Networks of Deep Impression: Shakespeare and the History of Information
Alan Galey
University of Toronto
Permalink for this paragraph 0 [The version appearing here is a draft and, at the request of the author, should not be cited. The final version of the essay will appear in Shakespeare Quarterly 61.3 (2010). A final version, suitable for citation, will be linked from this page when it appears.]
Permalink for this paragraph 0 Abstract
Permalink for this paragraph 0 Shakespeare’s texts have come to stand as both an ideal and a limit-case for the concept of information, which emerged from a late twentieth-century cultural formation that still dominates current thinking about the design of digital tools. This essay aims to challenge computing essentialism—the idea that computers have a single nature that we must either take or leave—by exploring the prehistory of Shakespeare and new media, particularly the postwar confluence of bibliography and information theory. By understanding this crucial episode of computing’s cultural history, we can recognize its consequences for the technologies that digital Shakespeare projects use in the present.
[...] Dean of the Faculty of Information). I hoped to have time today to read Alan Galey’s essay “Networks of Deep Impression: Shakespeare and the History of Information,” a forthcoming special issue of the Shakespeare Quarterly, “Shakespeare and New Media,” [...]
Martin’s comments open up a host of concerns that Alan would clearly do well to address. I, for one, found the essay wonderfully informative and illuminating, and, what’s more, perfectly tuned to the level of address needed for this kind of exercise.