The History behind DEEP
DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks allows scholars and students to investigate the publishing, printing, and marketing of English Renaissance drama in ways not possible using any other print or electronic resource. An easy-to-use and highly customizable search engine of every playbook produced in England, Scotland, and Ireland--or in Europe in the English language--from the beginning of printing through 1660, DEEP provides a wealth of information about the original playbooks, their title-pages, paratextual matter, advertising features, bibliographic details, and theatrical backgrounds.
In 1999, while graduate students in English Literature at Columbia University, we created the original, quite different version of DEEP, which “lived” only on our own computers, because we wanted to answer some questions we had about the marketing of authorship and theatricality on the title pages of early modern English playbooks. Since then, we have updated the database continuously, adding new information as our research moved into new areas and new questions arose.
Beginning in 2005, we worked with web designers and programmers to convert this database into a web resource so that all scholars and students could have access to it. Along the way, DEEP was generously funded by the Campus Research Board at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, and Penn's Schoenberg Center For Electronic Text and Image (SCETI). Much of the site development and the original coding was done by David Cross at the University of Illinois, where Traci Vaughan developed the visual design for the site, and Sara Long was the graphic designer. Three computer programmers at the University of Pennsylvania--Brian Kirk, Pan Thomakos, and Michajlo Matijkiw--transformed the database into the form it had for nearly twenty years, from its launch in November 2007 until 2024. David McKnight, Director of SCETI, coordinated the project and helped with funding.
In 2017, security concerns with the old site necessitated an upgrade and a complete rewriting of the site. At the same time, we had many new features we wanted to implement. Preliminary work on site development for “DEEP 2.0” was done by Brian Kirk and Scott Enderle at the University of Pennsylvania. The site itself was then developed by Andy Janco, with additional front-end development by Andrew W. Smith at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH @ UMD). We are very grateful to the Price Lab for Digital Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, and to the Penn Libraries Research Data & Digital Scholarship division, for financial and other institutional support.
DEEP 2.0 launched in September 2024.
Please contact us with any suggestions for the site or corrections to the data. We are eager to get your feedback so that we can continue to improve the site.
-Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser