MARQUETTE, Mich.—Robert Whalen, an English professor at Northern Michigan University, and collaborator Christopher Hodgkins of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, have received a National Endowment for the Humanities Scholarly Editions Grant worth $250,000. Whalen is one of only three NEH grant recipients in Michigan.

            Their project, The Digital Temple, is an electronic documentary edition of 17th-century devotional poet George Herbert’s English verse. It offers full transcriptions, linked to high-resolution digital scans, of three artifacts essential to the study of Herbert’s collection titled The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations, first published in 1633.

The completed edition will include the following: original- and modern-spelling transcriptions thoroughly encoded in TEI-XML, the universal standard for the preservation and transmission of platform-independent electronic texts; critical annotations and glosses; and a robust user interface that includes options for computer-assisted textual analysis and data retrieval. The Digital Temple is under contract with University of Virginia Press and tentatively scheduled for publication in 2012.

Whalen previously received an NEH fellowship that, combined with in-kind NMU funding, allowed him to work full time on The Digital Temple during the 2009-10 academic year.