From the Editor: Gentle Numbers
- From the Editor:Gentle Numbers
It is a gift we cannot afford to refuse.
—N. Katherine Hayles1
What happens when the cherished texts of literary scholarship are transformed from paper to digital platforms? Theorizing this transformation, N. Katherine Hayles suggests that we may best understand the remediation of our cherished objects as a kind of "media translation"; like all translations, it is "inevitably also an act of interpretation."2 Many insights thread through this quiet claim, with its appeal to our curiosity and its reminder of what we care about—interpretation—in an environment that may seem alienating, once we move out of our technological comfort zones. Older forms and values provide a vital intellectual framework for the way we use newer media, shaping the needs we bring to new tools and the opportunities we find in them. Hayles's trenchant point is that the converse is also true. Our experiences in comparative media studies can enrich our understanding of old and new media alike: "The challenge is to specify, rigorously and precisely, what these gains and losses entail and especially what they reveal about presuppositions underlying reading and writing. . . . The advent of electronic textuality presents us with an unparalleled opportunity to reformulate fundamental ideas about texts and, in the process, to see print as well as electronic texts with fresh eyes. For theory, this is the 'something gained' that media translation can offer. It is a gift we cannot afford to refuse."3 To decline to reflect critically on, reformulate, and reaffirm the value of our discipline in an electronically networked world is to court irrelevance.
The scholars and critics in this issue share Hayles's judicious agnosticism toward change. The diverse Shakespeare projects they explore and analyze likewise engage technological change in the spirit of experiment before evaluation. Their essays invite us to look not only at familiar literary works but also at some familiar methodological assumptions with fresh eyes.
In "Networks of Deep Impression," Alan Galey identifies an ambient "computing essentialism" that literary scholars can correct by bringing our historiographic [End Page iii] skills to bear on our digital tools. In this mode, he illuminates the role of Shakespeare in the cultural history of "information" since World War II. Kate Rumbold pursues a cultural history of our remediated present in "From 'Access' to 'Creativity,'" analyzing the online paratexts of four heritage institutions in the United Kingdom: the Royal Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare's Globe, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and the British Library. A broader question inspires both essays: how do academic Shakespeareans and Shakespeare institutions behave just like everyone else on the Web?
Whether we ourselves blog, vlog, tweet, or don't, our classrooms convene a generation of born-digital students. In "Unmooring the Moor," Ayanna Thompson explores student adaptations of Shakespeare on YouTube, focusing on performances of race. She asks what obligations we incur as teachers and scholars when the products of our classrooms circulate in these rich, unstable, social-networking platforms. Taking their title from Mistress Ford's trenchant critique of Falstaff 's love letters, Jonathan Hope and Michael Witmore introduce the practice of "iterative reading" in "The Hundredth Psalm to the Tune of 'Green Sleeves.'" By turns droll and technical, they demonstrate the use of digital tagging tools, interweaving statistical analysis with hermeneutic approaches to Shakespeare's genres.
With a few exceptions, traditional humanities journals seldom review online resources. Two major reviews in this issue redress this lack, providing critical guidance for students, teachers, and scholars navigating the increasingly bush world of digital Shakespeare. In "Disciplining Digital Humanities, 2010," Whitney Anne Trettien scrutinizes five important Web sites, from university-funded archives to BardBox, a blog-based gallery of original Shakespeare videos. She casts an experienced digital humanist's eye on their contents and platforms, how their data are structured, and how we navigate and use them.4 Andrew Murphy, in "Shakespeare Goes Digital," reviews three online editions of Shakespeare's works, situating their open-access missions within a longstanding tradition of editing Shakespeare "for the people."
Like a good performance review, digital reviewing captures a dynamic project at a particular moment in time. Thus, it is fitting to close this special...
