Review by Rowena Hawkins, MA Shakespeare Studies

Jonathan Hope began his lecture on Digital Shakespeare with a photo of a book chained to a reading desk. It was taken in a medieval library, where there were so few books that each book had its own stand. With the humanist intellectual revolution of the Renaissance came an avalanche of printed texts, creating a lot of work for carpenters who had to construct new storage arrangements for all these books and a lot of worry for scholars, whose small, stable canon had been radically expanded.

As well as new shelving solutions the libraries needed new organising systems, which Hope poetically calls the ‘ballet of books’. Beginning with the rudimentary system of shelf-based cataloguing, progressing through relational shelfmarks, and culminating in the giant, high-tech, ‘3-dimensional search engines’ of modern stacks such as the British Library’s, Hope took us on a brief tour of library history before revealing the advances being made today.

Now we’re on the brink of another influx of information as early modern texts are digitalised and made fully searchable, including 1244 pieces of early modern printed drama. The spreadsheet file of all the books available and now transcribed for ease of use is over 50,000 rows long. Hope is currently working on Visualising English Print, a major digital humanities project funded by the Mellon Foundation, developing tools and procedures for linguistic analysis of texts. In his presentation, Hope presented word-counts that revealed thematic continuities as well as generic surprises in Shakespeare, and some impressive scatter graphs mapping Shakespeare’s plays alongside his contemporaries’, the entire early modern dramatic corpus fitting onto one busy graph.

Is this a new intellectual revolution? Perhaps, although digital analysis provokes more questions than it can answer. Jonathan Hope’s lecture was a fascinating insight into the field of digital humanities, where early modern academics and computer scientists are colleagues, as well as a glimpse of the new possibilities for Shakespeare scholarship in the digital age.

Work from the Visualising English Print project is blogged at http://winedarksea.org/.