Near the forefront of any examination of disciplinary pursuits in the academy today, among the many important issues being addressed is the role of computing and its integration into, and perhaps revolutionizing of, central methodological approaches. The series New Technologies in Medieval and Renaissance Studies addresses this context from both broad and narrow perspectives, with anticipated discussions rooted in areas including literature, art history, musicology, and culture in the medieval and Renaissance periods.

The first volume of the series, New Technologies and Renaissance Studies, presents a collection of contributions to one ongoing forum for the dialogue which lies at the heart of the book series, the annual "conference within a conference" of the same name which takes place during the Renaissance Society of America gathering, dedicated specifically to the intersection of computational methods and Renaissance studies. Papers in this volume exemplify those fruitful and productive exchanges, from their inception at the 2001 meeting in Chicago to the 2005 meeting in Cambridge.

Near the forefront of any examination of disciplinary pursuits in the academy today, among the many important issues being addressed is the role of computing and its integration into, and perhaps revolutionizing of, central methodological approaches. The series New Technologies in Medieval and Renaissance Studies addresses this context from both broad and narrow perspectives, with anticipated discussions rooted in areas including literature, art history, musicology, and culture in the medieval and Renaissance periods.

In the fourth volume of the New Technologies in Medieval and Renaissance Studies series, volume editors Tassie Gniady, Kris McAbee, and Jessica Murphy bring together some of the best work from the New Technologies in Medieval and Renaissance Studies panels at the Renaissance Society of America (RSA) annual meetings for the years 2004–2010. These essays demonstrate a dedication to grounding the use of “newest” practices in the theories of the early modern period. At the same time, the essays are interested in the moment—the needs of scholars then, the theories of media that informed current understanding, and the tools used to conduct studies.

These essays explore problems with digital approaches to analog objects and offer digital methods to study networks of production, dissemination, and collection. Further, they reflect on the limitations of those methods and speak to a central truth of digital projects: unlike traditional scholarship, digital scholarship is often the result of collective networks of not only disciplinary scholars but also of library professionals and other technical and professional staff as well as students.
 

A collection of essays engaging with digital scholarship and new technologies.

Contributors to this volume engage with digital scholarship in several ways: by creating digital projects, often in multidisciplinary, collaborative environments; by applying digital methodologies and tools to explore research questions; and by speculating about the potential directions that digital scholarship can take to tackle existing research areas that could benefit from new perspectives. Together, the chapters demonstrate how various digital approaches—from network analysis to web mapping, VR and AR technologies, digital editions, databases, and archives—are all contributing in creative and effective ways to expand our knowledge of the past, to help ask and answer questions at a scale that was unimaginable before the digital turn, and to reshape early modern studies in the twenty-first century. Editors Randa El Khatib and Caroline Winter are co-organizers of New Technologies and Renaissance Studies–Digital Humanities at RSA (NTRS–DH@RSA) 2020, the online conference upon which this volume is based.
 

Every day, Internet users interact with technologies designed to undermine their privacy. Social media apps, surveillance technologies, and the Internet of Things are all built in ways that make it hard to guard personal information. And the law says this is okay because it is up to users to protect themselves—even when the odds are deliberately stacked against them.

In Privacy’s Blueprint, Woodrow Hartzog pushes back against this state of affairs, arguing that the law should require software and hardware makers to respect privacy in the design of their products. Current legal doctrine treats technology as though it were value-neutral: only the user decides whether it functions for good or ill. But this is not so. As Hartzog explains, popular digital tools are designed to expose people and manipulate users into disclosing personal information.

Against the often self-serving optimism of Silicon Valley and the inertia of tech evangelism, Hartzog contends that privacy gains will come from better rules for products, not users. The current model of regulating use fosters exploitation. Privacy’s Blueprint aims to correct this by developing the theoretical underpinnings of a new kind of privacy law responsive to the way people actually perceive and use digital technologies. The law can demand encryption. It can prohibit malicious interfaces that deceive users and leave them vulnerable. It can require safeguards against abuses of biometric surveillance. It can, in short, make the technology itself worthy of our trust.