Peter Robinson is Research Chair and Bateman Professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan. One part of Prof. Robinson's research career has focused on Geoffrey Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales. The other part of his work has focused on Digital Humanities and the development of software tools and environments for working with manuscript corpora. While still at Oxford University, he wrote Collate, the first program that could collate medieval manuscripts.
He also pioneered the application of algorithms developed in the context of evolutionary biology to the analysis of manuscript transmissions. In turn, this work has had a broad impact on many projects in textual criticism, including Sanskrit codicology.
Prof. Robinson will present his most recent project, Textual Communities, that leverages a scholar's workbench in the service of a community of scholars working on a particular literary tradition. Prof. Robinson will illustrate his work with examples from Chaucer and from the Sanskrit story-cycle, "Twenty-five Tales of the Zombie".
All welcome.