Erika Farr

From Digital Innovations @ Emory Libraries

Erika Farr is Associate Director for the Institute of Digital Scholarship at the Emory University Libraries and Director of the Lewis H. Beck Center for Electronic Collections located at Emory's Robert W. Woodruff Library.

[edit] Background

Erika earned her Ph.D in English Literature from Emory University. Her dissertation, Spatial Speculations: The Poetics of Place in Renaissance Verse, examines poetic constructions of rural and urban space in early modern English verse. She began working in digital libraries and digital scholarship as a graduate student assistant for the Emory Women Writers Resource Project in 1998. What began as an interest in publishing electronically texts by and about early modern women grew into a deep interest in textual technologies, digital publishing, and technological impacts on humanities research.

Erika pursued her B.A. at North Carolina State University as an English Literature major with a focus on the English Renaissance.

[edit] Interests

Erika's professional interests include a range of digital library and digital scholarship topics. The Emory Libraries' recent acquisition of Salman Rushdie's personal archive, which includes important born-digital materials, has sparked her interest in the intersections of digital scholarship, humanities research, and digital curation. She is currently researching possible modes and scenarios for processing, preserving, and providing research access to highly functional, scholarly credible born-digital archives. In addition to this field of interest, Erika continues to explore textual encoding, digital publishing, and approaches to optimizing the research experience through digital library technologies.

In tandem with these pursuits, Erika's scholarly interests include early modern literature, early modern women writers, especially poets, and the history of the book.

[edit] Presentations

• “Rushdie’s Computers: Born-digital Archives and Humanities Research.” Talk at Digital Humanities 2007, Urbana-Champaign, IL.
• “Digital Libraries at Emory University.” Presentation at Art Libraries Society of North America/Southeast Chapter Meeting, November 2006, Atlanta, GA
• “Digital Resources and Women’s Genre Fiction.” Research plenary talk at Marie Corelli and Popular Women Novelists, March 2006, Stratford-Upon-Avon, England
• “From Codex to E-text: The Challenges of Encoding 19th Century Women’s Genre Fiction.” Paper presented at Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers Conference, March 2004, Athens, GA
• “Fear and Loathing in 16th Century London: Isabella Whitney’s Satiric Rendering of Urban Space.” Paper presented at SAMLA Convention, November 2002, Baltimore, MD