Shakespeare Quarterly

[...] [1] [3] Hope, Jonathan, and Michael Witmore. “The Hundredth Psalm to the Tune of ‘Green Sleeves’: Digital Approaches to Shakespeare’s Language of Genre.” Shakespeare Quarterly 61.3 (2010). Also available online. [...]

[...] to Shakespeare’s Language of Genre.” Shakespeare Quarterly 61.3 (2010). Also available online. Share this:TwitterFacebookLike this:LikeBe the first to like [...]

[...] Witmore’s similar clustering studies using Docuscope. See also this draft version of Witmore and Hope’s forthcoming piece in Shakespeare [...]

[...] In this case, we learn that Docuscope is sensitive to human editorial intervention in texts. So sensitive, in fact, that it produced an almost complete clustering of Shakespeare’s plays in the larger group of 320 that we profiled in the online draft of our “Hundredth Psalm” article. [...]

[...] Hope and I participated in. We received some terrific feedback, mostly from Shakespeareans, on the article that was posted to Media Commons–feedback that helped us rewrite the essay for the print [...]

[...] that are, in a sense, built into the physical system of writing? I think people who are doing iterative criticism need to have an intelligent answer to this question and analysis of its underlying analogy. My [...]

I like the “iterative” idea in this essay, since drama is itself an iterative art. I think the authors are appropriately enthusiastic about their methods while retaining a sense of humanistic purpose (evinced, for example, in the idea that the point is to return to the text as readers refreshed by our digital excurses). An impressive achievement.

On the terminology question, I tend to prefer Steve Ramsay’s “algorithmic criticism” to “iterative criticism” since the more general term “algorithmic” can refer to processes more complex than iteration. The approach you’re describing in this essay deserves the more flexible term. “Iteration” doesn’t quite do it justice. (While we’re adapting the vocabulary of programming, I wonder what “recursive criticism” might look like. You’d need bigger screenshots…)

I’m reading this essay paragraph by paragraph, so my comments may address matters that are taken up in more detail later on. What an exciting prospect this abstract opens up. I did find myself pausing over the phrase “iterative criticism.” “Iterative” seems, on the face of it, too broad to cover the quite specific features that Docuscope is tracking–but I’m not sure what to propose in its place. As for “criticism,” are we dealing here with a critical methodology, or a particular technique being deployed as part of a larger critical methodology?

Yeah you see my ruse–a poor one–any word you choose to self-describe will be problematic here in terms of the knowledge claim that will get attributed to the essay.  I like Jonathan’s defense of portrait (and the indefinite article) and I take the point, Mike, that the description (rendering???) of the genre “encompasses all visual patterning” and that you’d prefer to understand the method asa re-description rather than a genetic analysis that tests the modeling of genres.  That said, when you metaphorize the product of the re-description “stuff” happens.

I really like the essay and am having fun slow commenting / thinking about it–coming off a reading of Benjamin on translation alongside Latour on translation…so that’s my point of arrival.