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Digitizing Shakespeare

Peter Donaldson

In the past 10 years, I have spent much of my time developing electronic resources for Shakespeare teaching and research. The Shakespeare Electronic Archive group which I direct has assembled a rich collection of electronic texts, high resolution digital images of early editions and works of art, as well as several films. Hamlet on the Ramparts (http://shea.mit.edu/ramparts) presents a selection of these materials free of charge on the World Wide Web. With iCampus funding we have developed a Cross Media Annotation System (XMAS), which has made it possible for the first time to include video citations defined in "real time" in on-line discussion of Shakespeare films. We are now adding production photographs and other images from the collections of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Shakespeare Centre Library to the archive, and plan to include many of these in MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) site. If we can find continued funding, there is a rich future for digital Shakespeare at MIT.

My entry into this world began with a specific teaching problem: namely, how to make best use of Shakespeare performances on film in a discussion class. Shakespeare's plays were scripts for performance first, literary texts secondarily, yet the traditional Shakespeare class was almost always a text-based course. Film – especially multiple film versions of a single play – offered the possibility of close study of one of the most central aspects of Shakespeare's work: its open textured quality. Though sometimes called "universality," I prefer to think of this quality as Shakespeare's seemingly limitless power to inspire divergent interpretation, and I thought that this could be understood best through group discussion of the specifics of text and film in conjunction – with evidence and examples available during the class hour for consultation. Just as we learn "close reading" of a sonnet, I wanted the complex interplay of text and performance to be something a class could read together, closely and carefully. That meant being able to find and play film sequences as quickly as we find page numbers in a book.

The first medium that showed promise was the now obsolete capacitance electronic disc (CED), a pre-digital video disc played with a stylus like an LP. We bought our first player because, in those pre-media study days, we thought our children were watching too much television. CED titles included classics that were also fun to watch, such as Modern Times, City Lights, Some Like Iit Hot, Casablanca, The Big Sleep, The Searchers, Henry V, Hamlet. CEDs succeeded because, using the stylus control and the minute counter, we could find and replay sequences we were interested in 15-30 seconds – quickly enough to sustain family discussion. When my eight-year-old daughter wrote out a short list of questions about the narrative of The Big Sleep, it seemed the right time to try the Shakespeare discs with my students. An index card with the minute numbers of key scenes provided a means of studying text and video in close conjunction.

After reading descriptions of a Media Lab laserdisc project in which users could simulate the experience of driving through Aspen, Colorado, turning at intersections at will, I began to think of the materials for Shakespeare study not only as a potentially legible text, but as a navigable environment. In 1992, with a seed grant from Steve Lerman's post-Athena educational technology group, I joined with Janet Murray and Larry Friedlander (Stanford) to try to make the dream of a Shakespeare environment in which all materials were linked to corresponding lines of text a reality.

Though we had a unified vision, we quickly found that copyright and technical issues made a mobile, sometimes nomadic strategy for achieving that vision a necessity. In one project, we linked all Shakespeare films published on laserdisc to their respective texts - one link for every three lines or so. Reading a passage in the text of the play on one screen, the student could click to start the corresponding film sequence playing on another. Using stacked players, we were able to compare passages. We also created electronic "notecards" so students could easily insert video citations into their homework and essays. Students used these tools to do remarkable work – systematically discussing Laurence Olivier's hand gestures in Henry V, analyzing alternate performances of the same scenes in multiple versions, approaching old fashioned thematic topics (such as "Nature in Hamlet") freshly by seeing how twentieth-century directors and performers struggled with the change in meaning this word has undergone since the sixteenth century.

The second project was a prototype archive of texts, images and films, intended at first as a workstation installation, and later migrated to the Web. Here we had no ready published source of images to plug into a disc machine, but were highly reliant on permissions from the rare book libraries that owned the folios, quartos, and works of art and illustration we photographed and digitized. Also, a multimedia archive of this size exceeded the limits of our classroom technology. The Shakespeare Electronic Archive (http://shea.mit.edu) has grown to include several complete electronic texts of all plays, images of all pages and all variants of the Shakespeare First Folio and most early quartos, all extant copies of Hamlet First and Second Quartos, 1500 works of art and illustration relevant to Hamlet, and several films. It still requires a password, though an impressive subset of the materials are freely available on Hamlet on the Ramparts.

Our current projects continue the tasks of building a large comprehensive cross media archive, as well as creating flexible on-line environments for using multimedia materials.

In order to move ahead on the copyright question, we are gradually populating the archive with materials for which we have permission for worldwide access. The University of Pennsylvania's generous policy of making its materials available free of charge has helped us here, and we are beginning a promising partnership with the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) which will add a new dimension to our work. This summer we began a pilot project in which we selected and digitized 200 images from the RSC collections. Publicity stills, photographic records of productions, prompt books, and other materials will enable us to study RSC productions more closely than ever before in our Shakespeare classes, and will be available worldwide on MIT's OpenCourseWare site. This project, in fact, would not have been possible without MIT's lead in establishing a new emphasis on the digital commons worldwide through OCW. Other institutions are impressed and convinced by MIT's example. A second project with the RSC in collaboration with Comparative Media Studies (CMS) and the MetaMedia Project is a new kind of production archive in which the evolution of a theatrical production would be traced from earliest discussions through rehearsal and performance. CMS graduate student Clara Fernandez has completed an impressive prototype for this project, using materials from Professor Janet Sonenberg's innovative deconstructed production, Hamlets, performed at MIT last February.

On the on-line environment side, we have developed new tools for using archival materials across all media in the classroom, building support for on-site as well as remote annotation, discussion, and collaboration by students. The iCampus project, XMAS, began as one of the launch projects for the MIT-Microsoft iCampus Initiative. We worked at first in close collaboration with Microsoft engineers and last year our MIT team – a gifted group of former students, current undergraduates, and staff members who are all devoted to working in a unified team of humanists and programmers – took over the development effort. DVDs are the initial medium supported by the system. As with laserdiscs, the computer acts as a more sophisticated remote control, recording start and stop points and weaving these into student-created discussions, commentary, and film/text essays that can be presented in class or shared remotely. The next phase of XMAS will include support for multimedia essay writing as well as discussion, image collections, electronic texts, and urls as well as DVDs. With XMAS we are very close to the goal of combining a multimedia archive with flexible learning and communication tools in one system.

Shakespeare materials constitute the most comprehensive potential multimedia archive in the humanities – not only are print and illustrative materials copious, but there is now a hundred-year film record, culminating in a recent wave of superb productions from Branagh's Henry V to Shakespeare in Love. Building the archive and devising new protocols for the performance archives of the future are compelling goals for our project. But equally compelling is the goal of using such collections to make possible new kinds of discussion, conversation, and collaboration, enriched by rapid and comparative access to materials across all media.

Many MIT humanities projects, including pioneering work in foreign language and culture and in comparative media studies, share the Shakespeare Project's vision of "the archive in the classroom," combining the creating of digital collections with an intense focus on the use of digital resources in teaching and research. Collectively, we are transforming teaching and research in the humanities. The present moment, in which the d'Arbeloff Fund and the iCampus initiative have nurtured groundbreaking new work, and in which the OpenCourseWare project commands worldwide attention, holds the promise of greatly extending the impact of our work, and extending recognition of MIT as a center of innovation not only in science and technology, but in the humanities as well.
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