Shakespeare's Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools ed. by Janelle Jenstad, Mark Kaethler, and Jennifer Roberts-Smith (review)

In their 2017 article on "Digital Modeling and the Infrastructures of Shakespeare Editing", Alan Galey and Rebecca Niles describe Shakespeare's "mechanical mediation" as existing "on a continuum reaching into the present age of digital editing" (23). Drawing on the work of Willard McCarty (2004) and Julia Flanders and Fotis Jannidis (2015), Galey and Niles propose modeling—a conceptual mapping of "the relationships between texts, machines and humans" (23)—as "a promising foundation for forms of humanities computing that do not merely apply digital tools to humanities research questions unidirectionally but also apply humanistic ways of thinking within computing practices" (25). In their new collection on Shakespeare's Language in Digital Media, Janelle Jenstad, Mark Kaethler and Jennifer Roberts-Smith bring together essays that attempt similarly to stretch from old to new, from traditional print editing of Shakespeare to digital analysis and electronic editing. Usefully, the essays describe and explain some of the digital tools developed and used by language historians and linguistic scholars in constructing the new models.

The book is divided into three sections: "Old Words through New Tools: Re-Reading Shakespeare with EEBO-TCP and LEME"; "Old Words, New Worlds: Shakespeare's Language in Digital Editions"; and "Old Words, New Codes: Shakespeare and the Languages of Markup". The emphatic repetition of the words "old" and "new" reveals a challenge of the collection: the essays vary widely in their approach to a readership that will have different levels of experience with either Shakespearean textual scholarship or digital linguistic analysis. The authors recognize that for some potential readers, Shakespeare is a known quantity and digital technology is less familiar, but the contributors give various levels of attention to this difference. For example, some readers will be rebuffed by the free use of acronyms. On page 7 we are informed that "when referring to electronic databases, online projects, or digital tools […] each essay presumes that the reader is aware" of what the acronyms stand for. Consequently, in the essays the "abbreviations are not accompanied by the full title", but acronyms are listed as "new tools" in the back of the book. However, the reader has already been faced with a page (5) which included more than a dozen of these abbreviations, only one of which this primarily non-digital scholar immediately recognized. It would have been much better to allot the minimal amount of space required to give the full forms at the beginning of each essay. It is annoying to lose track of an argument while leafing through the book for an explanation of TaPoR3, for example.

The first section of the book is the one that most clearly focuses on Shakespeare. Here Valerie Wayne's essay offers a model methodology for using both print and digital resources to explore the full significance of Shakespearean words. Working "beyond the OED loop" and using LEME (Lexicon of Early Modern English) and EEBO–TCP (Early English Books Online–Text Creation Partnership), Wayne explores words sometimes previously treated as compositorial errors ("solicity") or spelling variants ("imperseverant") and, strikingly, finds evidence for her controversial choice of Innogen rather than Imogen as the name of Cymbeline's heroine.

The remaining three essays in the first section also concentrate on what digital resources can do to expand our understanding of the building blocks of Shakespeare's works, his words. Along the way, the authors employ both new tools, especially LEME, and old-fashioned close reading. Ian Lancashire and Elisa Tersigni describe their creation of a "hard word annotator", based in LEME, where the hard words are not those unfamiliar to a modern reader but those that would have seemed difficult to Shakespeare's contemporaries. The authors illustrate the methods Shakespeare used to help his audience understand an unfamiliar term: either by content, or by adding a better-known synonym...