Digital Shakespeare Monday 16 May 2011 Workshop and Talks SWANSEA UNIVERSITY 4th floor SmallTalk Room, Faraday Building Organised by Dr. David M. Berry and Dr. Tom Cheesman Few dispute that digital technology is fundamentally changing the way in which we engage in the research process. Indeed, it is becoming more and more evident that research is increasingly being mediated through digital technology. Many argue that this mediation is slowly beginning to change what it means to undertake research, affecting both the epistemologies and ontologies that underlie a research programme (sometimes conceptualised as 'close' versus 'distant' reading, see Moretti 2000). Of course, this development is variable depending on disciplines and research agenda, with some more reliant on digital technology than others, but it is rare to find an academic today who had no access to digital technology as part of the research activity and there remains fewer means for the non-digital scholar to undertake research in the modern university (see JAH 2008). Not to mention the ubiquity of email, Google searches and bibliographic databases which become increasingly crucial as more of the worlds libraries are scanned and placed online. These, of course, also produce their own specific problems, such as huge quantities of articles, texts and data suddenly available at the researcher's fingertips, indeed, "It is now quite clear that historians will have to grapple with abundance, not scarcity. Several million books have been digitized...and nearly every day we are confronted with a new digital historical resource of almost unimaginable size" (JAH 2008). In this workshop we will look at how we might use the new digital tools of text aggregation, processing and information or data visualisation to provide the ways of looking at and thinking about Shakespeare. From making data patterns, to narrativising through algorithms and visualisation we aim to examine how these approaches and methods can assist in undertaking humanities research into textual materials. Programme 11.30-12.00 Registration (4th floor SmallTalk Room, Faraday Building) 12 noon: Introduction and Welcome (David Berry) 12.15-12.50: The Swansea VVV Project: Visualising Version Variation (Tom Cheesman) 13.00-13.45: Understanding through Visualisation (Stephan Thiel, Potsdam) 13.45-14.00: Coffee Break 14.00-14.30: Shakespeare in Arabic (Sameh Hanna, Salford) 14.30-15.00: Visualising Textual Corpora (Geng Zhao, Swansea University) 15.15-16.15: Computational Information Design (Stephan Thiel, Potsdam) 16.15: Reflections on the workshop (Tom Cheesman, Robert S. Laramee) 16.45: Ends There is no charge for the workshop but as space is limited please email d.m.berry@Swansea.ac.uk if you are interested in attending. http://www.delightedbeauty.org/ Funded by the Research Institute for Arts and Humanities (RIAH) --- Dr. David M. Berry Department of Political and Cultural Studies Room JC015 James Callaghan Building Swansea University Singleton Campus Swansea SA2 8PP Tel: 01792 602633 http://www.swan.ac.uk/staff/academic/ArtsHumanities/berryd/