variety of texts and aid in the ability to produce scholarly digital editions of works that wish to extend word with image, as well as other sensory modalities. 

The next step for Richard? He has been promoted to Associate Director of ELL and is leading the development of the exhibition, “Filter,” which opens on April 1. And sleep. Richard will get some time to catch up on his sleep. Much deserved!