Introduction: Reinventing Shakespeare in the digital humanities

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Acknowledgements

Even the smallest editorial endeavour can reflect the effort of a significant number, and this dedicated issue of Shakespeare most certainly embodies that maxim. The editors would like to thank the authors for bridging different worlds so energetically, and those who have provided support and advice, including Anne Correia, Gabriel Egan, Brett Hirsch, Lisa Hopkins, John Lavagnino, Sally-Beth McLean, our anonymous reviewers and all those at Shakespeare.

Notes

1. Two caveats must be observed here. First, there is doubt as to whether the dramatic moment of the cylinder's playback upon opening could have happened as the popular accounts describe. Read and Welch questions whether the apparatus required for playback was available on the occasion, and suggests the text attributed to the recording actually came from a transcription originally sealed with the graphophone (31). Second, we know now that the earliest surviving recorded sound is unfortunately not Shakespeare but the French folk song “Au Claire de la Lune,” recorded on paper in 1860; see Rosen.

2. On the function of the clip in Shakespeare classrooms, see also Osbourne.

3. On Busa's work and the history of humanities computing, see Hockey.

4. For general introductions to these fields, see Schreibman et al., as well as McCarty, Humanities Computing, and Rockwell; a good entry-point to the diverse approaches within the field is the Blackwell Companion to Digital Humanities, which, in the spirit of the field it describes, is available online on an open-access basis at <http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/>.

5. For useful introductions to the idea of modelling see McCarty, “Knowing” and “Modeling”, and for a more detailed discussion see his Humanities Computing (20–72).

6. On the virtual Midsummer Night's Dream performance, see Matsuba, and Matsuba and Roehl in References. On the Synthetic Worlds Initiative at Indiana University at <http://swi.indiana.edu/>.