Course Outline: Revenge Tragedy

English 412 is, in its official description, "A survey of drama from 1558 to 1603, including works by William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe." In this version from 2017, students focused on six revenge tragedies, the blockbuster genre of the Elizabethan theatre: plays filled with bloody violence, elevated rhetoric, and ghosts imploring justice. Like classic Hollywood films, revenge tragedies demanded more collaborations among writers than any other genre -- famous playwrights like Marlowe and Shakespeare, and the lesser-known Thomas Kyd, George Peele, John Marston, Henry Chettle, and Thomas Middleton. Students learned about their collaborations and their competitions for audiences, and their tragedies' adaptations of ancient sources to modern contexts

“Wear your eyes thus”: Toward a Cognitive Ecology of VR Shakespeare

How will immersive virtual reality (VR) cognitively affect the audiences who interface with it to interpret Shakespeare performances? Current theories of performance and cognition are based on theatre and film audiences, but VR performances combine features of both media: a disembodied spectral presence, like a theatrical audience; and a flexible range of locations and vantage points, like a film audience. This paper imagines how VR might adapt a sequence from Orson Welles' 1952 film *Othello*. It asks not only what would be lost and gained in the transition, but what cognitive ecology results from a medium that limits our interaction with and our movements within a performed narrative

Augmented Criticism, Extensible Archives, and the Progress of Renaissance Studies

In the three decades since the rise of New Historicism, Renaissance studies has progressed through extensions of scholars’ archival reach to new objects for new interpretations. The future will bring expansions on a larger scale, like those we now witness in English print archives. Machine-readable transcriptions of some fifty thousand texts now enable scholars to use algorithms that tell us things about them that are true, yet can only be known in the future. This is an argument not for an algorithmic criticism but for an augmented criticism, in which human judgments are the origin and outcome of algorithmic research methods. It sketches the emergent methods that are possible only in 2015, yet will do for the archival humanities what telescopes did for astronomy.Durant les trois décennies qui ont suivi l’émergence de la nouvelle histoire, les études de la Renaissance ont développé grâce à un travail approfondi d’archives de nouvelles données à interpréter. Des développements similaires de plus grande ampleur nous attendent, tels que ceux que nous observons dans l’étude des archives imprimées anglaises. Des transcriptions pouvant être analysées par des logiciels permettent maintenant aux chercheurs d’utiliser des algorithmes révélant de nouveaux faits réels, et pourtant inaccessibles avant aujourd’hui. Il s’agit d’un argument non pas en faveur de la critique algorithmique, mais en faveur d’une critique plus vigilante, assurant que le jugement humain est bien au centre des hypothèses et des résultats des méthodes de recherche algorithmique. Cet article fait un portrait des méthodes émergentes qui ne sont possibles qu’en 2015, et qui pourraient avoir le même effet que le télescope pour l’astronomie

WordHoard

This is a review of WordHoard.&nbsp

Augmented Criticism, Extensible Archives, and the Progress of Renaissance Studies

In the three decades since the rise of New Historicism, Renaissance studies has progressed through extensions of scholars’ archival reach to new objects for new interpretations. The future will bring expansions on a larger scale, like those we now witness in English print archives. Machine-readable transcriptions of some fifty thousand texts now enable scholars to use algorithms that tell us things about them that are true, yet can only be known in the future. This is an argument not for an algorithmic criticism but for an augmented criticism, in which human judgments are the origin and outcome of algorithmic research methods. It sketches the emergent methods that are possible only in 2015, yet will do for the archival humanities what telescopes did for astronomy. Durant les trois décennies qui ont suivi l’émergence de la nouvelle histoire, les études de la Renaissance ont développé grâce à un travail approfondi d’archives de nouvelles données à interpréter. Des développements similaires de plus grande ampleur nous attendent, tels que ceux que nous observons dans l’étude des archives imprimées anglaises. Des transcriptions pouvant être analysées par des logiciels permettent maintenant aux chercheurs d’utiliser des algorithmes révélant de nouveaux faits réels, et pourtant inaccessibles avant aujourd’hui. Il s’agit d’un argument non pas en faveur de la critique algorithmique, mais en faveur d’une critique plus vigilante, assurant que le jugement humain est bien au centre des hypothèses et des résultats des méthodes de recherche algorithmique. Cet article fait un portrait des méthodes émergentes qui ne sont possibles qu’en 2015, et qui pourraient avoir le même effet que le télescope pour l’astronomie