The Shakespearean Archive: Experiments in New Media from the Renaissance to Postmodernity
Cambridge University Press, 10/23/2014
EAN 9781107040649, ISBN10: 1107040647
Hardcover, 348 pages, 23.5 x 15.9 x 2 cm
Language: English
Why is Shakespeare so often associated with information technologies and with the idea of archiving itself? Alan Galey explores this question through the entwined histories of Shakespearean texts and archival technologies over the past four centuries. In chapters dealing with the archive, the book, photography, sound, information, and data, Galey analyzes how Shakespeare became prototypical material for publishing experiments, and new media projects, as well as for theories of archiving and computing. Analyzing examples of the Shakespearean archive from the seventeenth century to today, he takes an original approach to Shakespeare and new media that will be of interest to scholars of the digital humanities, Shakespeare studies, archives, and media history. Rejecting the idea that current forms of computing are the result of technical forces beyond the scope of humanist inquiry, this book instead offers a critical prehistory of digitization read through the afterlives of Shakespeare's texts.
1. Introduction
scenes from the prehistory of digitization
2. Leaves of brass
Shakespeare and the idea of the archive
3. The archive and the book
information architectures from Folio to variorum
4. The counterfeit presentments of Victorian photography
5. Inventing Shakespeare's voice
early sound transmission and recording
6. Networks of deep impression
Shakespeare and the modern invention of information
7. Data and the ghosts of materiality
8. Conclusion
sites of Shakespearean memory.