Congratulations to the Director of CEMS ANU Rosalind Smith and her international team of researchers, A/Prof Sarah Ross from Victoria University Wellington, Professor Michelle O’Callaghan from University of Reading, Jake Arthur from the University of Oxford and Professor Mitchell Whitelaw from ANU, who have won a Renaissance Society of America (RSA) Digital Innovation Award. Led by lead CI Rosalind, the team won the award for the innovative, searchable digital index they created to support the ARC-funded Discovery Project “Early Modern Women and the Poetry of Complaint”.

Complaint is an important form for major male authors of the English Renaissance, but prior to the project it was thought that it was not available to, or used by, women writers. The complaint index changes this story by visualising the work of over 500 women who engaged with complaint in their poetry, allowing users to view the data from the project in aggregate categories and as individual poems. The index facilitates further exploration of the rich world of protest, loss, grief and love from the perspective of early modern women complaint writers, and changes how we view complaint as a formal category. In doing so, the index reinvents its own form, the bibliographic finding tool of the index, in a new guise for the digital age. View the index here: https://cems.anu.edu.au/complaintindex/