Disciplining Digital Humanities, 2010: Shakespeare's Staging, XMAS, Shakespeare Performance in Asia, Shakespeare Quartos Archive, and BardBox

For over two decades, Shakespeare scholars have shown us how digital archives can disseminate rare materials to a wider audience; how digital tools can facilitate cross-cultural, collaborative, and interdisciplinary research on Shakespeare performance; and how increasingly sophisticated text-mining techniques can help us to search, analyze, and visualize Shakespeare's entire corpus.¹ These pioneers have laid a foundation of best practices in digital humanities, documenting metadata, markup standards, and techniques for Web-based pedagogy and collaboration. While this growing cyberinfrastructure is crucial to the long-term preservation of digital resources, it also tends to circumscribe the field of digital humanities, as best practices become disciplinary criteria for funding and tenure.² Thus, digital humanities finds itself in the odd position of depending upon the very structures that limit its potential, rigidifying the methodologies of early humanities computing into "projects," products constructed and disseminated along an artificial timeline.

This review takes up the issue of digital humanities' disciplining by investigating a range of recent Shakespeare Web sites, from university-funded archives such as Shakespeare's Staging to BardBox, a YouTube Shakespeare blog. While these projects all fall under the umbrella of digital humanities, each presents a different vision of how new media can facilitate Shakespeare research and pedagogy. Those that succeed best at negotiating disciplinary boundaries move beyond the rhetoric of access—a theme tied to Enlightenment notions of political empowerment and "progress," as Martin Hand points out³—to exploit the literacies, practices, and readily adaptive methods of social media. For if digital humanities is to change the way we think about Shakespeare, it must embrace the Web not simply as a content delivery platform, but as an expressive medium in itself.

Shakespeare's Staging

Put together by Hugh Richmond of University of California at Berkeley, Shakespeare's Staging: Shakespeare's Performance and His Globe Theatre (http://shakespearestaging.berkeley.edu/) has two explicit goals: 1) to enrich pedagogy through a vast collection of images and videos related to performances of Shakespeare's work and 2) to facilitate research on Shakespeare performance through an extensive bibliography divided chronologically and by play. The site also documents the history and performances of the Shakespeare program at Berkeley.

As an archive, Shakespeare's Staging assembles a rich array of visual materials. Images are helpfully organized into albums: for instance, within the gallery "Introduction to Shakespeare Staging," users can browse "The Historical Context of Shakespeare Staging," which contains photos of Hampton Court Hall, contemporary illustrations of the Globe, and a map of sixteenth-century London. Other galleries show the diachronic changes in stage blocking, set design, and actors for specific performances dating back four centuries. Although not organized into galleries, the videos are captioned with didactic, contextualizing descriptions written for a student audience and include not only Shakespeare performance (along with a full staging of Much Ado about Nothing) but also documentaries on the political and social culture of Elizabethan times. Since permissions have been secured or the material is already owned by the Shakespeare Program, instructors and students are free to use the images and video for educational purposes.

Beyond access to the materials, though—many of which are low resolution—the Web site offers few functionalities. Students are unable to sort, save, or search across images or their descriptions, which restricts their application to a fairly narrow set of predetermined lesson plans. Similarly, the Gallery display software seems to limit the metadata categories attached to each object, so that a photo's provenance, date and author are often unclear. Unfortunately, the video collection is even more unintuitive. Built using Seyret, a clunky (and, it must be said, downright ugly) video component, clips are stored within one unhelpful category ("Shakespeare videos"), and the search function is, at the time of this writing, broken. While no doubt many of these functionalities will be fixed, expanded, and tweaked as the site progresses, early decisions to contain all media within Gallery and Joomla, as opposed to Flickr, YouTube, or a feed-syndicated content management system like WordPress, have...