Introduction: What's Digital Shakespeare?
What's "Digital Shakespeare"?
Great question! We're guessing that, if you're asking it, you're interested in Shakespeare already, or at the very least, are taking a class in which Shakespeare has a prominent place. So with mutual reassurance that we won't forget him, let's set him aside and talk for a minute about what we mean by "digital" first.The use of this word in the context of academic study has increased steadily over the last two decades, in no small part owing to the rise of the so-called "Digital Humanities," a growing (and no longer "emergent") field of scholarly inquiry.
You can find many definitions and debates about the "Digital Humanities" online in other sources (we recommend taking a look here and here); you can also read more about that phrase and its associations with scholars of English Literature. For our purposes, as authors of a textbook on an English poet and playwright, that association is crucial; for our readers, the most basic definition of "digital" in the context of this textbook will be one that we apply specifically to literary texts. When we invoke "the digital" in our literature courses, we mean the study of literary texts in electronic, non-paper, formats. That definition includes (though isn't limited to) literary texts that are available online in a variety of formats.
Inherent in our creation of this book as a book is the assumption that digital texts share features with the material objects we know to be books and that they share a common sense of purpose: to be read. If you have taken literature courses before this course, you know that reading––and, in particular, reading closely––is essential for understanding any textual phenomena; whether your classes have focused on a particular genre of writing, on the body of writing produced by a specific writer or writers, or on the literary output associated with a specific time or region, you know that every class requires the interrelated acts of reading works of literature and interpreting their significance.
In this textbook, we assume that the principle holds even in literature classes that have multi-media components built into them. Yet we also know that how we read texts is contingent at least in part upon the form in which those texts exist––and that we necessarily approach texts differently when we can see and read them in electronic forms.
Of course, the fact that you can read this textbook on your computer or mobile device does not make it unique; we're pretty sure that its accessibility online makes it (in some ways, at least) more like the content you read regularly on the web than the print-media books you might otherwise have to carry around for class. The reading you will do in this book for your class will differ from some of the reading you do for recreation and entertainment, of course, but with countless electronic editions and performance videos of Shakespeare online, we also recognize the ways in which these categories may overlap. In fact, the sheer number of electronic resources available online for students and scholars of Shakespeare has convinced us of the need for a book like the one you are now reading, one that contains active links to the best sites and sources on the web as well as information on how to understand them in light of developments in scholarship and the tools we use for analysis.
Can we get back to Shakespeare?
Having offered a rather expansive definition of the "digital" in relation to literary texts, we can now speak with a bit more specificity about what we mean by Digital Shakespeare. On the one hand, we can define "Digital Shakespeare" quite broadly: anything related to Shakespeare that appears on the Internet––what we used to call (and maybe still call) "the world wide web"––as well as any Shakespearean texts (or related texts) that exist in forms that can be read by machines.Although that last part might sound more like Science Fiction than Shakespeare Studies to some students and scholars, machine-reading is in fact crucial to the field of Digital Humanities, the larger umbrella of scholarly inquiry under which "Digital Shakespeare" falls. As a mode of academic interest, the Digital Humanities are not new; as we explain in later sections of this book, scholars turned to computers to assist with finding patterns in texts many decades ago. Despite our popular vocabulary for mobile devices, machines are not smarter than humans; however, they can process texts more efficiently than we can. Among other virtues, they are not slowed by ambient distractions, deep thoughts, or moral quandaries like we are; nor are they concerned with ideas, the actual plot of a work, or the meanings of words within it. This lack of interest, accompanied by the fact that they don't have aspirations beyond following directions set for them, ensures that they will move speedily through large amounts of text and, depending on what we need them to find or display, reveal aspects of a text we might not be able to detect otherwise (or without taking significantly more time). Still, we must also remember that computers and computer programs are created by human beings. So any digital tool we might use may exhibit the same kinds of human error or fallibility that we have individually--and do so at a much bigger scale.
This book, Digital Shakespeare, aims at helping you navigate the world of digital humanities in the twenty-first century through the lens of a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English writer. Luckily for all of us, Shakespeare offers us an extraordinary way to measure what humans can do––with and without a computer.
Our three basic aims as the authors, editors, and teachers contributing to this book are as follows:
- to provide you with enough background information to begin to think critically about the forms in which we access literary texts--particularly Shakespeare's, but also those by other writers
- to teach you to use digital tools and methodologies that will build productively on (rather than replace) the close reading practices that have long characterized "traditional" literature courses--including those devoted to Shakespeare, but also other writers.
- to alert you to the best content on the web for the academic study of Shakespeare and the period in which he lived, with criteria for appraisal that you may apply to any site on any literary figure.
