Introduction: A Special Issue on the Digital Turn

This issue of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies is grounded both in the past and in the future, in theory as well as in practice. It combines what we think are some of the most exciting, emerging strands of research in our field: considering new knowledge and technologies, investigating how understudied aspects of past cultures worked at the micro and macro levels, and engaging in the fraught but important process of contemplating how we label our investigations of the past and why.

Several of our contributors add to the conversation that has spanned the past two issues of JEMCS in the ongoing forum, "What is Early Modern?" These essays look deeply and deliberately into how we have understood, used, and perhaps misused that category. They offer perspectives on how far back—and forward—in time "early modern" may be said to stretch. They ask, directly and indirectly, what the category offers us as an organizing principle or as a mapping of scholarly territory. Tackling issues from animals to fashion and nation to history, these leading scholars prompt us to look more deeply into how "early modern" is used and might be used in the future.

Other contributors to this issue are concerned with the scholarly future from a different angle. Several essays and a series of brief notes describe and contemplate how contemporary technologies—and technologies yet to come—will help us understand precisely what we mean by early modern. Articles in this section of the issue emerged from our call for contributions to "The Digital Turn." We received a wide variety of essays that grapple with the challenges and debates arising with the early modern digital. The essays published here demonstrate through their methods, questions, and conclusions the kinds of scholarship that ought best be done—or perhaps can only be done—in early modern studies in the wake of the "digital turn."

These contributors demonstrate the specific contributions that digital tools can make to early modern cultural studies, and they showcase the innovative work that can be done only through such tools. They advocate for new tools to shape new questions, and they suggest the provocative results we may expect from them. Whether describing the challenges of founding open-access journals, or the quest for a better way to harvest more accurate early modern texts, these contributors allow us to imagine what may be the scholarship of the future—its potentials, pitfalls, and promises. In our call for papers, we also asked for brief reports summarizing ongoing digital projects in early modern studies, whether or not these projects have yet reached completion. We are pleased to include some of those notes in this issue as well, allowing JEMCS readers a glimpse of the future that we continue to build for better investigating the past.

As two of the co-editors who have had a hand in building the past nine years of JEMCS, we also look forward to what will come next for the journal, as we are stepping down from our editorial positions with this issue. We are grateful to the other co-editors with whom we have had the privilege to work—Bruce Boehrer, Elizabeth Spiller, and Dan Vitkus—especially for their creative energies and professional insights into innovative ways to approach early modern cultural studies. We are also immensely grateful to our talented and unflappable post-1660 book review editor, Patsy Fowler. The journal would not be the same without the tireless and careful work of copyeditor-guru-in-chief, Jack Clifford. We are furthermore thankful for the many managing editors we have had the opportunity to work with. In addition, we thank all of you who have sent us your excellent work for publication. But most of all, we thank JEMCS's readers—those of you who have been reading the journal for the past thirteen volumes and those of you who have joined us along the way. We hope that your interactions with JEMCS will continue and that you will continue to submit your work in early modern cultural studies to JEMCS's newly emerging...