"But why all this fuss about Shakespeare?": text, transmission, and technology

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“But why all this fuss about Shakespeare?”: text, transmission, and technology Pip Willcox Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford @pipwillcox Bodleian First Folio, Title page, f.πA1+1r Bodleian Libraries UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD Vers une littérature mondiale à l’heure numérique? 30 September–2 October 2015 Bibliothèque nationale de France et l’université Paris-Sorbonne http://www.slideshare.net/PipWillcox/butwhyallthisfussreducedsize

Transcript of "But why all this fuss about Shakespeare?": text, transmission, and technology

Page 1: "But why all this fuss about Shakespeare?": text, transmission, and technology

“But why all this fuss about Shakespeare?”:text, transmission, and technology

Pip WillcoxBodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

@pipwillcox

Bodleian First Folio, Title page, f.πA1+1r

Bodleian LibrariesU N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D

Vers une littérature mondiale à l’heure numérique?30 September–2 October 2015Bibliothèque nationale de France et l’université Paris-Sorbonne

http://www.slideshare.net/PipWillcox/butwhyallthisfussreducedsize

Page 2: "But why all this fuss about Shakespeare?": text, transmission, and technology

http://www.princeton.edu/~danson/Lit131/HANDBOOK/Swan.htm

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atre

Bodleian LibrariesU N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D

Early modern theatre: a co-creation

Page 3: "But why all this fuss about Shakespeare?": text, transmission, and technology

http://shakespeare.berkeley.edu/index.php?option=com_g2bridge&view=gallery&Itemid=256&g2_itemId=16938Will

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Bodleian LibrariesU N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D

Early modern theatre: a co-creation

Page 4: "But why all this fuss about Shakespeare?": text, transmission, and technology

The Stationers’ Register

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With thanks to Giles Bergel and Ian Gadd for supplying the Photograph

Bodleian LibrariesU N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D

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Bodleian LibrariesU N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D

1623

http://blog.wellcomelibrary.org/2012/03/saving-oxfords-medicine/

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ages

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An unexplained arrivalB

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Bodleian LibrariesU N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D

✤ Bodley: plays in quarto as “baggage books”, “riff-raffe”, “idle books”

✤ Presented by the consortium of printers, or John Hemminge and Henry Condell?

✤ Under the 1610 agreement with the Stationers’ Company?

http://firstfolio.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/

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William Wildgoose, bookbinderB

odle

ian

Lib

rari

es

Bodleian LibrariesU N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D

✤ A consignment of 10 books

✤ Strong, plain brown leather

✤ Recycled paste-downs:Cicero’s De Officiis (~1480-1485)Bod-Inc. C-322

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http://shakespeare.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/ — http://firstfolio.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/

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1624

Bod

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, 190

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2012

Bodleian LibrariesU N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D

http://shakespeare.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/

Page 9: "But why all this fuss about Shakespeare?": text, transmission, and technology

1624

"Engraving of Arts End, Duke Humfrey's Library" by David Loggan - http://rycote.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/?location_id=176. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/

File:Engraving_of_Arts_End,_Duke_Humfrey%27s_Library.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Engraving_of_Arts_End,_Duke_Humfrey%27s_Library.jpg

Arts End, Bodleian LibraryDavid Loggan, Oxonia Illustrata, 1675

Bodleian LibrariesU N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D

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A (partially) well-read bookBo

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✤ Heritage History

Bodleian LibrariesU N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D

http://firstfolio.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/

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An unexplained departure

http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/16898http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/14034

Bodleian LibrariesU N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D

✤ The Third Folio is published, 1663/4

✤ Thomas Lockey, Librarian, 1660 — 1665

✤ “not altogether fit for that office”

✤ “Rcd of Mr Ri: Davis for Superfluous Library Bookes [...] £24”

✤ John “the bookseller” Hudson, Librarian, 1701 — 1719

✤ “negligent if not incapable”

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1905

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Will

cox

Bodleian LibrariesU N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D

✤ Madan, Gibson and Turbutt, The Original Bodleian Copy of the First Folio of Shakespeare (The Turbutt Shakespeare), Oxford: 1905

✤ Bibliographical Society lecture

✤ Review in The Times

✤ The Athenæum, 25 February 1905

Bodleian Library Records, c. 1260

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1905

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Bod

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ries

Bodleian LibrariesU N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D

✤ E.W.B. Nicholson, Bodley’s Librarian, 1882 — 1912

✤ Offered to buy the First Folio for the Library at its market value

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1905

Bodleian LibrariesU N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D

✤ E.W.B. Nicholson, Bodley’s Librarian, 1882 — 1912

✤ Offered to buy the First Folio for the Library at its market value

✤ An anonymous offer of £3,000

Pho

togr

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Pip

Will

cox

Bodleian Library Records, c. 1260

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1905

Bodleian LibrariesU N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D

Am

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https://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/magazine/issues/2007_fall/shakespeare

✤ E.W.B. Nicholson, Bodley’s Librarian, 1882 — 1912

✤ Offered to buy the First Folio for the Library at its market value

✤ An anonymous offer of £3,000

✤ Henry Clay Folger, Standard Oil

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A private campaign

Bodleian LibrariesU N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D

✤ ‘PROPOSED REPURCHASE FOR THE BODLEIAN OF THE ORIGINAL BODLEIAN COPY OF THE 1ST FOLIO SHAKESPEARE (1623)’

✤ “Oxford men”

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Pip

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Bodleian Library Records, c. 1259

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National commons

Bodleian LibrariesU N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D

“I think every patriotic Englishman should answer”

“in so national a matter I think that every patriotic criteria is vitally aroused”

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Bodleian Library Records, c. 1260

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National commons

Pho

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Pip

Will

cox

Bodleian LibrariesU N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D

“I hope it is possible to raise the sum required, & to prevent this treasure going the way of all our English treasures — to America.”

Bodleian Library Records, c. 1260

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Diversity

Bodleian LibrariesU N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D

✤ Not all from Oxford

✤ Not all from men

“Pray forgive the mistakes. Put it down to my being a Cambridge man, mourning that Oxford men have not found the requisite sum. I hope it will be found.”

“from my sister-in-law Mrs. Henry Pott, that there exists a Guild of Ladies”

Pho

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Bodleian Library Records, c. 1260

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“man-eating money maniacs”

Bodleian LibrariesU N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D

✤ Not everyone supported the appeal“Secondly, having due regard to the cost of existing in this present wicked world, it is quite absurd that any copy of any book should command such a price. Only the man-eating money-maniacs of America could have started such an inept fashion. […] By all means let them have EVERYTHING that can be bought for money – the Pope’s tiara and the King’s crown and a majority in the House of Commons – and a free passage across the Styx. And let them have the Shakespeare, if the present possessor’s sentiment and conscience allows him to let them have it. The only cure for covetousness is satiety – and the Styx.”

Pho

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Pip

Will

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“Fourthly, why all this fuss about Shakespeare? If you were offered genuine manuscripts of the lost plays of Sophocles, I can imagine that heaven and earth ought to be moved to where the University Press would then provide us, who love Sophocles and decent literature, with copies, much better for practical purposes than the originals, and at a reasonable sum. But why all this fuss about Shakespeare?

“[…] Why should the great, the dignified, Bodleian Library lend itself to the encouragement of such literary provincialism?”

Bodleian Library Records, c. 1260

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A successful campaign

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Bodleian LibrariesU N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D

✤ Curated by the Bodleian’s Rare Books

✤ The Turbutt family commissioned its box

http://shakespeare.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/

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2012: Sprint for Shakespeare

HELP US OPEN THE BODLEIAN’S FIRST COLLECTED EDITION OF SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS TO THE WORLDShakespeare’s First Folio is one of the greatest treasures in the Bodleian collection, and we would like your help opening it up for anyone anywhere in the world to enjoy exploring its pages. Now, in the year of the Cultural Olympiad, we invite Shakespeare lovers and Bodleian supporters to join our Sprint campaign to digitize and publish our First Folio online for the benefit of everyone, from schoolchildren to scholars.

By making a contribution of any size – from as little as £20 per page – your support will enable us to publish a speech, a scene, an act or even a whole play of the First Folio online, on a specially created website, which will inspire readers today and in the future.

The Sprint for Shakespeare campaign aims to raise £20,000 through a large number of donations of all sizes. Any surplus beyond the target will go towards future online projects to open up the Bodleian collections.

All supporters of this campaign will be recognised on a special page on this website, with the opportunity to dedicate their gift to someone who inspires them. Like the patrons and subscribers of books in the past, the names will live on with this digitized book through this website.

FOR

Shakeßpeare

TO FIND OUT MORE AND LEARN

HOW TO BE INVOLVED VISIT OUR WEBSITEhttp://shakespeare. bodleian.ox.ac.uk

B

D

L

S

S

Bodleian LibrariesU N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D

http://shakespeare.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/

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23 April 2013: Shakespeare’s 449th birthday

Bodleian LibrariesU N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D

http://firstfolio.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/

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Research potential: manufacturing processes

Bodleian LibrariesU N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D

http://shakespeare.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/ — http://firstfolio.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/

✤ Permanent access

✤ Close digital comparison

✤ Material contexts of the book

✤ Understanding printing

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Research potential: reception

Pho

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Bod

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Bodleian LibrariesU N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D

http://shakespeare.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/ — http://firstfolio.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/

✤ Permanent access

✤ Close digital comparison

✤ Material contexts of the book

✤ Understanding printing

✤ Understanding bookbinding

✤ Marks of its readers’ use

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Research potential: discoveryB

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Bodleian LibrariesU N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D

An Active Swain to make a Leap was seenWhich sham’d his Fellow Shepherds on the Green,And growing Vain, he would Essay once more,But lost the Fame, which he had gain’d before;Oft’ did he try, at Length was forc’d to yeild.He St[r]ove in Vain, — he had himself Excell’d:So Nature once in her Essays of Wit,In Shakespear took the Shepherd’s Lucky LeapBut over-straining in the great Effort,In Dryden, and the rest, has since fell Short.

http://firstfolio.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/

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Bodleian LibrariesU N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D

✤ Dedications

✤ “who taught me to love Shakespeare”

✤ “whose greatest gift to me was education”

✤ “Shakespeare should be available to everyone in the closest possible form to his original text”

✤ “who is the soul of kindness, goodness and wit, with my love”

✤ “other women cloy the appetites they feed, but she makes hungry where most she satisfies”

http://shakespeare.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/the-project/supporters/

International commons

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Bodleian LibrariesU N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D

23 April 2014: Shakespeare’s 450th birthday✤ Publication of a searchable, machine-readable full text (beta)

✤ Use and reuse: Creative Commons Attribution Only

✤ Collaboration: IT Services TEI consultation; Oxford e-Research Centre

✤ Open source software

✤ The future:

✤ Search

✤ Variant spelling

✤ Improved texts

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“with the participation of Society”

Bodleian LibrariesU N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D

https://www.academia.edu/12103878/_Coniunction_with_the_participation_of_Society_Citizens_Scale_and_Scholarly_Social_Machines

David De Roure and Pip Willcox‘“Coniunction, with the participation of Society”: Citizens, Scale, and Scholarly Social Machines’

Beyond the PDF: Born-Digital Humanities, Boston, 27–28 April 2015

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Social Machines

Bodleian LibrariesU N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D

Real life is and must be full of all kinds of social constraint – the very processes from which society arises. Computers can help if we use them to create abstract social machines on the Web: processes in which the people do the creative work and the machine does the administration... The stage is set for an evolutionary growth of new social engines. The ability to create new forms of social process would be given to the world at large, and development would be rapid.

Tim Berners-Lee with Mark FischettiWeaving the Web, 1999 (pp. 172–175)

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Scholarly social machines

Bodleian LibrariesU N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D

✤ Performed, and therefore mutable

✤ Generative

✤ Collaborative, human and machine

✤ Connected, embracing scale

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Remediating the digital’s materiality

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Pip Willcox and David De Roure. Forthcoming. ‘“now art thou sociable...now art thou what thou art”: Surfacing TEI Encoding in the Bodleian First Folio’s The Tragedy of Romeo and Iuliet.’

Bodleian LibrariesU N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D

Textual layers: visual search,“like Google Books”

Social annotation:✤ page✤ encoding✤ edition

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Social editions

Bodleian LibrariesU N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D

✤ Metadata, text, image, annotation—including translation

✤ Presentation, resource discovery, transmission, re-use

✤ Partnerships of respect, with credit for creating, curating, enhancing, linking, augmenting, funding…

✤ A perfectable text?

Page 35: "But why all this fuss about Shakespeare?": text, transmission, and technology

Bodleian LibrariesU N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D

This Is For EveryoneH

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and

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toric

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r Mus

eum

http://compmuseum.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/TBLOlympics-013.jpg

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Bodleian LibrariesU N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D

Bodl

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http://compmuseum.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/TBLOlympics-013.jpg — http://firstfolio.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/

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Acknowledgements

Bodleian LibrariesU N I V E R S I T Y O F OX F O R D

✤ We are grateful to the supporters of the Sprint for Shakespeare campaign, to the donors of the Bodleian First Folio project, and our colleagues who worked on both projects:

✤ http://shakespeare.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/the-project/supporters/✤ http://firstfolio.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/supporters.html✤ http://firstfolio.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/about.html#contact:

Lucienne Cummings, David De Roure, Nicole Gilroy, Arthur Green, Andrew Honey, Monica Messaggi Kaya, John Pybus, Judith Siefring, Julie Sommerfeldt, Emma Stanford, Matthew Wilcoxson, Pip Willcox

✤ This work is supported under SOCIAM: The Theory and Practice of Social Machines, a programme funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) under grant number EP/J017728/1, and a collaboration between the Universities of Edinburgh, Oxford, and Southampton.

✤ With particular thanks to Giles Bergel, David De Roure, Ian Gadd, Emma Smith, Richard Sheppard, Ségolène Tarte.

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/PipWillcox/butwhyallthisfussreducedsize