Navigating Digital Text, Performance, & Historical Resources
About this Book
Focus on Henry V
About this ProjectThis digital multimedia monograph is an open educational resource authored by students and faculty at the University of Georgia (UGA) and Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3 (UPVM3). Focus on Henry V also serves as the capstone of a three-year collaboration, with the support of the Partner University Fund/FACE Foundation (PUF/FACE) between UGA and UPVM3, "Scene-Stealing/Ravir la scène," which from 2016-2019 brought teams of faculty and students from France to the US and to the US from France to work together on research projects and publications that focused on a single type of "scene" in early modern or Enlightenment drama in English or in French. In 2016 UGA and UPVM3 collaborated on the conference-festival "Balcony Scenes" at UPVM3, which brought together scholars from three continents to talk about the so-called balcony-scene in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet; in 2017 UGA and UPVM3 jointly hosted an international conference on "Bedchamber Scenes/Scènes de lit" in Early Modern European Drama at UGA and a work session on "Scenes in the Other's Language" at UPVM3; in 2018 we collaborated on a field study trip to Savannah, Georgia, and a series of presentations on bilingual scenes in Shakespeare's Henry V at UGA, and on an international conference, "Scenes in the Other's Language," which considered scenes by Shakespeare, early modern British, and early modern French playwrights that involved communication across two languages, explicitly identified as such within the text, and the stage histories of such scenes. We also visited local schools, where we talked about Shakespeare, citizenship, and theatre. Peer-reviewed and revised, selected proceedings from this series of gatherings have been or will be published in the open-access, peer-reviewed, online, multimedia journals Arrêt sur scène/Scene Focus or Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation.
From the beginning of the collaboration, however, co-P.I.'s Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin (UPVM3) and Sujata Iyengar (UGA) envisioned another publication: one that would fully involve the undergraduate and graduate students who attended or participated in the conferences or who traveled between France and the USA. We decided, first, that an online open-access educational resource with high-level, peer-reviewed essays both by established academics and by graduate students would be the most appropriate vehicle to display students' talent and to provide a public good. Then we selected Shakespeare's Henry V, with its controversial portrayal of English and French history, its ambiguous marriage between the King of England and the Princess of France, its rich cinematic history, and perhaps the best-known bilingual scenes in the Shakespearean canon, as the play on which our digital monograph would focus.
Thanks to a Learning Technologies Grant (LTG) from the University Systems of Georgia, the resource's student involvement, and its potential contribution to the scholarship of teaching and learning, became even richer. Our LTG funded us to hire and train a team comprising undergraduate, Master's, and PhD students to serve as technical, art, and multimedia editors so that we could bring high standards of design and readability to the online publication format. Beautifully designed books and websites, we believe, are more likely to be used by students and by teachers at all levels. Our technical editors additionally gained extensive experience with the processes of publishing and copy-editing. Finally, our LTG funded us to include rich audio description of the archival maps and historic photographs of performances that we have included, and to make sure that there are clear and correct English subtitles on video excerpts. In this way we hope to encourage access to the highest level of scholarship to the broadest degree.
Future editions of this resource will include even more student-authored contributions, including annotations to the scholarly essays; additional ekphrasis or image description; original student-authored mini-essays on scenes or parts of scenes; and possibly other types of contribution that we can't imagine yet.
In 2019 the UGA team makes its final visit to UPVM3 to display and discuss the "beta-version" of this resource to focus groups and to the team members in France. With the publication of the first edition of this resource scheduled for August 31, 2019, the official three-year partnership will come to an end, although the publication itself will remain in use and, we plan and hope, will go through future editions, with additional student contributions.
Navigating this Book
This monograph includes original scholarship and resources to help students and teachers investigate Shakespeare's Henry V. It is designed to work at multiple levels, from university instructors looking for new approaches to the play to college students studying the play in class and hoping for additional resources and background to schoolteachers who would like some handy clips to introduce their pupils to Shakespeare on page, stage, or screen.
Like a print monograph, this digital book has a cover, a Table of Contents, individual chapters, running titles, text on finite pages, and illustrations. Navigating to the "compass" icon [include cropped screencap of it] displays the Table of Contents. Unlike a print monograph, however, some of its illustrations are streaming video, and its still images include audio captions. Also unlike a print monograph, it explicitly offers multiple additional ways to navigate this book and to uncover relationships among its chapters.
Moving your cursor or mouse to [this menu, have pic] and clicking "Pathways" shows you some of the textual and thematic routes that a reader can traverse through this book. We imagine different audiences navigating this digital book in different ways. A postgraduate reader might prefer to navigate traditionally through the book, page (or screen) by page, one essay at a time, in order, moving from the sources to the textual history to individual scene-analyses and to performance histories before concluding with the afterlife of Henry V in popular Anglophone culture. An undergraduate student writing a paper might start with a particular essay that includes lines that pique the student's interest, and then move outwards to other essays or to multimedia excerpts in other essays that chime with the student's concerns. A schoolteacher or high-school student might look for commentary or explication or performances of particular lines or speeches. For example, if on October 25th, St. Crispin's Day, teachers or students feel like comparing historical stage or film declamations of the speech in the twentieth century, or looking at what Shakespeare did with his sources to convert prose history into King Henry's stirring verse, they can follow this pathway through the monograph to find all its references, clips, images, and arguments surrounding this famous speech. Other pathways include [...]
Students of visual culture and those who "think visually" might choose to explore the rich visualizations that this format produces, such as the data network, scatter, or the more traditional "tree" [images]