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Tag: Shakespeare Quarterly

  • Shakespeare Quarterly 61.3 Figures

    The color figures below correspond to those published in black and white in the print edition of Jonathan Hope and Michael Witmore, “‘The Hundredth Psalm to the Tune of ‘Green Sleeves’: Digital Approaches to Shakespeare’s Language of Genre,” Shakespeare Quarterly 61.3 (fall 2010), Special Issue: New Media Approaches to Shakespeare, edited by Katherine Rowe. These figures can also be found at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Memorial library server.

    Figure 1 (above): A total of 776 pieces of Shakespeare’s plays from the First Folio, each piece consisting of 1,000 words, rated on two scaled PCs (1 and 4). The cumulative proportion of variation accounted for by the first four principal components is 12.33 percent, with component 1 accounting for 3.83 percent and component 4 accounting for 2.35 percent.

    Figure 2 (above): Loadings biplot for scaled PCs 1 and 4 used to create the scatterplot in Figure 1.

    Figure 3 (above): Docuscope screenshot of exemplary Comic strings from Twelfth Night, 3.1. “SelfDisclosure” and “FirstPerson” strings appear in red; “Uncertainty” in orange; “DenyDisclaim” in cyan; “DirectAddress” in blue; “LanguageReference” in violet.

    Figure 4 (above): A total of 767 1,000-word pieces of the Folio plays rated on scaled PCs 1 and 4. This image is the same as Figure 1, except that all the plays are displayed as red dots with the exception of Othello, which is displayed as blue dots and collects mostly in the upper-right-hand quadrant where the Comedies tend to cluster.

    Figure 5 (above): Docuscope screenshot illustrating exemplary Comic strings from Othello, 3.3. “SelfDisclosure” and “FirstPerson” strings appear in red; “Uncertainty” in orange; “DenyDisclaim” in cyan; “DirectAddress” in blue.

    Figure 6 (above): Docuscope screenshot illustrating exemplary Comic strings from Othello, 4.2. “SelfDisclosure” and “FirstPerson” strings appear in red; “Uncertainty” in orange; “DenyDisclaim” in cyan; “DirectAddress” in blue; “LanguageReference” in violet.

    Figure 7 (above): Docuscope screenshot illustrating exemplary History strings from Richard II, 1.3. “CommonplaceAuthority” strings appear in lime green; “Inclusiveness” in olive; “SenseProperties,” “Sense Objects,” and “Motion” in yellow.

    Figure 8 (above): Docuscope screenshot illustrating exemplary History strings from Romeo and Juliet, 1.1. “CommonplaceAuthority” strings appear in lime green; “Inclusiveness” in olive; “SenseProperties,” “Sense Objects,” and “Motion” in yellow.

    Figure 9 (above): Dendrogram produced by Ward’s clustering method on scaled data using ninety-eight LATs to profile 320 plays written between 1519 and 1659. Individual items are colored according to genre, with the exception of plays written by Shakespeare, which all appear in yellow. To examine the diagram, click on it. We are grateful to Martin Mueller at Northwestern University for providing us with the modernized versions of these texts from the TCP collection.

    The authors would like to thank the University of Wisconsin Memorial Library for its assistance in hosting these illustrations on a permanent basis. Thanks also go to Kate Fedewa for her assistance in preparing Figure 9.

  • Crowdsourced Peer Review in NY Times

    The Times this morning did a piece on the Shakespeare Quarterly New Media issue that Jonathan Hope and I participated in. We received some terrific feedback, mostly from Shakespeareans, on the article that was posted to Media Commons–feedback that helped us rewrite the essay for the print edition which will be appearing this fall. There was also a piece on the process by Jennifer Howard in the Chronicle for Higher Education, itself the topic of an opinion piece in the Chronicle’s Brainstorm section.

    The idea of open peer review in the humanities raises basic questions about the “specialized” nature of our knowledge in the humanities. Could simply anyone weigh in on a debate about a particular text and its interpretation? Wouldn’t that, in principle, be a good thing? I assume that knowledge in the humanities is in principle available to all. But it is also clearly specialized. The word “allegory,” for example, has a deep history and set of contextual meanings that you just couldn’t pick up from a good dictionary. Our research does expand what is known about certain literatures, cultures and writers, and in this sense, we look like a science that aims to extend the range of objects that are understood. We also refine our terms of art and build communities around these terms (i.e, différance, queering, hegemony, subaltern, hybridity, racialization). One could learn to throw these terms around, as Alan Sokal did in his famous hoax and as graduate students do every day in their seminars, but a good critic or editor should be able to say whether or not the writer really understands the terms. (This is where the editors of Social Text failed.) Perhaps if the paper Sokal submitted to Social Text had been vetted through crowdsourced open peer review, the article would have been rejected. In any event, the hoax itself provides an interesting limit case with which to evaluate the promise of open peer review: a writer acting in bad faith, either as author of the article or peer reviewer.

    One last thought: the trajectory of learning in the humanities is intensive rather than cumulative. This is what differentiates us from, say, molecular biology, where you must learn certain things first (organic chemistry, cell physiology) in order to understand other things later (gene transcription). Within the humanities, acquiring expertise might mean re-orienting our approach to existing works rather than expanding the range objects that can be known, although the latter is always possible. But the underlying assumption – that in the humanities one can make qualitative advances in knowledge that do not necessarily fit into a progressive sequence – makes any comparison between the humanities and sciences difficult.

  • Docuscope Goes Live on Shakespeare Quarterly Open Peer Review

    Jonathan Hope and I have written a new piece that we submitted to the special issue of Shakespeare Quarterly on “Shakespeare and New Media.” The essay cleared the first stage of editorial review, and is now posted at MediaCommons for general comment and critique prior to final editorial evaluation. Please visit the essay here and make your views known. The abstract and title are as follows:

    “The Hundredth Psalm to the Tune of ‘Green Sleeves’”: Digital Approaches Shakespeare’s Language of Genre
    In this essay, we explore the underlying linguistic matrix of Shakespeare’s dramatic genres using multivariate statistics and a text tagging device known as Docuscope, a hand-curated corpus of several million English words (and strings of words) that have been sorted into grammatical, semantic and rhetorical categories. Taking Heminges and Condell’s designations of the Folio plays as comedies, histories and tragedies as our starting point, we offer a portrait of Shakespearean genre at the level of the sentence, showing how an identification of frequently iterated combinations of words (either in their presence or absence) can allow us to appreciate the integrity and fluidity of Shakespeare’s genres in new ways. Calling this approach “iterative criticism,” we situate our critical practice in the context of both Shakespearean criticism and more general protocols of reading in the humanities, concluding with a genre map of Shakespeare’s plays in the context of 282 other early modern plays.

    As the last line suggests, we have now managed–with the help of Martin Mueller at Northwestern–to produce an analysis of 282 plays from the TCP database alongside the Moby Shakespeare written between 1519 and 1659. I think this is the first visualization of its kind purporting to treat 150 years with of Renaissance drama, which itself feels like something of a hurdle overcome. Here it is:

    Dendrogram Produced using Ward’s clustering method on scaled data using 99 LATs to profile 318 plays written between 1519-1659, color coded by genre and separating out the works of Shakespeare as a category of their own: Red=Comedy, Blue=Interlude, Green=History, Cyan=Tragedy, Purple=Tragicomedy, Orange=Masque, Gold=Shakespeare. The item names follow the protocol: (genre)-(date)-(author)-(title).

    Two points to make here, although there could be many more. First, this diagram was constructed using scaled data, which means that the “mile away” linguistic markers of similarity and dissimilarity are being balanced with markers whose variation is less visible from a distance. Variables with large standard deviations are not dominating with respect to those with smaller ones. Note then that most of Shakespeare’s works cluster together here, comedies, tragedies and late plays all on the same twig. When I tried this analysis using non-scaled data, these genres split up and Shakespeare’s comedies clustered together with Jonson’s, suggesting that Ward’s clustering procedure on unscaled data is better for picking up genre differences, while the same procedure conducted on scaled data (as is the case here) is more sensitive to authorship. (For an earlier analysis of Shakespeare’s plays only using scaled data with Ward’s clustering technique, see this.) This finding should be tested in other contexts and with other data sets, but it is interesting, since it suggests that authorship becomes legible when fluctuations in variables that contain lots of tokens (say, Description) are coordinated with those that have many fewer tokens. It may be this “adding a dash of something” that pulls the author as such to the fore in an analysis.

    I’d like also to offer another observation here about the fact that so many Shakespeare plays are hanging together (as are Shirley’s and Middleton’s), remaining agnostic for the time being about whether it is authorship or genre that is producing these clusterings. The majority of Shakespeare’s plays are clustering on a twig that contains mostly comedies. So when compared with 282 other items written between 1519-1659, Shakespeare’s plays look for the most part like plays that Harbage (in the Annals of English Drama) classed as comedies as opposed to some other genre. (Martin tells me that he followed Harbage for the most part, but made some guesses himself about genre designations based on title page information and common sense.) The thing to remember here is that an individual genre may cluster in different ways depending upon the larger population in which it is situated. That is, a fuller collection of texts from the period–not just the ones that Martin was able to modernize so that we could run a test on them–might show new subdivisions that end up splitting the Shakespeare block into a number of smaller splinters. (Or it may not: this may be a stabilized portrait, more or less.) The best way to understand more about the groupings themselves is to begin looking at them with the help of PCA and other techniques we’ve been using already. That’s where we’re headed next.