"Covetous to parley with so sweet a frontis-peece": Illustration in Early Modern English Play-Texts

This dissertation studies visual artifacts associated with early modern theatre and book culture, and through them examines acts of communication in the marketplace. These artifacts, illustrated play-text title pages from the period 1600 to 1660, provide scholars with an opportunity to better understand the discursive power of theatre and subjects associated with drama in seventeenth-century London. This work offers a set of case studies that demonstrate how title page imagery and its circulation can contribute to our understanding of contemporary theatre culture, and addresses questions of intention, production and distribution. As well, it offers insights into early modern modes of constructing visualization. These artifacts served not only as visual reminders or interpretations of the dramatic works they represented, but were also used as powerful marketing tools that enhanced the cultural capital of the plays throughout London. The title pages were used as posters, tacked to the walls of the booksellers’ shops; the woodcuts were also repurposed, and incorporated into other popular publications such as broadside ballads, which retold the plots of the plays in musical form and were sold on city street corners. These connections raise questions about early modern forms of marketing used by publishers, and challenge the widely accepted belief that images held little value in the society and in the culture of print of the period. In addition, the distribution of these illustrations challenges the widespread conviction that early modern English culture was iconophobic, and suggests that seventeenth-century English society embraced rather than spurned visual media. Methodologically, this study is built on the foundations laid by scholars of English theatre and print culture. Within those fields, however, it has been customary to view these title page illustrations as inferior forms of representation, especially in comparison to their continental counterparts. By using tools from visual rhetoric to expand on how and what these images communicate, I am able to show the important functions they performed, and the distinct and playful way they represent complex relationships between stage and page, audience and performance, reading and spectating. These readings, in turn, enrich our historical understanding of the cultures of print and theatre, and build upon our knowledge of the interactions between these rich and important fields. Each chapter explores theoretical and contextual questions that pertain to some aspect of each illustration, as well as examining whether individual illustrations can inform us further about early modern theatrical performance practices. The introduction surveys the relevant field and introduces the theoretical resources that will be used in the subsequent chapters. Chapter Two examines the 1633 edition of Arden of Faversham and the question of whether the action in the illustration pertains to the play or to a broadside ballad that appeared in the same year. The third chapter provides a theoretical analysis of the performance of violence in the woodcut for The Spanish Tragedy, and how emphatic elements in the image may demonstrate the influence of theatrical performance upon the artist. Chapter Four explores the relationship between the title page of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and the concept of celebrity in relation to the Tarltonesque clown character who dominates the action of the image. Chapter Five considers the problematic relationship between theatre, politics and satire in the competing engraved title pages for A Game at Chess. The conclusion draws together the findings, and points to other aspects of early modern print and theatre cultures to which they pertain

Introduction to the Digital Humanities Summer Institute Colloquium Special Issue

This is the introduction to the DHSI Colloquium Special Issue. The DHSI Colloquium serves as a forum for emerging scholars to present their own research.This special issue showcases some of the research presented at the Institute in 2014

Introduction to the Digital Humanities Summer Institute Colloquium Special Issue

This is the introduction to the DHSI Colloquium Special Issue. The DHSI Colloquium serves as a forum for emerging scholars to present their own research.This special issue showcases some of the research presented at the Institute in 2014

Purpose and Purpose-Built: Considering Multi-Purposality in Developing a Linked Historical Gazetteer of London.

English Renaissance Theatre is generally dated between 1576-1642: circumscribed by the construction of the Theatre in 1576 and the closing of the public playhouses by Act of Parliament in 1642. ‘Found’ London performance locations in taverns, churches, legal and professional buildings, aristocratic houses, not to mention the streets and waterways in the city - suggest amateurish or provincial performance styles that are somehow less important without those purpose-built theatres. Many theatre historians, including David Bevington, Janelle Jenstad, Sally-Beth MacLean, Scott McMillin, and Alan Nelson, have demonstrated the importance of London performance beyond the purpose-built playhouse, proving that theatre-going for 16th and 17th century Londoners was rooted to the topography of London itself and not consigned to a few amphitheatres in adjacent liberties. The work being done by the REED London team, digitally amplifying the research produced in print by the Records of Early English Drama, re-avers that audiences expected to witness professional entertainments in interior and exterior spaces throughout the city, and that these spaces were appropriated for performance at the same time that they were in use for their defined purposes: The Bell Inn Yard on Gracious Street, Merchant Taylors’ Hall in Cornhill, Temple Bar, the Tiltyard at Whitehall, even the Thames itself were all regularly used for performances but are not so well known for this as for their more primary functions. As we in REED London compile our place entities in anticipation of sharing our gazetteer with other projects engaged in the study of historical London, we find ourselves confronted with this multi-purposality. We see this type of platial complexity as important to the development of materials to be connected to the semantic web. In this poster we will put forward a model for how such qualitative information can be integrated into the process of publishing historical place entities

Space, Scale, and Scope in the Linked Dataverse: LINCS and the Map of Early Modern London—REED London Online Alignment Project

A key goal of the LINCS project (Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship) is to create pathways between datasets while preserving both the nuances intrinsic to humanities data and the research questions that have produced diverse datasets. Our work of aligning the gazetteers of the Map of Early Modern London and REED London Online (the "MoEML-RLO Gazetteer Alignment project") invites us to confront the major conceptual challenges that come with merging and connecting data across projects. MoEML is a descriptive gazetteer and map platform with drawing tools, finding aids, and toponymically rich texts. RLO makes discoverable a broad collection of London-centric archival materials referring to performance, music, and theatre. Our projects, with their overlapping but distinct spatial and temporal scope, offer a fruitful opportunity to test the real interoperability of two datasets

Combining the Factoid Model with TEI: examples and conceptual challenges

The Factoid Model arose out of various prosopographies undertaken in partnerships with King’s College London’s Department of Digital Humanities (KCL DH). It first appeared in a rudimentary form in the 1990s, but in more recent times has stimulated significant interest from historians who are trying to apply formal data structures such as RDF to historical ideas. Its central idea is the factoid which has been described as “a spot in a source that says something about a person or persons.” (https://www.kcl.ac.uk/factoid-prosopography/about). By being this "spot in a source", the factoid acts as a kind of nexus, or gathering point, between the historical source, the historical persons, and other aspects of the historical society being studied: historical events, of course, but also, for example, what occupations or offices operated in that society. Perhaps because the factoid model comes out of the paradigm of highly structured data, the text itself, the “spot”, that is the factoid has not been explicitly given in any of KCL DH’s factoid prosopographies. TEI, of course, has been developed to represent things about textual sources. Since the factoid model is centered on spots in textual sources, is it possible to link the factoid concept to its text by bringing the two structural approaches together? TEI provides a “personography” approach to historical persons in the Guidelines, section 13: see a particular striking example in section 13.3.2.2 (Personal Events), but not all of the structure represented in the factoid model is demonstrated there. In this presentation have examined how factoids can be represented completely in terms of slightly extended TEI markup, drawing examples from experimental markup that has been applied to the materials in the Records of Early English Drama (London) project. We also introduce some of the conceptual and technical challenges that arise from this approach

Accounting for Accounting: REED London and the Development of a Financial Transaction Encoding Schema

The REED London project, a collaborative international research project involving scholars in the US, Canada, and the UK, aims to make publicly available an expansive corpus of documentary evidence of performance, music, and theatre in London from 1200 to 1650. By encoding and analyzing these historical documents we are discovering new connections among London citizens and the business of performance as well as the productions themselves. The presenters of this proposal are focusing, in particular, on questions to do with revealing information about financial transactions, and are using a subset of the records that explicitly capture the transference of funds (in terms of goods, services, and the obligations undertaken by communities to underwrite performance costs). Considering the complex accounting methods employed by different communities, we have established a model that allows for extraction of meaningful information across subsets of the data, while maintaining the rich meaning behind the documents. Over the past year, Simon has developed a custom TEI schema that distinguishes data from the ‘readable’ records as presented in CWRC. This encoded information is then converted into tabular format, for the purpose of analyzing the data both numerically and textually using Tableau data visualization software. The conversion is important because it enables researchers to interrogate the records for both the tracking of financial transactions and the semantic context within them

CFP: Debates in Digital Humanities Pedagogy

This is the Call for Papers for Debates in Digital Humanities Pedagogy, which was originally published in January 2019 at http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/cfps/cfp_2019_pedagogy.html. The site no longer exists, so we are depositing it here for archival and citational purposes

The Invisible Labor of DH Pedagogy

In this essay, we examine the invisibility of pedagogical labor in digital humanities. We argue that the complexities of teaching DH require modes of instruction and effort that are unusual, uncounted, and undertheorized. Unlike publications or citation counts, it is difficult to quantify or to review. Why does DH teaching involve so much extra effort? What is it about either those who teach or the subject itself that leads people to go above and beyond in the classroom? Drawing on an international survey of the DH pedagogues, we consider three particular forms of invisible labor that are common with DH: guest speakers in courses, multiple instructors in the classroom, and the practice of self-publishing materials related to one’s pedagogy. We then inquire as to the reason for so much additional labor and trace its cause to both the way that universities value labor and the values that the digital humanities community professes to hold. For this last point, we draw on Lisa Spiro’s “‘This is Why We Fight’” and show that enacting these values results in this labor’s simultaneous (in)visibility