Shakespeare Quarterly

This comment is from Mark Burnett, who couldn’t get the comment function working:

“This is a highly stimulating and exciting essay: I particularly like the ways in which we need to attend to the encoding process in digital humanities as a route back to the materials themselves.

The essay could benefit from some more finessing. For example, in the reflection on information theory, are we also talking about new kinds of collective memory practices that reveal themselves in processes of reproduction? Similarly, what exactly are the new media? The phrase is used frequently, but this essay, and others, never quite gets down to questions of definition. It occurs to me that the concern with numbers could be traced back further – specifically, to the so-called scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. In other words, why go back only to 1949? What happened in between? I’m echoing here Jonathan Hope’s call for a longer historical timeframe but offering an alternative context. Gestures of this kind might be useful in view of the author’s observation that ‘Cultural investments … bestow value’. Value, of course, has its own history of interpretation.”

alan, thanks for this informative and engaging essay.  i’d like to know more about why and how “the message that computing brings an inevitable turn toward…quantitative research” is the result of “a disciplinary sleight-of-hand by which poststructuralist and materialist influences are displaced by an empiricism more amenable to the cyberinfrastructure model of big science and an administered world.”  no doubt this is true! but who is doing the displacing in the academy or in the digital humanities?  are there structural arrangements that might be disrupted (or alternatively instituted) to achieve the goal you suggest in the previous paragraph, i.e., “digital Shakespeare researchers should not feel constrained by the idea that digital technologies are somehow inherently scientific instruments…”

i am always wary of arguments that say or conclude “you should.”  people should do lots of things but they don’t. sometimes people need  incentives or nudges.  sometimes they need institutional or structural change.

arguably, the incentives and the structures currently lead toward “the embrace of an empiricism more amenable to the cyberinfrastructure model of big science and an administered world.”

I do think there’s something a little odd, after such nuanced discussion of Shakespearean material texts, and desire for more such nuance in computer form, to refer to “science” as if it were such a unitary or simplified field. This links with the comment about coding, and the absence of discussion of multi-variant computer texts (I know Bernice Kliman was working on this with the Hamlet online variorum, among others).  Computers are already allowing all sorts of fun combinations of data that complicate our reception of “Shakespeare,” so I find this paragraph–unlike most of this excellent article–feels a bit dated, as if speaking to the last generation rather than this moment in time. It may have to do with the essay’s combination of a carefully situated historical analysis and then present-tense advice without much attention to subsequent scientific theorizing, and I certainly understand why you wouldn’t want to (and don’t need to) go there.  And then back to Auden–the temporal fine distinctions don’t seem to be applied here and following to the responses among humanists or those who have multiple interests in science/engineering/math/computers as well as Shakespeare.  So I’d agree that is an area to think about a bit more in the final version.  Having said that, a very enjoyable, thoughtful, and rich essay-thanks!

Martin, thanks for these very thoughtful comments. I take your first point about “non-overlapping magesteria” and agree that the kind of hybrid–or, if you prefer, continuum-based–approach makes more sense than radical distinctions between humanistic and scientific ways of thinking. Repeating C.P. Snow is not my intent. It may be that I need to clarify my Indean/Judean example, or at least its purpose. I was trying to get at a way of thinking about variants in which our first response isn’t to resolve the ambiguity–to remove noise from signal–but rather to let the ambiguity stand if the evidence warrants it. For the present context, it’s the difference between thinking of computing as primarily a problem-solving or problem-expanding activity.

I understand and appreciate your second point, about allographic texts, but can’t entirely agree with you. Your thought experiment is a good one, but I’d answer with one of my own. Imagine if our example wasn’t Sophocles or Milton or Beethoven, but a Raymond Chandler detective story published in a cheap pulp magazine in the 1930s, surrounded by ads and other lurid paratexts. Then imagine the same Chandler story gets canonized and reprinted in a Norton anthology, on high-quality paper (well, imagine a Norton with high-quality paper…) and without ads or the lurid pulp-fiction cover. The sequence of letters might be exactly the same in both versions, but I think they would be different texts because I take “text” to mean more than the letters and language. That doesn’t mean one can’t reprint the Chandler story in a Norton anthology, but it does require us to be alive to what’s lost and gained in transmission.

I think we’re just reasoning from differing premises here. For my part, I’m working from the direction of media-specific analysis like Katherine Hayles’s, and from D.F. McKenzie before that. (McKenzie’s answer to W.W. Greg in the former’s Panizzi lecture is relevant here.) I don’t mean to dismiss the idea of allographic works of art, only to resist the idea that all texts are essentially that way–or, more to the point, that we have to accept a specific set of premises about language in order to be digital humanists. There are some theoretical questions worth keeping open, and the relation of language to inscription is one of them.

It may be that I need to respond to your comments more fully in the article, and I think you’ve pointed to a way the conclusion could be better. Thanks again for your comments, which I’ve enjoyed thinking about.

Thanks, Jonathan — these are very helpful references, and lead into the fascinating territory that Renaissance Computer helped open up. Wilkins is especially interesting. If I can find any room to expand, I’ll try to address this thread.

Thanks, Andy — that’s a great question, and one to think about during revisions, to be sure.

One answer that comes to mind is that the idea of the single, definitive digital resource should be as untenable as the definitive Shakespeare edition. The ideal situation–at least for scholars, if not for publishers–will be a field where more than one digital project attacks the same problem from different angles. In other words, I’d like to see more digital projects that functioned like essays, and could readily be created and received as such. However, that would call for smaller projects and more focused collaborations–or more eclectic individual projects–which seems the opposite of where the field is going right now. Most of the discussion, in North America at least, seems focused on scaling the digital humanities up, not down.

Another answer might be that digital editions should start looking more like experiments again, as we imagined they would back in the nineties. Once we started actually building them, I think some of the adventurous spirit got lost along the way as best practices and funding models came into the picture. It’s strange to think that the printed Oxford Middleton is more experimental than many of the digital editions coming out at the same time.

Maybe the simplest answer is that if we recognize computing essentialism for what it is, then it’s not so much the how that would change in digital editing as the who. I like the idea that Shakespeareans interested in starting digital projects could undertake a lot of the code-level work themselves, rather than hiring information professionals to support them (and applying for the funding to do so, and restructuring their project to get the funding, and so on…). For this to be worth their time, however, the field has to recognize code work as valuable intellectual labour, and in turn the work has to be done in a way that actually provokes new knowledge of some kind. Matt Kirschenbaum had a good piece along these lines in the Chronicle a while back.

Thanks again for this comment. I’ll be thinking more about it in the coming weeks.

Thanks for this thought-provoking comment, Jason, which is very much to the point. There’s been some interesting research on programming languages and human languages, especially in places like Russia and Brazil where there are lots of programmers. Of course, the value of programming languages and markup schemes, like any formalism, is the interplay between affordance and constraint. That’s why encoding assignments in classrooms can work well as intellectual exercises. It gets tricky, though, when one has to face the fact that there’s little point in encoding if you can’t share the results with others, which is where standards come in. It’s the classic DH trade-off.

This is a very thoughtful piece with a lot of interesting ideas, but I’m not sure I buy into its main ideas. The chronological parallels between bibliography and information theory are persuasive.  But I could imagine a humanistically inflected reading of information theory that would accommodate concerns of humanities scholars, rather than setting up a counter paradigm. 
Take the Indian/Judaean crux. If you are empirically or probabilistically oriented you might say something like this:

The palaeographical evidence is inconclusive. You cannot argue from it to a clear choice
Both readings make sense
It is unlikely that they are authorial variants

As for the first, the palaeographical evidence is very often decisive in the sense that you can establish with absolute certainty or very high probability that there is an original reading X. But it is also common for palaeographic evidence to be inconclusive. Evidence is often fragmentary, and where evidence is fragmentary, conclusions are hard
As for the second, it is not uncommon for different readings to make good sense or sense enough so that you cannot rule out one meaning from context.
Finally, it seems to me highly unlikely that an author who either intended Judaean or Indian would have the other reading as a variant. This is different from, say, the two reactions of Brutus to the death of Portia. These could be called a hard Stoic reading (Brutus has no feelings) or a soft Stoic reading (Brutus seeks to controls his feelings). Both are plausible. A reading that seeks to incorporate both of them is highly implausible, but it is quite plausible that a playwright would have these alternate versions and might never decide between them. 

In other words, you can accommodate a great deal of ambiguity, polysemy, and what have you within a framework of information theory without having to invoke some completely other paradigm or arguing that the humanities and the sciences inhabit ‘non-overlapping magisteria’, to use a term from Catholic doctrine. That doesn’t mean humanists should be like scientists. It does mean that arguing in the sciences and arguing in the humanities can and should be accommodated within one broad framework and conditions of proof or validation that run across a spectrum rather than involve existential gaps. 

My other disagreement involves the idea that writing is essentially bound to some material form. Nelson Goodman argued many years ago that some works of art are “allographic”: a sonnet or a piece of music can be encoded in an infinite variety of ways without loss of information. That is just a fancy way of the common sense idea that when you write down a text there are some differences that make no difference and other differences that change the text. Some fairly strong commitment to that view seems to underlie the whole business of writing.  There are practical modifications of that view. You might argue that you always learn something from the typography and layout of a first edition, just as you might learn something from a score. But neither Milton’s sonnet nor Beethoven’s Für Elise is tied to some union of form and content, if by form you mean the details of notation. These are fundamentally arbitrary and could be different than they are without changing the meaning of the text. 
Here is a thought experiment: if tomorrow we discovered a papyrus of a Sophoclean play written in the Old Attic alphabet, it would be a terrific boon to scholarship. We would discover all manner of things and would be extrapolate from the differences in that play to others. But we would also be able to mark with precision where the readings in our notation differ from the readings in the papyrus, where they do not differ, or where differences result from ambiguities in Old Attic orthography. But all these analyses rest on the fundamental fact that the text under discussion is an allographic object.

Like Andrew I enjoyed reading this – I wondered if your historical contextualisation could be extended back even further.  I think that historians of binary code regard work by Francis Bacon (and John Wilkins) and then (separately) Liebnitz as foundational (though I’m no expert and could be misreading it) – see: Volker Aschoff, 1983, ‘The early history of binary code’, IEEE Communications Magazine, 21.1, pp. 4-10  (Institute of Electrical Engineers); and
F.G. Heath, 1972, ‘Origins of the binary code’, Scientific American, 227, pp. 76-83

also possibly of interest:
H. Neville Davies, 1967a, ‘The history of a cipher, 1602-1772′, Music and Letters, 48.4, pp. 325-9

It would also help if humanists could be brought to understand that encoding and coding — markup systems and programming languages — are not fixed and immutable, but highly manipulable and extendable. An encoding standard does not have to be slavishly used as if it were akin to the laws of physics — there is nothing preventing, for example, a Shakespearean scholar from modifying or creating a markup scheme for encoding a Shakespeare play designed to fulfill a specific interpretative aim. Similarly, an examination of a programming language and its ‘dialect’ descendants reveals that codes can become, as you say of computers in the previous paragraph, “whatever [one] can make of them.”