Digitizing the Stage, a conference highlighting digital explorations of early modern drama, returned to the University of Oxford on 15-18 July 2019. The conference was co-sponsored by the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. It followed the first Digitizing the Stage conference held in 2017.

Abstracts and Speakers

Tuesday, July 16

Plenary: Cristina Dondi

Cristina Dondi is Professor of Early European Book Heritage in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, and Oakeshott Senior Research Fellow in the Humanities at Lincoln College, Oxford.

Building the Stage: New Developments

A Digital Edition of Paratexts in Early English Drama

Sonia Massai, King's College London Heidi Craig, Folger Shakespeare Library

In this paper, we will present the features and functionality of the digital iteration of Paratexts in Early English Drama. At the first Digitizing the Stage conference in 2017, we focused on the benefits and challenges involved in expanding and digitizing the print edition of Thomas L. Berger and Sonia Massai’s Paratexts in English Printed Drama to 1642 (CUP, 2014). This edition is the first reference source to include all paratextual materials (i.e. extra-dramatic materials such as title pages, dedications, addresses to the reader etc.) in early modern English playbooks from the emergence of print drama to the closure of the theatres in 1642. Since then, Massai and Craig have been working in collaboration with the Folger’s digital team to develop a browsable, open-access online version of Paratexts in English Printed Drama, hosted at the Folger Shakespeare Library, that includes transcriptions of all paratexts from the original two-volume printed edition, as well as newly available transcriptions of paratexts in English playbooks printed between 1642 and 1660.

Because the project had its genesis at the inaugural conference in 2017, we are excited to present our progress on the online Paratexts edition at Digitizing the Stage 2019. In addition to presenting the site’s functions and features, we will describe its construction, explain our decisions, and outline the challenges, solutions, and lessons that emerged over the course of the site’s development.

Sonia Massai is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at King’s College London.

Heidi Craig is a Folger-Mellon Long-term Fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Creating a database of performances: http://www.theatreinsaintdomingue.org

Julia Prest, University of St Andrews

The former French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) boasted the most vibrant tradition of public theatre in the colonial Caribbean. I propose to present and discuss http://www.theatreinsaintdomingue.org — a website that I put together (and launched in March 2018) featuring a bilingual (French-English) database of all documented public performances in the theatres of Saint-Domingue between 1764 and 1791 as announced in the local newspapers. I shall outline why and how I created the database, and the particular challenges that I encountered when faced with incomplete and sometimes inaccurate primary data, as well as a very small budget. The database is both a time-saving device (information that would before have taken days or even weeks to gather is now available instantly) and a tool that promotes research into an important but neglected field. It also tells the story of an emerging tradition of local or creole theatre more clearly than ever before, thereby challenging some longstanding preconceptions about colonial-era theatre. Alongside the obvious advantages of having this information available at the click of a button, I would also like to debate two possible disadvantages to this kind of database: 1) the fact that it creates a misleading sense of accuracy and completeness and 2) the likelihood that it may encourage an overreliance on digital technology at the expense of the original sources and archives. Finally, I would like to outline the ways in which, funding permitting, I would like to expand the database and website in the future.

Julia Prest is Reader in French at the University of St Andrews, where she specializes in early-modern theatre, including ballet and opera. A graduate in Music and French, she wrote her PhD thesis on Molière’s comedies-ballets, before going on to write monographs on cross-casting in 17th-century French theatre and on the Tartuffe controversy, as well as numerous articles on related topics. More recently, Julia has turned her attention to the public theatres of colonial Saint-Domingue. In relation to her current project, she has published articles on white imitations of slave dance and on Caribbean performances of Gluck’s Paris operas, as well as a critical edition of the first play known to have been written in the French Caribbean: Les Veuves créoles. Julia’s bilingual (French-English) database of documented public theatrical performances in the French colony of Saint-Domingue between 1764 and 1791 was launched on 1 March 2018.

“Look thee, I speak play scraps”: Digitally mapping intertextuality in early modern drama

Regula Hohl Trillini, University of Basel

WordWeb is a new online, searchable repository of intertextual references in early modern drama. Thousands of text extracts with their metadata will map the mutual reception history of London theatre as a verbal network.

WordWeb builds on HyperHamlet, a hypertext database of 11’000 text quotations from Shakespeare’s tragedy. The step from one play to recording just intertextually active passages allows for documenting overlaps between hundreds of texts. Jacobethan playwrights collaborated, heard each other’s work onstage, memorized, re-wrote, improvised and quoted with and without acknowledgment. Like Hollywood scriptwriters, they made audiences laugh by recycling “memes”: “Look, I speak play scraps!” (Marston, What You Will). The whole competitive scene was a “tissue of quotations” (Barthes 1967) where “influencers” acquired “likes” by being quoted. Our corpus of thousands of quotations will be the first inclusive map of this dense, extended network.

An accessible overview is urgently needed to reclaim valuable information dormant in NQ items, footnotes, indexes and 19th-century PhDs. WordWeb will re-present and contextualize this data, with entries also in modern spelling to facilitate human and electronic recognition of recurring phrases and to set Shakespeare in context (collaboration with FolgerDigitalTexts in discussion). Harnessing 200 years’ research (metadata will indicate who first spotted a quotation) for an unprecedentedly comprehensive collection will clarify Shakespeare’s contribution to his age’s “web of words”. He has dominated research for centuries; resurrecting disregarded research on writers that are more than just “contemporaries” (Wiggins Catalogue) will provide a new view of him in a rediscovered verbal landscape.

Regula Hohl Trillini is an adjunct lecturer and research associate in English Literature at the University of Basel; she also holds a degree in piano performance. Her first book The Gaze of the Listener: English Representations of Domestic Music-Making (Rodopi 2008) analyzes the place of music in the English imagination with particular regard to gender. More recently, she has been working in intertextuality studies and the reception history of Shakespeare’s works. Her monograph Casual Shakespeare: Three Centuries of Verbal Echoes (Routledge 2018) focuses on the apparently ‘thoughtless’ quotations and re-writings which have constituted an essential part of the ongoing Shakespeare phenomenon since the early seventeenth century and which are prefigured in Shakespeare’s own casual handling of his sources. Thousands of such references can be accessed in the HyperHamlet database, a collection which she co-designed and continues to edit. Regula Hohl Trillini’s current work for the nationally funded WordWeb / Intertextuality in Drama of the Early Modern Period project extends the database approach to the dense network of one-liners, plot elements and catchphrases which link hundreds of plays performed in London between 1533 and 1642.

Mapping the Text: New Analysis

The Talk of Drama Town: Exploring Topics in Russian Plays

Irina Pavlova, University of Oxford Frank Fischer

This paper introduces a digital approach to explore drama by means of topic modelling. The object of study is our Russian Drama Corpus of more than 150 plays encoded in TEI. It is part of DraCor (https://dracor.org), a larger platform for the research on drama that also holds corpora in other languages (English, German, Swedish). The task of topic modelling fictional texts is especially challenging, since topics (‘themes’) might appear not as explicit as they usually do in non-fictional texts. We present a detailed workflow from preprocessing and parameterisation to analysis and interpretation with a special nod to the evaluation of topic models. In large-scale NLP projects the most popular metric is statistical perplexity, which does not necessarily focus on the coherence of topics. While in digital literary studies the human assessment is still the most widely used method for evaluation, its subjectivity can pose a problem, which is why we focus on automatic approaches. Some metrics such as pointwise mutual information evaluate the dependence or association of words. We explore several approaches of topic-model evaluation to fine-tune parameters and extract a balanced number of topics. This model is applied to our corpus of plays, followed by the analysis and interpretation of the distribution of topics throughout time, genre and authors and by gender of dramatic characters. Short of the language-dependent preprocessing steps like lemmatisation, our approach is applicable to all corpora linked to the DraCor platform and opens a comparative angle for the study of drama.

Irina Pavlova, BA and MS at Higher School of Economics – Computational Linguistics; DPhil at the University of Oxford, working on establishing formal features for genre identification in Russian drama texts. The interests include TEI, creating corpora, digital humanities and literary studies, distant reading, and natural language processing technologies. The projects/initiatives I have been involved into are: creating a computational model for predicting suspense in literary texts; creating a TEI-encoded corpus of 90-volumes edition of Leo Tolstoy writings; creating and researching a TEI-encoded corpus of Russian drama texts. I was a part of the Digital Humanities Centre in Higher School of Economics in Moscow and was organising two Moscow-Tartu DH summer schools.

Bastardy in Early Modern Drama: A Computational Approach

Jakob Ladegaard, Aarhus University

Illegitimacy was a favored topic in Early Modern English drama. This paper presents a study conducted by a small team of scholars of bastardy in a corpus of 20 dramatic works from 1590 to 1642. We use a computational method developed in corpus linguistics (keyword analysis) to see if the linguistic characteristics of bastard characters in general differ from those of other characters in the corpus. We then use the same analytical procedure to compare bastard characters from different genres (tragedy, comedy, history). We conclude that there are marked differences between characterizations of bastards in different genres. Tragedies tend to embody the negative stereotypes of the period, while comedies vary more. We also find an increase in positive bastard characterization in Caroline drama compared to the earlier period. To properly understand these differences, we argue that it is necessary to return to historical contextualization and close reading. We illustrate this in a brief comparative reading of bastardy in Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear (1606) and Richard Brome’s comedy A jovial Crew (1641). This study is a part of the research project ‘Unearned Wealth: A Literary History of Inheritance, 1600-2015’ at Aarhus University, Denmark (2017-2021). The presenter of this paper is the director of that project.

Jakob Ladegaard, PhD, Associate Professor in Comparative Literature, Aarhus University, Denmark. My research is primarily concerned with the relations between modern literature, politics and economy. I work on Early Modern English drama with a particular interest in comedies (including Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson and Richard Brome), and using both qualitative and quantitative digital methods. Since 2017 I have been the director of a four year collective research project entitled ”Unearned Wealth – A Literary History of Inheritance, 1600-2015”, supported by the Danish Research Council. The project deals with literary representations of inherited wealth in England and France from the Early Modern period to the present.

Networking to Secure an Estate: Social Network Analysis and Inheritance in Early Modern Comedies

Beth Cortese, Aarhus University

Part of the ‘Unearned Wealth: A Literary History of Inheritance 1600-2015’ project at Aarhus University, this paper will engage with social network analysis as a means of analyzing kinship ties and social structures relating to inheritance of property and distribution of wealth in early modern drama. Social network analysis is a useful tool for both teaching, research, and performance practice because it provides a visualization of all the characters in a play and their relationships. It has previously been used to generate and compare social networks across German drama (F. Fischer, M. Gobel, D.. Kamkaspar, P. Trilcke, 2016). The tool measures not only those characters who possess the most connections and are therefore central to the plot but also those with ‘betweenness-centrality’, who facilitate communication between characters from different spheres in the play, such as servant characters. The advantage of this approach is that network analysis can help to reveal new insights about the agency of characters along with which characters never appear in a scene together, contributing to ideas about which roles may have been played by the same performer. This paper will discuss the benefits and pitfalls of social network analysis along with its potential as a means of tracking trends and changes in early modern comedies about inheritance. I will consider the role of kinship ties, wit, exchange, and non-familial trust relations in the protagonist’s desire to secure an estate.

Beth Cortese is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Comparative Literature at Aarhus University, Denmark. She is currently researching inheritance in Literature using digital methods as part of the Unearned Wealth: A Literary History of Inheritance project. The subject of her PhD thesis was ‘Women’s Wit on Stage 1660-1720.’ Her research interests include wit, gender, inheritance and credit and trust relations in early modern, Restoration and eighteenth-century drama.

Projects in Motion: Lightning Talks

Dramatic Data: DEEP at the Folger Shakespeare Library

Meaghan J. Brown, Folger Shakespeare Library

As we near the end of our three-year build for Miranda, our digital collections platform, the Folger is thinking through how we represent related data in our collection. In this short talk, I will highlight the integration of one particular dataset into our collection: the Database of Early English Playbooks. DEEP’s data isn’t new; it’s been a digital tool since 1999, when it was developed by Zachary Lesser and Alan Farmer as part of their graduate work at Columbia. This data has already influenced our data ecosystem for early modern drama. Data from DEEP was instrumental in creating the metadata for EMED, and is a touchstone for many other digital projects. In this short talk, I’ll examine the ways DEEP has been integrated into a variety of projects at the Folger, from Lost Plays to Paratexts. Integrating DEEP into our digital environment offers an opportunity for a bit of a revamp: we get a chance to work with the principal investigators to both search and display, and test out methods for creating linked data. In doing so, we want to provide models for the next generation of early modern bibliographers for addressing the challenges of historic sources and name authorities. Our long-term goal is to create a rhizomatic data structure that leverages data already in the collection to make it easier to ingest and link new datasets. Eventually, we hope that the underlying structures we create provide a stable foundation for new layers of information about the early modern world.

Dr. Meaghan J. Brown is the Digital Production Editor at the Folger Shakespeare Library, interested in early modern data, particularly bibliographical data, and how to use it to facilitate search, discovery, and reuse of primary source materials.

Experimental Reflections on Eighteenth Century Representations of Garrick's Prosody

Iain Emsley, Oxford University

In 1775, Sir Joshua Steele created and published a symbolic performance notation as a forerunner of linguists’ suprasegmental approach to prosody. He used this notation to preserve records of Shakespeare performances and that he then played back. Other critics, most notably Thaddeus Fitzpatrick, were critical of Garrick’s Shakespeare performances.

Sonification is presented as an experimental digital approach to Steele’s notation and similar experiments. The notation is simulated through two studies of the same lines from Hamlet’s ‘To Be or Not to Be’ soliloquy spoken by Steele and Garrick as described in Steele’s Prosodia Rationalis. We reflect on the challenges in reproducing experiments from archival sources and using digital methods to present them through their modelling and constraints. We then discuss how the Garrick model can be used to recreate one aspect of Fitzpatrick’s critique of Garrick’s speech and how the digital provides methods of aural reconstruction.

The paper also considers the challenges in reading and modelling the notation in a digital form. This encourages us to view the experiments as a way of thinking about the original methods and algorithms discussed in the sources, including completing an implied piece of work. The approaches to digital and modelling provide methods through which we are able to explore and attempt to explicate the underlying aims of the presented modellers (Steele and Fitzpatrick). The paper reflects on the challenges of reproducibility, such as technology and time, for experimental Humanities.

Iain Emsley: I am a PhD student in Digital Media researching the potential for alternative ways of understanding complex cultural forms through the use of what I am calling distant sonification. Previously I was a Research Associate at the Oxford University, where I gained an MSc in Software Engineering. My research interests include reproducibility, digital humanities and methodology.

The New Interface of Global Shakespeares: Building a Digital Repository for the Next Decade

Alexa Alice Joubin, George Washington University

This 8-minute lightning talk examines the new interface of MIT Global Shakespeares, an open-access digital performance video archive providing free online access to performances of Shakespeare from many parts of the world as well as peer-reviewed essays and vetted metadata provided by scholars and educators in the field. It is both a curated and crowd-sourced archive.

In 2018 we released a new user interface that supports the creation of clips and streamlining of aggregated searches. It can suggest videos of potential interest based on the user’s history. This lightning talk will also demo new educational modules that are built upon a database of videos.

Distinct from analogue media such as photography and film, digital video—as a non-linear, non-sequential medium—can support instant access to any sequence in a performance, as well as the means to re-order and annotate sequences, and to bring them into meaningful conjunction with other videos, texts and image collections. A global archive of Shakespeare as a performed event enables an ever-wider range of interpretive possibilities that activate important aspects of the plays through videos that connect live performances to the concepts of rehearsal and re-play.

Alexa Alice Joubin is Professor of English at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where she is founding co-director of the Digital Humanities Institute. She held the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Global Shakespeare studies at Queen Mary University of London and University of Warwick. As research affiliate in literature at MIT, Alexa is founding co-editor of the open-access digital performance archive Global Shakespeares. Her latest book is Race, which is co-authored with Martin Orkin and is part of the Routledge Critical Idiom series.

Online Databases and the Art of Recreating Early Modern Ballads in Performance

Shirley Bell, Sheffield Hallam University

The songs included in plays of the early modern period were not merely additions to the drama, they were central to the drama, and to understand a play in its entirety, it is important to have an understanding of its music.

Online databases including EEBO-TCP (Early English Books Online-Text Creation Partnership), EBBA (English Broadside Ballad Archive) and Bodleian Ballads have radically transformed researchers’ ability to engage with early modern songs and tunes. They not only facilitate one’s ability to hear how certain tunes would have sounded, but also provide the tools that enable musicians to recreate these songs in performance.

Despite the fact that the majority of the songs used in early modern plays remain fixed in their time, recently, there has been a greater interest in reproducing them for modern audiences. According to EBBA, there are over 11,000 surviving broadside ballad texts from the seventeenth century, and the compilers of this database are currently working through them to produce twenty-first century settings of these ballads and make them accessible online. As well as this, early music ensembles, including Passamezzo, The Carnival Band and The Broadside Band, who specialise in recreating and playing sixteenth and seventeenth century songs regularly tour around the UK bringing these songs to a modern audience.

This paper argues that preserving ballads online enables researchers to engage with a clear, high-quality selection of page images and full-text editions, allowing the tunes of the past to be recreated in modern performance.

Shirley Bell: I am a NECAH funded PhD student in renaissance literature based at Sheffield Hallam University and my research explores the use of music and song in Caroline drama (1625 – 42). I am particularly interested in the ways in which vocal and instrumental music shaped the lives of early modern citizens, especially those who attended and performed in the theatre. I am also interested in the texts of the songs mentioned in the plays of this period and I am using online databases including EEBO-TCP, EBBA, and Bodleian Ballads to discover the life of these songs before, and after, their involvement in the plays to establish their roles within the drama.

Quite charmed: Victoria, Albert, and the stage

Andrew Cusworth, Bodleian Libraries

Drawing on multimodal contemporary evidence of performance and reception, I propose a miniature exploration of the royal experience of theatre during Victoria’s reign up to the death of Prince Albert in 1862. The paper will draw upon and highlight two significant digitisation projects (Queen Victoria’s Journals Online; The Prince Albert Digitisation Project) and, alongside providing examples of Victoria and Albert’s interest in and responses to theatre, will consider the digitisation as a means of remediating, elucidating, and contextualising material cultures of performance and reception.

Andrew Cusworth is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Bodleian Libraries attached to the Prince Albert Digitisation Project. Acting as an academic liaison for the project, his research explores possibilities for enhancing the use, accessibility and connectivity of this digital resource. His research interests include intersections between digital research, the archive, and cultural history = particularly reception history and histories of cultural experiences. He has held positions at the National Library of Wales and the University of Exeter Special Collections. He is also active as a musician and composer.

Wednesday, July 17

Virtual Theatres: 3D Modelling and Virtual Reality

Shakespeare-VR: Virtual Reality Education

Stephen Wittek, Carnegie Mellon University

The Shakespeare-VR project uses virtual reality technologies to bring students face-to-face with professional actors performing Shakespearean soliloquies in a replica of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars Playhouse. Directed by Shakespeare scholar and Digital Humanities specialist, Prof. Stephen Wittek, the project combines the talents of partners from the virtual reality production company Stitchbridge, the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence and Educational Innovation, the CMU Center for Digital Sciences, Humanities, Arts, Research, and Publishing (DSHARP), and the American Shakespeare Center with the goal of guiding students toward a better understanding of Shakespearean drama. In addition to providing an exciting, immersive introduction to the spaces Shakespeare had in mind when he composed his plays, the project makes an important contribution to the growing body of research on virtual reality in humanities education. This presentation will touch on a number of issues connected to the project, including VR development, pedagogical application, online dissemination & curation, and classroom testing.

Dr. Stephen Wittek is an Associate Professor in the Carnegie Mellon English Department, Literary and Cultural Studies Division. His research considers early modern drama through the lens of media studies, digital humanities, public sphere theory, and cultural studies, with emphasis on issues of emotion, conversion, performance, and cognition. He is the author of “The Media Players: Shakespeare, Middleton, Jonson, and the Idea of News” (University of Michigan Press, 2015), co-editor of “The Merchant of Venice” (Internet Shakespeare Editions), and co-developer of the DREAM digital platform for analyzing early modern texts.

Giulio Camillo's Theatre of Knowledge: A Case Study for 3D Modelling in the Humanities

Oscar Seip, University of Manchester

In the past decades, the creation of digital models has become an essential tool for visualisation and analysis in scientific documentation and analysis. Today, with the dissemination and development of 3D, it is increasingly being used by scholars in the Humanities and Arts. In particular, technologies for 3D modelling the physical world have been used to document historic sites, artefacts, and study their materiality. In some cases, these digitisations are used as a basis for reconstruction. However, the potential for 3D modelling to reconstruct historical sites or artefacts that have no material basis in reality (or no longer) is less explored. Also, the adjoining methodology for this application of the technologies is less defined. In this paper I will discuss the challenges and opportunities for this particular use of 3D modelling in the Humanities and formulate a set of best practices concerning the methodology. These findings are based on the outcomes of a pilot project to create a 3D prototype of Giulio Camillo’s Theatre of Knowledge. Traditionally studied as a mnemonic technique or mental architecture, new evidence has proved unequivocally that the theatre was an actual physical structure. Although no trace of this theatre remains and there are only fragmented and conflicting descriptions from vastly different manuscript and printed sources, I will demonstrate that 3D modelling can help to explore, compare, comprehend, and analyse this information. This helps to better understand the function and design of Camillo’s theatre and furthers our understanding of other contemporary theatres such as the Globe.

Oscar Seip submitted in 2018 his PhD thesis in Italian Studies at the University of Manchester, supported by the John Rylands Research Institute. His research focuses on the Italian humanist Giulio Camillo (c.1480-1544) and his Theatre of Knowledge as an example of the intertwined history of the theatre and the sciences. In relation to this, he studied as part of his PhD a manuscript at the John Rylands Library, which contains a description of Camillo’s theatre. He currently works on a pilot project to create a 3D prototype of Camillo’s theatre. Oscar is also a founding member of the Lives of Letters Network, which is currently developing into the Manchester Centre for Correspondence Studies. Additionally, Oscar is the Managing Director of the Transversal Theater Company, which he co-founded with Prof. Bryan Reynolds from the University of California, Irvine. In regard to this, he produced with Reynolds several plays by the former, as well as plays by Shakespeare as part of an outreach project. He also coordinates Transversal’s second two-year EU-funded project (ERASMUS+ Strategic Partnerships Programme).

A reconstruction of the 17th-century "Olivera" playhouse in Valencia for Virtual Reality experience

Jesús Tronch, University of Valencia Gemma Burgos-Segarra, University of Valencia

This paper will present the results of a project that has digitally reconstructed a lost playhouse in Valencia (Spain), “Casa de les farses de la Olivera”, in operation between 1618 and 1750. This digital project, directed by Joan Oleza at the University of Valencia, has involved an architectural reconstruction of the playhouse from extant early documents, the development of a graphical 3D model of this architectural design (using Rhinoceros 5), the development of an acoustic model based on the acoustical properties of the materials in the original builders’ documentation as texturized from existing buildings in Valencia in the same period, the development of a simulation using ODEON software, the auralization of some excerpts from Lope de Vega’s El castigo sin venganza (Punishment without revenge) performed by professional actors, the integration of the graphical and acoustical models (using Unity 5, FMOD and Csound), and the rendering of the latter in an interactive simulator that allows users head movement independently of the body. This exercise in virtual archeology for an immersive 3D experience allows users not only a visual, auditory and spatial perception of the lost playhouse as they are able to look and move around the simulated playhouse and hear the auralized Lope de Vega excerpts. As an application of Virtual Reality technology to the reconstruction of a lost playhouse, with contributions by theater historians, actors, architects, and computer engineers, this project is of interest in the fields of cultural heritage, education and entertainment.

Jesús Tronch is Senior Lecturer at the University of Valencia, where he teaches English literature and creative translation. His main research interests are textual scholarship (basically on early modern drama), translation and reception studies (specifically the presence of Shakespeare in Spain) and the use of digital technologies in early modern theatre studies. At present, he is editing _Timon of Athens_ for the Internet Shakespeare Editions; collaborating in EMOTHE, an open-access, hypertextual and multilingual collection of early modern European theatre developed by the ARTELOPE research project at the University of Valencia; and directing the HIERONIMO digital environment for early modern English drama in translation.

Gemma Burgos-Segarra: A PhD Student in Spanish Golden Age drama, she is working in a critical and digital edition of Lope de Vega’s play “La discreta enamorada” (In love but discreet) for the EMOTHE multilingual collection of early modern European theatre with a predoctoral grant form Spanish goverment from 2014-2018. At the moment she is collaborating with the ARTELOPE research project at the University of Valencia by digitizing and editing Lope de Vega’s comedia and works as research assistant at a contemporary Spanish Literature project.

The Triumph of Isabella – Virtual Reunification, Immersive Experience, and Augmented Reality in the Exploration of Performance through Art

Franklin J. Hildy, University of Maryland Collaborators, not presenting: Paul Deziel, Christen Mandracchia, Q-mars Haeri

The digitally enhanced display of fine art has become so popular that an entire museum in Paris is being dedicated to it. The School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, has been exploring the ways in which our artist/scholars of live performance can bring a new dynamic to this emerging digitally-based field. Through our International Program for Creative Collaboration and Research, we have created a joint venture with the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, and the Museo Nacionel del Prado to bring audiences inside the world of the “Parade of the Craft Guilds”, called the Ommegang, which occurred in Brussels on 31 May 1615. The parade was dedicated to the Archduchess Isabella Clara Eugenia (1566-1633), co-sovereign of the Spanish Netherlands and memorialized by the studio of court painter Denys Van Alsloot (c. 1568 – c. 1626) in eight paintings, each measuring 3.66 by 1.22 meters. These paintings present a uniquely detailed representation of performance culture in Early Modern Europe with their display of secular power, ecclesiastical authority, military prowess, folklore and street theater along with issues of race and gender. This was all staged against a political backdrop of two popular co-rulers who created a golden age for northern European art in the midst of the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries. The original immersive experience portion of this year-long multifaceted project was projected in 360° across multiple screens with surround sound. Our presentation today will feature, on a single screen, the digital animation and soundscape from this experience.

Franklin J. Hildy, Producer of the “The Triumph of Isabella,” An Exploration of Performance through Art and Art through Performance, is Director of the International Program for Creative Collaboration and Research at the University of Maryland where he is also on the faculty of the Graduate Certificate in Digital Studies in the Arts and Humanities and the faculty of the Center for East Asian Studies. He was the founding co-convener for the Digital Humanities in Theatre Research Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) and also organized the Theatre Panel of the Performing Arts Field Committee for the National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH) which resulted in the $900,000 grant for “Virtual Vaudeville.” He has held two consecutive fellowships with the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). Professor Hildy was elected to the College of Fellows of the American Theatre in 2010 and elected Senior Research Fellow of Shakespeare’s Globe, London, in 2015. He is co-author, with the late Oscar G. Brockett, of five editions of History of the Theatre; which has been translated into Chinese, Czech, Fārsī, Greek, Korean, and Ukrainian and has published over 65 articles on historic theatre architecture, theatre archaeology, stage technology, and the history of Shakespeare in performance. (The other “Triumph of Isabella” contributors include Paul Deziel, Christen Mandracchia, and Q-mars Haeri.)

Plenary: Digitising the Stage at the V&A since 2009

Ramona Riedzewski, Victoria & Albert Museum

The V&A’s Department of Theatre and Performance holds the UK’s National Collection of the Performing Arts, which is one of the largest of its type in the world, comprising of up to 1 million playbills and programmes, ca. 2. 5 million photographs, 15000 posters, 500+ archive collections, 3000 costumes, 700 puppets, 500 set models, playtexts, prompt books, annotated scripts, architectural drawings, designs and much more. The collection will celebrate its 100th anniversary in 2024. Before our significant milestone, however, the entire collection will move from its current West London location near Kensington Olympia to a new V&A Collections Research Centre in the Olympic Park in Stratford, East London, which due to open in Summer 2023. The collections move is one of the largest projects in the Museum’s 150 year history and digitisation of materials sits at the very heart of it.

Over the past 10 years, the department delivered digitisation projects of all sizes, and processes have steadily evolved to deal with various collection materials. Ramona will reflect on some of these, lessons learnt and how this now feeds into preparing the collection for the move and the resulting extended access restriction period between 2021 and 2023.

As the collection prepares for its founding centenary in 2024, the team is actively planning this major milestone and how to truly celebrate the pioneering spirit of its founder, Mrs. Gabrielle Enthoven as well as prepare for the next 100 years ahead. Digitisation and of course, preservation and access to born digital collection items are very much part of it. However, in this digital age and increasing general public digital literacy, one of the truly challenging aspects are the limitations in actually documenting performing arts and the live stage. Indeed, in all the digitisation projects, one of the biggest challenges tends to be the creation and availability of an adequate record to attach digital assets to. One could possibly argue, that the current international collection management and documentation standards are not fit for purpose in facilitating easy and democratic access to core information and relevant collection materials, especially where it captured across different systems and data silos. Ramona will focus on her experience in the V&A specifically, which uses three different collection documentation standards to manage its collections:

Objects, 3D items: Museum (SPECTRUM)
Collections by provenance: Archives (ISAD(G))
Printed materials, journals, and reference items: Library (AACR2)

Reviewing a number of approaches already in place and applied nationally and internationally, Ramona will conclude, that solutions are at everyone’s fingertips and with some creative thinking (and some investment), our catalogues and documentation will become highly relevant not just as a tool identifying collection items, but the use of the data to our users.

Ramona Riedzewski is Head of Collections Management in the Theatre and Performance Department of the V&A, which holds the UK’s National Collection of the Performing Arts. As a professionally trained archivist, she worked in a number of different organisations as archivist, records manager and librarian, including Trinity College Library, Dublin; the National Library of Ireland, the Irish Red Cross as well as the Arts Council of Ireland. In recent years, she has been an Executive Committee member of both SIBMAS, the International Association for Performing Arts Collections, as well as APAC, the Association for Performing Arts Collections (UK and Ireland). Ramona is currently a member of the Memory of the World Register for the United Kingdom.

Digital Tools in the Classroom

Reevaluating Performance History Resources for Students (And with Publishers

Christie Carson

The world of digital resources for the study of Shakespeare seems to have arrived at a log jam of sorts. On the one hand, there are more resources available than ever before, on the other, the time available to teachers for preparation has never been in shorter supply. The desire to bring Shakespeare to the people, particularly the young people, through education is not new. Teaching a new course this year for English and Film Studies students at Royal Holloway I have been struck by the fact that there is a certain circularity to the history of reimagining Shakespeare for the screen which highlights the physical features of Shakespeare’s Globe and the cognitive features of a critical approach that focuses on the play text as studied in English Departments in the UK. These two forms of authority have been synonymous with the authority of Shakespeare specifically and the study of the Humanities more generally for over a century. The return to the ‘original’, the ‘authentic’ Shakespeare has been an underlying imperative in most of the practical and critical approaches to the texts and can be traced back to before the 20th century. But the current interaction between the stage, the page, the screen and the classroom has come to a point of remediation that has distilled and distorted the aims of this endeavour sufficiently to require a bit of a reassessment.

Dr. Christie Carson: I am a Reader in Shakespeare and Performance and have created several digital resources myself. I have also taught with and analysed the resources created by others online for the study of Performance history over the past two decades.

Presenting the Re-mix: The MIT Merchant Module

Mary Erica Zimmer, MIT Global Shakespeares

How might the affordances of digital media support students’ work with Shakespearean performance? Here, the concept of the remix provides a lens through which to understand contributions made by The Merchant Module’s approach. Ordinarily, one might see “sampling” and “remix” as insufficiently articulating the depth and richness of Shakespearean discovery through performance. Yet the multimedia environment of The Merchant Module is also a constellation of texts: visual, verbal, printed, performed, and above all preserved—not in full, in the case of the 2016 Merchant in Venice at the module’s heart, but instead in powerful fragments that are re-contextualized within learning sequences designed to encourage users’ own work of creation, as well as their sense of grounding in a continuum of performance practice.

Here, the site-specificity of Karin Coonrod’s 2016 Merchant, from whose performances the module samples, proves useful in pedagogical terms: visibly and vividly, the components of her production cannot be reconstituted, given their particularity in space, time, and historical moment. Invited into the logic of her production, as articulated and anatomized through a host of voices, users learn instead to make cognate choices: her production thus serves less as predecessor than partner in the long history of realizing Shakespeare. Beyond the main performance assignment, further opportunities for multimedia practice allow users to reflect, recast, and re-present, and design features of the edX Edge platform support the same in structural terms. How best to advance and archive users’ work remains a question: here, discussion is welcome, as the module’s “remixing” continues.

Mary Erica Zimmer is a Research Associate with MIT Global Shakespeares: The Merchant Module, under the direction of Diana Henderson. Her early modern textual studies consider the intersection of digital approaches with earlier media, emphasizing the affordances of each within an evolving theatrical continuum. She recently received her PhD in Editorial Studies from The Editorial Institute at Boston University and is honored to advance digital bibliographic studies undertaken since 2013 in conjunction with the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Macbeth Across the Centuries: A Panel Discussion

Stacey Redick, Folger Shakespeare Library Sophie Byvik, Folger Shakespeare Library Ramona Riedzewski, Victoria & Albert Museum Richard Palmer, Victory & Albert Museum Jenny Fewster, AusStage Database Julian Meyrick, AusStage Database

The Macbeth Story website, built collaboratively by a cross-institutional team from the V&A, AusStage, NUI-Galway, and the Folger Shakespeare Library, brings together collection items and performance data to tell a unique story of performances of Macbeth in Australia, Ireland, England, and the United States. For the first time ever, we have access to the technological infrastructure to combine all these resources in one website, broadening the reach of our collections and connecting our resources in a way that has not been done before.

This experimental website will be built in a customized WordPress environment connected to the Folger’s new home for digital collections online: the Miranda platform. It will share images from artifacts held in collections in Ireland, England, and the United States, and will mingle those artifacts with narrative content and data that establishes a unique perspective to the performances of Macbeth around the world. It will highlight the diversity of Shakespearean performance and reception in different parts of the world, including non-anglophone productions, such as in the Irish language. Digital images of collection items and their metadata will be pulled directly from their source repositories and shown alongside their related metadata and associated annotations.

The panelists, representing the participating institutions, will share what we have learned and discovered as part of this project, so that others who wish to build similar websites might benefit from our experience. As a team, we will discuss the technological affordances that have made this collaborative project possible and the opportunities for research and learning that arise when we connect and share collections in this way. We will also share the challenges we have encountered.

Stacey Redick is Digital Strategist at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She oversees information architecture of digital initiatives, leads user experience research and design, and collaborates with institutional partners on digital initiatives. She has worked on the Miranda platform, the Folger’s home for digital collections. She holds an M.A. in Ancient History and Italian from the University of St Andrews, and an M.I. in Library and Information Science with Book History and Print Culture from the University of Toronto.

Sophie Byvik is the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Digital Projects Associate. In addition to facilitating the day-to-day operations of the Digital Media & Publications division, she currently performs budget analysis, coordinates Miranda interpretive digital content, and is managing the early stages of an institutional digital infrastructure project. She also works on division event planning, usability testing, and analytics. Sophie holds an A.B. in English from Bryn Mawr College.

Ramona Riedzewski is Head of Collections Management in the Theatre and Performance Department of the V&A, which holds the UK’s National Collection of the Performing Arts. As a professionally trained archivist, she worked in a number of different organisations as archivist, records manager and librarian, including Trinity College Library, Dublin; the National Library of Ireland, the Irish Red Cross as well as the Arts Council of Ireland. In recent years, she has been an Executive Committee member of both SIBMAS, the International Association for Performing Arts Collections, as well as APAC, the Association for Performing Arts Collections (UK and Ireland). Ramona is currently a member of the Memory of the World Register for the United Kingdom.

Richard Palmer, Tech Lead, Victoria and Albert Museum, London: Richard leads the tech team in the Digital Media dept responsible for the V&A’s web estate, from the main visitor website to the collections site, and various fascinatingly amorphous projects in between. He is a co-chair of the IIIF museum group.

Jenny Fewster, AusStage Database Project Manager: Jenny joined AusStage, the Australian national online resource for live performance research, when the project began in 2000 and was appointed Project Manager in 2003. During her time with AusStage the project has been successful in gaining over $5 million (AUD) in funding from the Australian Research Council, Australian National Data Service, National eResearch Architecture Taskforce, eResearch South Australia and the Australian Access Federation. Jenny is active in nurturing relationships between university researchers and cultural collections. She is currently the Interim Chair and Secretary of the Performing Arts Heritage Network of Museums Galleries Australia and has served on that Committee for the last eleven years.

Julian Meyrick is Strategic Professor of Creative Arts at Flinders University, South Australia, the Artistic Counsel for the State Theatre Company of South Australia (STCSA), and a member of both the Currency House Editorial and CHASS Boards. He was Associate Director and Literary Advisor at Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC) 2002-07 and Artistic Director of kickhouse theatre 1989-98. He has published histories of Sydney’s Nimrod Theatre and the MTC, and numerous articles on Australian theatre, culture, and cultural policy. He is Chief Investigator for both the AusStage database and Laboratory Adelaide, an ARC Linkage project studying the problem of culture’s value, and a regular contributor to The Conversation. The Retreat of Our National Drama,his second Currency House Platform Paper was launched in 2014. He is the director of over 40 award-winning theatre productions, including Angela’s Kitchen,which attracted the 2012 Helpmann for Best Australian Work. He was a founder member and Deputy Chair of PlayWriting Australia 2004-09 and a member of the federal government’s Creative Australia Advisory Group 2008-10. His book Australian Theatre after the New Wave: Policy, Subsidy and the Alternative Artist appeared in 2017. What Matters? Talking Value in Australian Culture, co-authored with Robert Phiddian and Tully Barnett, was published by Monash University Publishing in 2018.

Collecting in Context

SORT BY and SELECT IF: 30 years of digital analysis

Barbara Bell

The structures of digital collections, their data choices and access points, necessarily impact on the flexibility that they offer subsequent individual/single issue researchers and projects that cannot be imagined beforehand. With this in mind ‘end results’ can be informative; how completed large-scale database projects succeed in revealing previously hidden practices, pose the question as to whether their dataset choices can be applied more widely.

From 1987-1991, the first digital analysis of the nineteenth-century theatre repertoire in Britain was conducted by a researcher into Scottish theatre. In total, 35,000 playbills, covering 30,000 nights in 281+ theatrical venues garnered from 16 different libraries/named collections in the UK and USA were analysed to create a Main Catalogue Listing of 3,605 entries. A union Calendar Listing prevented duplication. Each entry recorded multiple elements [30+] selected as revealing the underlying workings of the repertoire. Another key aspect was the inclusion of two smaller Listings taken from the Henderson Collection of Playbills in the Folger Shakespeare Library, which acted as a ‘control’ in the experiment.

Combining the choices made in creating the data TAGS alongside the program’s ability to SORT BY and SELECT IF, it was possible to uncover previously hidden processes and trends. This paper places the project’s findings, about process and product, in a contemporary context, offering up a fresh perspective on the questions to be asked of new ventures in terms of format, development processes and the relationship between archivists, scholars, citizen scholars and general readers.

Dr. Barbara Bell: During a career teaching in UK universities, specialising in blended/online learning and literary management, Dr. Bell has researched, presented and published on Scottish theatre history, contemporary playwriting, Victorian Medievalism and digital pedagogy in the performing arts.

Digitizing and publishing Shakespeare's Globe Archive

Felix Barnes, Adam Matthew Digital

The research potential of Shakespeare’s Globe Archive has been enhanced and made more accessible by its digitization and publication in March 2019 via the academic publisher Adam Matthew Digital. The project publishes the performance archive detailing productions from 1996 to 2016 plus materials on the construction of the theatre. The publication of the archive aims to allow in-depth study of contemporary performance of Shakespeare (and other playwrights) in the experimental space of the reconstructed Globe.

This talk recounts the process of digitising and publishing the archive; how it goes from paper to screen. It will discuss what was selected for publication and why, how images are captured, how materials are catalogued/indexed, making the collection navigable/searchable, and issues around copyright, data protection and redaction.

Felix Barnes: Felix Barnes is a Senior Editor at Adam Matthew Digital, an academic publisher of archives and primary sources. He works on the production of these primary source collections, seeing them through the process of digitisation and publication online. He has worked on the publication of various primary source collections from The Gilder Lehrman Institute’s collection on American history to filtm collections at the British Film Institute.

Building the Rose Theatre Archive 1989 – 2019

Johanna Schmitz, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

The Rose Theatre archive (1989-2019) is a material and digital collection related to the 30-year period since the discovery of the Rose archaeological site in 1989 from the “Campaign to Save the Rose” (the protests and various negotiations that saved the site) to the on-going “Rose Revealed Project” (the development scheme now underway to finish the excavation and remodel the site for use as a museum and flexible theatre space). Since I participated in the first “Digitizing the Early Modern Stage” conference (2017), I have increased the number of items in the collection from 495 to more than 5,080 using the Omeka archiving platform. In this presentation, I will share the current configuration of the collection, describe challenges as it continues to grow, and identify emerging theoretical concerns regarding my curatorial intervention and the archive user’s engagement of the Rose monument as an archeological site and an incorporeal or immaterial theatre space – as a location of living and lost memory, and an archive that will remain after our shared memory of the Rose discovery and preservation must one day be imagined.

Johanna Schmitz, PhD is professor of theater history at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and archivist for the Rose Theater Trust.

Plenary Conversation with Richard Ovenden OBE, Tiffany Stern, and H.R. Woudhuysen FBA, moderated by Eric M. Johnson

Richard Ovenden OBE is Bodley’s Librarian, Bodleian Libraries, Oxford.

Professor Tiffany Stern is Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama, Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham.

Professor H.R. Woudhuysen FBA is Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford.

Introducing Traherne: an open source software tool for digital visual collation

Giles Bergel, University of Oxford Abhishek Dutta, University of Oxford

This presentation will introduce Traherne, an open source tool with the potential to revolutionise the collation of early modern texts by allowing more detailed and efficient collation than was previously possible. This software brings ease of use and flexibility for collators who have often had to endure health hazards caused by tedious and time-consuming mechanical and optical methods of collation. Traherne was initially developed for the Oxford Traherne project but is now being used by a variety of prestigious scholarly editing projects across the world.

The presentation will begin with a history of collation, from Charlton Hinman’s pioneering work on Shakespeare’s folio Works, to the Shakespeare Quartos project, which encountered obstacles to the digital compositing of images that Traherne has now effectively solved. Dr. Abhishek Dutta, the developer and maintainer of Traherne, will outline how the tool was developed in response to the needs of scholarly editors and demonstrate some of its features. Dr. Giles Bergel will describe how several dramatic and other textual editing projects are using Traherne, and additionally it will show how it can also assist in the comparison of images.

Since Traherne is open source software, users have the freedom to use it for any purpose and share it with colleagues without paying any fees. This presentation will conclude with a description of the open source community built around this software and provide details about how users can acquire it for installation in their own personal computers.

Dr. Giles Bergel and Dr. Abhishek Dutta are based in the Visual Geometry Group (VGG) in the Department of Engineering Science at University of Oxford. Dr. Bergel is a book historian and a digital humanist, with particular interests in broadside ballads and in the history of copyright. Dr. Dutta is a Research Software Engineer, and is the developer of the Traherne software tool.

Rethinking the Archive

The Parish of St. Mary Aldermanbury, London: Rescuing the first surviving Vestry Book (1569-1609)

Alan H. Nelson, University of California, Berkeley

The parish of St Mary Aldermanbury was the home of several individuals with playhouse connections, above all John Heminges and Henry Condell. A neglected source for information about the parish is the much decayed first surviving Vestry Book (1569-1609). Many pages of this document are torn, some paragraphs are seriously faded, and the paper has been attacked in many places by a fungus. Parts of the text are consequently nearly or entirely illegible, and are potentially lost to historians. I have attempted to “rescue” the first Vestry Book by transcribing the entire text to the extent possible, sometimes inferring missing words, including names. In the course of my proposed paper I will explain the digital techniques which have assisted me in recovering the text of this document; discuss choices open to the transcriber; and summarize new information now available to theater (and other) historians.

Alan H. Nelson is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is author of Monstrous Adversary: The Life of Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford (Liverpool University Press, 2003). He is editor or co-editor of three multi-volume collections in the Records of Early English Drama series: Cambridge (1989); Oxford (2004); and London: Inns of Court (2010). He has contributed many essays to the “Shakespeare Documented” website sponsored by the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C.

The March of Fortinbras: A Digital Reconstruction

Thomas Dabbs, Aoyama Gakuin University

Using high resolution, open source images of sixteenth-century maps, this talk will examine an enduring textual and production problem in Hamlet and propose a possible solution.

In the play, just before Hamlet embarks from Denmark to England, Fortinbras of Norway and his army make a quick appearance in Denmark. Fortinbras gives orders to his captain to confirm permission from King Claudius to continue passage through Denmark en route to Poland. This short scene presents multiple problems with dramatic feasibility, not least of which is the fact that when Hamlet sees Fortinbras’ army, he neither knows whose army it is nor does he seem concerned about the presence of a massive military force just outside Elsinore castle.

Modern editions of Hamlet typically include this scene because of its literary value, but directors of Hamlet productions have to decide whether to cut or further diminish Fortinbras’ mostly offstage presence, or else risk staging a strange scene. Indeed, it would be absurd to lead an army from Norway to Poland via modern Denmark in the first place.

However, Abraham Ortelius’ maps show that Denmark’s borders and geophysical positions were quite different in the past. These maps would have been familiar to many in Shakespeare’s audience, and they reveal how members of an Elizabethan audience might have imagined the geographical position of the army of Fortinbras and Hamlet’s perspective of that army. In sum, the Fortinbras scene, odd to us, would have made much more sense to Elizabethan playgoers.

Thomas Dabbs is a professor in the Department of English and American Literature, Aoyama Gakuin University, where he teaches Shakespeare and the English Bible. His current research interests involve using digital technology to envision and describe spaces and places in Elizabethan London that were integral to the rise of Elizabethan drama.

The Theatre in the Archive: Case Studies in Scalable Searching

Pip Willcox, National Archives UK

Abstract forthcoming.

Pip Willcox is Head of Research, National Archives UK.

Digitizing the Stage 2019 (conference)

Contents