Brett D. Hirsch

Digital humanities pedagogy : practices, principles and politics

The essays in this collection broaden the ways in which both scholars and practitioners can think about the emerging discipline of digital humanities, bringing together established and emerging scholars from around the world.

Beyond the Text: Digital Editions and Performance

The alluring promises of digital editions blind many would-be editors to the sober realities of the undertaking. The heady days of the 1990s— and the premature calls for the death of print at the hands of hypertext— are over. Although computational tools may aid editors through fullor semi-automation of fundamental editorial processes, such as transcription, modernization, and textual collation,1 the digital medium introduces additional tasks to those involved in print, and complicates the tasks of producing and maintaining a critical edition.2 Digital editions are not for the faint of heart. As Coordinating Editor of the Digital Renaissance Editions (Hirsch) and Associate Coordinating Editor of the Internet Shakespeare Editions ( Jenstad), we are intimately aware of the challenges of digital editions. In addition to traditional textual critical skills, the publisher of a digital edition requires technical expertise in programming and software development, textual encoding, interface design, methods of digitizing analogue materials, and digital content management. By contrast, a print edition can be left to fend for itself after publication—no further action on the publisher’s part is required to ensure that a book remains readable, so long as copies survive in libraries and on bookshelves. Digital editions, on the other hand, require constant, hands-on, vigilant attention. Play editors for our series need not just full peer review of their work,3 but also guarantees of long-term preservation of their scholarly labor; we are both publisher and library. The digital editorial platform must adapt to changing technological specifications, redesign its interface periodically, plan for succession if the

Prime Suspect: William Cowper Prime in the Holy Land and the Identity of “An American” In Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 1858

One of the most popular writers for travellers to Egypt, the Holy Land and Syria in the later nineteenth century was William Cowper Prime. His journey of 1855–1856 resulted in two books which went through multiple editions over a period of twenty years, a stimulus to follow in his footsteps and a standard text in the hands of many pious Christians. A series of five long articles published anonymously in Harpers New Monthly Magazine in the mid- to late 1850s can be shown as by Prime. All have been accepted as factual reports of actual events, places, and people but closer examination leaves little doubt they are fictitious. In the light of these conclusions, it is clear Prime had a taste not just for the wild exaggeration parodied by Mark Twain, but also outright invention and we must be cautious in using his writings as sources.

The Taming of the Jew: Spit and the Civilizing Process in 'The Merchant of Venice'

Jews were murdered by the Nazis and Nazi collaborators by the millions. These are unforgettable realities to me and intrude violently into my reading of the various brutalizations of Shylock. .. Even ambiguous, or to many readers of Shakespeare innocent, dramatic moments, such as the account of Antonio’s spitting on and kicking of Shylock in the Rial to, fill me with rage.1 For readers and audiences of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Antonio’s spitting on Shylock may evoke a range of emotional responses, both subtle and extreme. Audiences may feel disgust and discomfort, guilt and shame, anger and contempt. For Derek Cohen and many modern readers, reception of the play has been ‘irrecoverably darkened by history’ through ‘the lens of atrocity’.2 In other contexts, however, audiences may feel enjoyment and, perhaps, even affirmation. A reviewer of a (now notorious) production of the play at the Vienna Burgtheater, opening on 15 May 1943, described the depiction of Shylock as ‘the pathological image of the typical eastern Jew in all his outer and inner uncleanness.’3 If we can only speculate how the audience might have reacted to Antonio’s threat to spit on and spurn Shylock again during this production, ‘singled out as the most infamous instance of theatre’s complicity with the regime during the Nazi period,’4 how might Shakespeare’s audiences and readers in early modern London have reacted?