Spring 2022: Shakespeare (un)edited – Page 8 – Digital Humanities Project Course

Contents:

Conclusion

In our project, we investigated different perspectives of Shakespeare reuse, starting from a higher overall level and later looking closely at areas such as reuse in grammars, reuse of the poem Rape of Lucrece and also relationships in the network of authors and publishers. Overall, we observed a general tendency that the reuse of Shakespeare spread increasingly from poetry and drama collections and other quotation books over different types of publications, diversifying the reuse. This indicates that Shakespeare started to gain ground as a general cultural marker, beyond the literary circles.

The chosen perspectives illustrate the diversity of ways in which Shakespeare has been used. The canonical nature of these reuse extracts supports the canonization of the national Bard: quotes and scenes we might know today were already popular in the times of our dataset.

Division of work & reflections on learning

This chapter describes our division of work and our individual learnings. The division was based on personal interests. Tablo mainly worked on the historical context, and Kati on the overall use of the plays. Telma wrote the general introduction to the topic, and the methods section, looked at the plays overtime and at the top clusters. Telma also worked with Monika on Grammar books and with Rafal on network analysis. Milja analyzed the reuse of the poem Rape of Lucrece.

Kati: For me the major outcome from this project was the understanding how many uncertainties exists in study of historical literature. Even if we have digital tools for data mining, there are lot of issues that need to be taken care of and preparing the data for analysis is a lengthy process. For example, the in categorizing the reuse type we have a huge amount of matches categorized as “other” and that proportion grew as the analysis progressed. From all the data set category “other” accounted for 11%. But when we removed the Shakespeare reprints the amount grew to 36% and when we counted only one match between a text ( unique estc_id) and a play (Play_name), the “other” category represented 67% of the matches. Another learning point for me was as simple as using Google Drive and Google Co-lab. I also managed not to take the lead in this project, but let the junior students take the center stage. But over all, I gained some insights and practical tips on what I might work on for my thesis.

Monika: My main takeaway is the importance of knowing your data well. This allows you to ask interesting questions about them and also prevents future problems, as in this project where I had a mix-up about the origin of the Webster data. I also learned how various approaches can be combined to show different perspectives of the studied topic and that it’s important to combine digital humanities methods with traditional close reading and also domain knowledge.

Rafał: This project has taught me, above all, a very meticulous approach to the data I work with. Many details that initially escaped my attention later turned out to be crucial for the analysis. I also learned a lot about the network analysis itself, which before the project was not known to me at all, and became the main subject of my work during the project. Finally, I learned a lot about Shakespeare and modern English literature. It is not an area of my studies on a daily basis, but it was interesting to delve into these areas of knowledge and see how digital tools can be used in them.

Telma: I’ve been working with large datasets before, too, but this project reminded me again how important it is knowing your sources and how much time the cleaning of the data takes. The diversity of sources we had made it challenging to narrow down my own interests, and therefore it was great to have a group to set common goals. I learned a lot about group collaboration and how to compromise between different interests. I also learned a lot about going more qualitative, and how close-reading and distant-reading complement each other. Overall, this was a great way to get to know Shakespeare!

Tablo: The group was able to collaborate and work on this paper regarding the Shakespeare reuse after his death and in the paper generally a common knowledge regarding Shakespeare is demonstrated as an introduction, despite the fact that he is known or can say a well-known person in English history for his literary works. His poems and plays are focused on and in the paper, it is shown that he was considered as a successful playwright in his own time and this perception during his own time, after his death and nowadays is important. The paper reaches to the point to seek for the answer of the question in the historical context, that was the situation and environment was helpful for his success or he gained all the fame and recognition by only his talents? The group has found different aspects about the historical context of his time and how it was helpful or an obstacle for him to succeed. It is obvious that he has lived during Elizabethan age so the time and period is important to reflect on and needs further explanation to seek the answer of the previous question. It was found that the period was known to be a better time for people compared to the previous ages and the time was suitable for people and public as an audience to come and watch his plays. Since it was found in the group about the period, I can say that in safe and good state of life when people are not under the pressure and pain in life due to war, pandemic, or poverty, they tend to like entertainment means more. Shakespeare’s works serve as a great entertainment tool for the time he has lived in. Also, the paper in the introduction in the paper tends to explain the notion of authorship at the time that Shakespeare has lived which was Elizabethan time. So, the context and nature of the literary arts can be seen through Shakespeare’s works. Then the group explains how Shakespeare became a national bard because it is an exceptionality to have write who as died nearly 400 years ago and still studied, reused, and his plays are played. Along with these main aspects of the paper there are other factors and areas that are mentioned in the paper that definitely made Shakespeare to be that successful playwright.

Milja: For me, this project had a good combination of a bit of computational work (which I’m still a beginner at) and a lot of close reading, which is a familiar and comfortable area. It was interesting to see how research interests and directions evolved in the group during the project, and in the end I think we somehow managed to get into something that is perhaps surprisingly rather cohesive while also having interesting connections and contrasts between the different parts of the work. The manual work I had to do was quite tedious, but I am glad I picked Rape of Lucrece as my topic, as it was fascinating to study and sustained my interest throughout the whole process. The part that I think could be improved is that my second research question, finding reuses that tell about the attitudes of readers towards the events depicted in the poem, does perhaps not play to the strengths of this type of data. Long-form analyses of certain works of literature are something that would most likely be already known and discoverable by traditional methods. In hindsight I think the charm of this kind of reuse data is more in finding the very short quotes, that perhaps are twisted and pastisched, or just not attributed to the original author. It would be fascinating to focus on for example quotes that are used in the beginning of novel chapters or to delve into what actually is included in the 17th century quote compilations.

References

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Code on GitHub

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