Why I blog

I’ve been thinking lately about why I originally set up this blog, and why, more than three years later, I continue to post on it. In the very early days I think I was looking for a place to work through some emerging ideas about digital forms of performance, in particular live broadcasts. I was still in the midst of another research project on a different topic, and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to publish any work in this new area for quite some time. The blog seemed like a good way to document ideas as they came up, to get feedback on them, and then one day to put them together into something longer and more detailed–i.e. an academic publication.

The difference now is that ‘one day’ has finally arrived. The older project is finally done and dusted and the monograph out, and now my primary focus is on the publications that will come out of this research into digital technology and Shakespearean performance. At last, I’m able to devote the bulk of my research time to these ideas, and that time has also dramatically expanded, as I’m on study leave for about 7-8 months of this year. Hurrah!

But the thing I didn’t expect is that, now that I have the time and energy to focus solely on this digital research, I’ve actually started to blog less. In fact, I haven’t written a proper post on the subject for more than half a year. Instead, I’ve been writing up this research as a series of journal articles and chapters, and making plans for the book that will eventually come. Every research day has gone to this more publication-oriented mode of writing, and as a result the blog has lingered by the wayside.

So now that I am officially on sabbatical, I thought I’d take some time reflect on what I’ve learned about both my research and myself as a researcher through blogging, and to think about what I hope to get from it in the future…

1) Blogging offers a way of working oneself into a new research area, especially when time is limited and has to be split among many other things.

The biggest difference for me between starting my first book project and my second one has been time. When you’re working on your PhD, at least in the UK, your main focus is your research. After I started my first job I was suddenly responsible for a lot more things and many more people. Extended periods of research time took a particularly painful hit: I went from spending 4-5 days a week on my research to 1 if I was lucky. So this blog became a way of stealing snatches of time in between teaching, meetings, proof checking, and everything else to start working my way into a new topic. I could have done all this privately, keeping my own personal research diary, but to be honest being able to share my ideas with others was more motivating. This might be useful for me to remember in other aspects of my life: if I really want to do something, do it publicly/socially.

2) Blogging has allowed me to work up chunks of writing (and thinking) that can become part of future publications.

This is true, but also a bit trickier than I originally expected. It’s definitely been the case that several of the details I focused on in blogs have become key points in articles that I’ve recently been drafting. But I’ve also found myself a bit unsure about how to draw on this previous writing without duplicating it. For the most part I’ve developed existing points in new terms, but there are instances in which I’m just really happy with the way I originally wrote it. So I’ve actually been thinking about redacting the occasional sentence from some of my posts, should it prove an issue. I’m still not sure about all of this: I think it’s a grey area and that feelings about it can differ depending on who you ask. About 80% of A Year of Shakespeare had been published online before it became a book, for instance, and all that material is still available through www.yearofshakespeare.com. But I know that others are understandably more wary about material previously posted online, and so I’ve started thinking more pragmatically about what can go on the blog as I come closer to getting some of my ideas more officially in print.

3) Blogging has helped me become part of a community of researchers in this field, both directly and indirectly. 

This maybe seems like a no-brainer: blogging is social, responsive, immediate, conversational. You can respond to ideas in a few hours, whereas academic publishing would at best take a few months, and more realistically a few years. This doesn’t necessarily make blogging better than academic publishing–just different. I’ve been able to get talking to others in the field, both directly and indirectly, and to learn from them as I go. This has perhaps been the greatest benefit for me. The flip side is, now that I feel well connected and reasonably well read in the field, I kind of just want to get my head down and write my ideas up the old-fashioned way. Blogging has been a great way of getting started, but, as of yet, not the most natural way of continuing on.

4) Blogging can take a lot of different forms and, presumably, they can change with time. 

This is probably the most important thing for me right now. When I first started blogging, I was careful to post regularly and to make sure that those posts were in-depth pieces of writing that I would be happy to publish in more academic contexts. I still really value those posts, and I must say that they’ve been the most helpful in terms of generating feedback from others and establishing some of the key issues that have turned up again in longer publications. But shorter, more whimsical, more descriptive, and/or more irregular posts have their place too. I suspect that as I get further into the writing of this project, the blogs will become more about the process of writing or the activities that surround and support the writing, rather than the writing itself. We’ll see; I might surprise myself. But given how precious having time to write is, I plan to make the most of it while I have it. This blog–or, who knows, maybe a future one–will always be there when it’s time for something different.

 

Guest post – Shakespeare, social media, and everyday creativity

Over the past five weeks I’ve been working with Holly Reaney, as part of the University of Birmingham’s Undergraduate Research Scholarship programme. Holly has just completed the first year of her BA in English at UoB and has been helping me explore the wide and wonderful world of Shakespeare and the internet. Each week I’ve given her a project or prompt to explore and she’s then gone away to see what the world wide web uncovers. Below is a summary of her work in her own words. Thank you Holly for all your help!

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Shakespeare, social media, and everyday creativity

The undergraduate research scholarship is a scheme offered to non-final year undergraduate students in the College of Arts and Law at the University of Birmingham. The scheme aims to immerse and engage students in academia as well as enabling them to gain valuable experience in the undertaking of academic research. It was as part of this scheme that I had the opportunity to carry out research for Erin Sullivan, specifically focusing on the applications of Shakespeare in social media.

The first two weeks of my research focused on two major social media-based performances of Shakespeare’s plays: Such Tweet Sorrow (2010) and A Midsummer Night’s Dreaming (2013). Co-produced by the RSC, these adaptations attempted to push the limits of theatrical performance, aiming to make Shakespeare more accessible to the wider public. One of the unique aspects of the social media performances were their ability to occur in real time. Such Tweet Sorrow occurred continuously over five weeks. However, due to the length of the project and the vast amount of content which was produced as a consequence, it was sometimes difficult to follow. This challenge was combatted in A Midsummer Night’s Dreaming as it only ran for seventy-two hours.  Over the course of A Midsummer Night’s Dreaming, 3,000 pieces of original content were released by over 30 original characters. This created a diversity of narrative and effectively established a very complete world of auxiliary characters. The vast amount of content showcases the wide range of creative abilities as well as the ingenuity which Shakespeare has inspired. In both of these performances the RSC achieve the aim of making Shakespeare accessible. Both performances serve to bring the play quite literally into the hands of their audiences, enabling them to interact and alter the performances in a way which is impossible on stage.

The second aspect of my research focused on audience-created responses. These responses occupy a wide a range of forms, such as memes and gifs on Tumblr, tweets from ‘Shakespeare’ or community based Twitter pages, and whole narratives in the form of fan fiction. All of these online communities attract similar audiences: young adults and teenagers with a vague interest in Shakespeare and who are active online participants. Tumblr is a primarily visual site, with the most circulated images being pictures of Benedict Cumberbatch in his performance of Hamlet or Richard III, Tom Hiddleston as Henry V and David Tennant as Hamlet or Richard II. These photos (excluding Tom Hiddleston as Henry V) were accessed through the National Theatre live performances, a system which enables select performances to be broadcast by a massive audience. The sharing of the photographs and gifs further increases the audiences for these performances (even if they have not seen the live piece) as the images serve to illustrate the original text in the context of these specific adaptations. However, only those who know the original text can appreciate the images in this way.

Another element I researched with regards to audience-created responses to Shakespeare was fan fiction. Fan fiction is an interesting and creative way for audiences to respond to the narratives which interest them. It provides a way for audiences to develop a community based around similar interests whilst also offering an extremely versatile creative outlet. The inclusion of ‘comments’ and ‘kudos’ or ‘reviews’ and ‘favourites’, depending on which site, enables interaction between fan fiction author and reader, the opportunity to share criticism and to develop a community of like-minded individuals. Writing in a modern day setting, with the accompanying modern language, proved to be extremely popular on the creative front. There is a trend that these ‘modernisations’ tend to be based upon the plays which revolve around younger characters, such as Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night. This could be because their situations are the most romantic or that they hold a level of relatability for the authors (teenagers suffering with love, anger, depression etc.). Prequels and sequels also heavily feature in the works, and these are possibly the works that are the most connected to Shakespeare, with some painstakingly obeying Shakespeare’s original writing style, featuring iambic pentameter, rhyme schemes and verse.

Another form of audience-created responses are visual adaptations of Shakespeare. Web series hold a much broader appeal as they follow a linear narrative which aids understanding for those unfamiliar with the original play. By reimagining the original scripts in the vernacular the plots are made easier to follow and the occasional yet seamless integration of Shakespeare’s original lines ensures that the connection to the original text is maintained and honoured, whilst also not being inaccessible. Due to the open platform which is YouTube, levels of professionalism varied from the heavily produced and funded Titus and Dronicus to the completely amateur A Document in Madness. As with all modern adaptations, and internet adaptions, the plots are altered. In the case of Monty and Jules, the adoption of a university setting means that the feud is between two rival fraternities as opposed to the families. In this case the adaptation of the plot to the 21st century setting is exceptionally well done. The avoidance of murder and suicide was especially well executed as they still communicated the consequences of what in the play are the murder and suicides but managed to avoid the involvement of the police or similar legal authorities, something which often impedes believability of modernisation of Shakespeare’s plays. The modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays, especially that on the internet platform, is definitely well suited to the video form – especially the mix of vlog style and video calling used Monty and Jules – as it communicates an intimacy and believability which is often lost when productions are attempted on other online platforms.

Overall, Shakespeare and the digital world appears to be based around accessibility and community. Audiences are engaged and interacted with in ways that are impossible on a traditional stage. The online world gives everyone’s voice a chance to be heard and way for their own creativity to be displayed.

Guest post by Holly Reaney, BA English (University of Birmingham).

Banksy and digital art – making it and saving it

Banksy’s newest piece of street art has caught my attention twice this week – first for the work of art itself, and the powerful way that it incorporates digital media, and second for the clearing away of the work, and the way it’s being saved for the public digitally.

So let’s start with the work of art itself. It turned up last Saturday across the street from the French Embassy in Knightsbridge. At its centre is the iconic illustration of Cosette from Les Miserables, but with yellowy tears running from her eyes, and gas from a nearby canister clouding her body. Most have read it as a critique of the French government’s use of tear gas in refugee encampments in Calais.

Photo: banksy.co.uk

This isn’t the first time Banksy has used his work to speak out against the treatment of immigrants and the dangers of xenophobia – for other examples see here and here. It is the first time, though, that he’s included a piece of digital technology that invites viewers to take his image a step further, and to have a look for themselves at the media footage he’s responding to.

Photo: AP/Alastair Grant

That’s right, a QR code. One of those black and white little squares that you really only see in marketing materials these days. In his book The Emergence of the Digital Humanities, Steven E. Jones takes a swipe at these pieces of low-fi, quasi-digital kit, largely for their ineffectiveness (who actually takes the time to scan them?) but also for their feeble and rather outdated gesture towards some other dimension known as ‘The Digital’. I pretty much agree – I downloaded a QR reader to my phone a few years ago when we got an app-based walking tour in Stratford, but it never really worked that well, and eventually I deleted it in order to make space for something else. But Banksy’s use of the QR code really caught my eye, and got me thinking about how it really can work, provided that the thing it connects you with is something genuinely interesting, useful, unexpected, and important.

As the video above shows, Banksy’s QR code links the viewer to media footage of the very event he is critiquing, and in doing so it layers art with reality, painting with video, street art with newsfeed. It is multimedial and multiexperiential, inviting us not only to revel in his satirical comment, but also to witness a few, harrowing minutes in the lives of people just 100 miles away from London. In a strange way, Banksy’s painting makes this live footage become ‘real’, rather than the other way around. By inserting it into the well-heeled streets of Knightsbridge, by giving it context outside of the numbing repetitiveness of the nightly news, by making it a part of a conversation, it focuses viewers’ attention and creates new impact.

It’s interesting too that the best video documentation of the painting that I’ve found – the piece embedded above – was created specifically for Facebook by the social media outlet AJ+, and doesn’t exist separately as an independent URL. It’s meant to be shared, and unlike the versions that I found on more traditional news sites, it actually mixes in the video footage opened up by the QR code. Plus, it forgoes the heavy, didactic narration of the news presenter and chooses instead to frame the piece through music and single lines of written text. The effect, for me, is far more engaging, exploratory, immersive, and powerful.

Now, the coda – like so many Banksy pieces these days, this one has already come down (or at least part of it – while the bulk of the image was painted on a piece of easily removed plywood, the tear gas can is on the base of a stone wall). Given the price that Banksy’s works now go for, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it makes its way into a private collection. But before the removal occurred, a man from Google came with the company’s Streetview kit to digitally record and document it. In a few months, and certainly a few years, this may very well be the only high-quality, officially archived ‘copy’ of the work available to the public. So what started off as a mixed media piece on the streets of London might ultimately end up as an entirely digital one in the clouds of the internet, increasingly managed by the empire of Google.

Such stuff as sales are made on.

New Shakespeare-inspired advert from IKEA, sent to me by one of our excellent Shakespeare Institute DL students. Though it’s not digital in an obvious, self-referential way (meta-digital?), it clearly is in terms of production and distribution.

And I sometimes wonder if The Tempest is Shakespeare’s digital drama par excellence. O brave new world?

Celebrating the digital, part 2 — new directions

Earlier this week I posted a piece about three recent digital Shakespeare anniversaries — the 6-month anniversary of this blog, the 5-year anniversary of NTLive, and the 1-year anniversary of the RSC and Google+’s A Midsummer Night’s Dreaming. Today I want to follow that up with some discussion of the recent re-launch of the digital arts site TheSpace.org, and the possible new avenues it may open up for online creativity and performance.

Originally developed as a pop-up site for the digital side of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, The Space returned last week as a new and more permanent gallery for the digital arts in the UK. While the old Space included a wide range of digital offerings, including the free streaming of recordings of 37  Globe to Globe Shakespeare productions, we are told that the new Space will leave broadcasting initiatives to BBC Arts Online and will instead turn its focus to more radical engagements with creative form. That means content that is more like Midsummer Night’s Dreaming and less like Globe to Globe streaming, as demonstrated by the kind of work generated by the #hackthespace all-night opening event at the Tate Modern last weekend.

Hackers hacking. #hackthespace

While the new version of the site is still young and content is in the process of being developed, there are a few initial offerings that caught my eye. The most high-profile piece featured in the new Space was an iPad drawing from David Hockney of a lily against a mauve background. I say was because in the process of writing this post I realized that the lily, titled ‘1062’, has been taken down, and all the links to the Telegraph coverage of it are now mysteriously broken (to be fair, The Space responded to my tweet below saying that the Hockney was a a special and time-limited offering just for the launch). At the moment the drawing can still be seen in this Channel 4 story about the new Space, about halfway down the page. A couple of things about the work really interest me — first, the title, which to some extent highlights the potentially mechanized status of digital art (especially considering the fact that Hockney, unlike some artists, doesn’t tend to use numerical titles for his paintings), and second, the fact that the ‘drawing’ is actually an animation that allows you to watch the composition of the flower from start to finish. For me the work was much more interesting for the insight it gave into Hockney’s process, and I’d be interested to know if the 2-minutes’ worth of animation was in real-time or sped up. How long does it take to create a piece of digital art?

Video element of new Hockney work best part I think. http://t.co/vJF0J4G8pF #hackthespace

— Erin Sullivan (@_erinsullivan_) June 14, 2014

Would be interested to know if #Hockney usually titles his digital art numerically, and if so why. http://t.co/vJF0J4G8pF #hackthespace

— Erin Sullivan (@_erinsullivan_) June 14, 2014

Just writing a blog about #hackthespace and digital art and see that the #Hockney has been taken down from @thespacearts. What happened? — Erin Sullivan (@_erinsullivan_) June 17, 2014

Leaving the question of the disappearing Hockney aside, the other work on the new Space that most interests me is a theatre piece called Longitude. Written by Tim Wright, one of the creatives behind the RSC’s 2010 digital experiment, Such Tweet Sorrow, Longitude uses Google Hangouts (as did Midsummer Night’s Dreaming) to broadcast three 20-minute episodes of a new play about global climate change and water shortage. It’s fashioned as a thriller, set in a near future that sees ocean levels rising, weather patterns intensifying, and clean water disappearing. The action connects actors in Lagos, Barcelona, and London, roughly all on the same longitude line, as they communicate with each other about a dodgy water deal that seems destined to go wrong. There’s still one more episode to go on 23 June at 6pm GMT, with a Q&A to follow, and episodes 1 and 2 can be watched online in the meantime (see ep. 1 below).

I’ll be interested to know more about the logistics of the performance, specifically how the live action and broadcasting is coordinated, since I had initially assumed it was pre-recorded based on cued technical break-ups in some of the video conferencing that were part of the dramatic action. With Auslander fresh in my mind I’m also interested in how the production’s liveness, a feature emphasized in its promotion on Twitter and The Space, might contribute to its status as theatre rather than television, film, or something altogether new. In any case it’s a really interesting example of possible new directions for digital performance, and the fact that it’s also partly commissioned by LIFT (the London International Festival of Theatre) points towards a growing and more widespread interest in what the digital, in all its infinite variety, may have to offer the performing arts today.

So lots to celebrate, I’d say, and much to look forward to. While I think that it’s right that we question the remit and scope of the so-called ‘digital’, and that we push ourselves to define how we’re using it in different contexts (a point discussed in part 1 of this post), I also think it’s important to allow it space to range somewhat wildly across form and platform, and to see what happens. By ‘what happens’ I mean not only what creative artists and producers come up with, but also how audiences of all different  digital competencies engage with and use it. And it looks like we’ll have more opportunity for this in the near future — just yesterday The Space announced a competition for £20,000 of seed money for the UK company that submits the most promising proposal for a new work of digital theatre. So stay tuned.

The new face of digital theatre?

Shakespeareans in Paris: Notes on the Digital

Back today from a week-long conference in Paris, where I was talking about ‘Digital Shakespeare and Festive Time’. Unsurprisingly the email backlog is about a mile long, but I thought I’d jot down a few notes about digital Shakespeare at the conference before I forget…

Well, there actually isn’t too much to say — this was a fairly un-digital conference. Not that that’s a bad thing. There were several interesting plenaries, panels, and seminars, and I certainly didn’t mind spending as much digitally unmediated free time as possible around the Latin Quarter in Paris. There was a conference hashtag, though no one quite knew what it was (#shakes450? #shake450? #ParisShakes?). And there were only a few sessions that touched upon digital humanities issues, most often through the question of digital methods, rather than direct address of digital Shakespeare as subject matter itself.

Instead, much of the conference actually looked back — to Shakespearean celebration over time, and especially to the anniversaries in 1914 and 1916 that saw Shakespearean commemoration embedded in the traumatic politics of the Great War. Interestingly, some papers suggested that this was when we saw the emergence of a so-called ‘global’ Shakespeare, wrapped up in the processes of global politics, finance, and culture, that has become such a frequent focus in Shakespeare studies today.

A couple of exceptions though to the relatively un-digital conferencing I did last week. The first is that I met in person for the first time three MA graduates of the Shakespeare Institute’s distance learning programme. One is French and is now pursuing a PhD there, another lives in Abu Dhabi and is setting up a Shakespeare society there, and the other is based in Paris and is now doing a PhD with me and one of my colleagues. I’ve ‘known’ each of them for several years, but this was the first time that I got to see them in the flesh, give them a hug, and congratulate them on completing the MA (each with great aplomb). It was a lovely continuation of our relationships, and the shift from digital to in-person and now back to digital felt completely natural — we might be spread across great distances, but in festive moments like conferences both time and geography contract to bring us together in the most concentrated of ways. The only slightly unnerving and even funny moment was when one of the students recognized me in the queue for the bathroom and came up to me and asked — with puzzlement but also enthusiasm — ‘Who are you??’

The other noteworthy digital moment was the final plenary, given by Professor Sarah Hatchuel of the University of La Havre. Her excellent paper looked at how many of the blockbuster Shakespeare films of the 1990s are being pulled apart and repurposed in the digital world. She offered examples of YouTube mashups, video game homages, and theatre trailers, but without a doubt my favorite was the ‘Hamlet gone viral’ social media video created as a senior English project by a very creative high school student:

It’s the drama of Hamlet told through the world of online communication, and there are several moments that offer both witty and critically astute takes on the action and characterization in this story (a personal favorite — the Gmail nunnery scene at 4.00). I think what the project does especially well is suggest the extent to which we enact our own experience of interiority online. So Hamlet uses Google and Ask.com to look up information about grief, to ask anonymous questions about what to do if…, and of course he uses Facebook to navigate the confusing personal relationships making up his social world.

One thing that came up in the questions, and that is of especial interest to me, is the fact that most of Hatchuel’s examples (including the Hamlet) are primarily comic. While she rebutted that some of them were rather serious, I would suggest that the most effective and interesting examples were indeed essentially funny. For me this raises the question of how digital works as an artistic resource. Given the fact that much of our digital and digitized life is made up of the experience of fragments of information washing over us almost constantly (news headlines, interesting links, funny animal pictures, Upworthy videos), it makes sense I think that digital creativity is especially adept at the art of juxtaposition, wit, and subversion. A big question for me though is whether or not it can work in other genres too. Digital media constantly makes us laugh, but can it also make us cry? If so, what might that artform look like?

Digital Shakespeare and Festive Time

Next week I’m off to a conference in Paris marking the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth. I’ll be participating in a seminar on Shakespeare, festivals, and festivity, with my contribution focusing on the place of digital celebration and outreach within Shakespeare festivals. The post below sets out some of the questions I hope to raise concerning the nature of ‘the festival’ and that of ‘the digital’, and how these entities overlap, if at all. Time, synchronicity, boundedness, focus, and togetherness are all key issues in this discussion, I think, and I’m eager to find out where we might get with them as a group.

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In his introduction to the 1987 collection Time out of Time: Essays on the Festival, the anthropologist Alessandro Falassi writes that festival environments are centrally defined by three factors: ‘time, space, and action’. Time, in the sense of normal, mundane time disrupted and suspended; space, in the sense of either everyday or, conversely, rarely used spaces claimed for collective festival activity; and action, in the sense of the intensification of special activities such as prayers, performances, or feasts not typically a part of daily life. Falassi suggests that when these three things come together, normal life ‘is modified by a gradual or sudden interruption that introduces “time out of time,” a special temporal dimension devoted to special activities’.

My question for this seminar on ‘Shakespearean Festivals in the Twenty-first Century’ is what might such a definition of festivity, and in particular its valuing of ‘time out of time’, mean for the growing use of digital connectivity and communication within Shakespearean festival settings? Do digital initiatives help enhance festive experience by allowing it to be extended in real-time to audiences otherwise cut off from the festival site (a corollary being televised sports events such as the World Cup or music events such as Glastonbury)? Or do they actually undermine festivity by disrupting the specificity and boundedness of time, place, and action upon which festivals depend, producing a more mundane experience of “time within time” – that is, an only partially festive experience mixed into the normal, digitally inflected rhythms of daily life?

How we answer such questions will depend at least in part on our own understanding and experience of digital technology, I think, and the role it plays for us in our day-to-day existence. In his recent book, The Emergence of the Digital Humanities (2014) (discussed earlier this year on this blog), the literary scholar Steven E. Jones argues that the entity once known as ‘cyberspace’ has finally ‘everted’, meaning that what was once imagined as an esoterically high-tech, completely immersive otherspace has transitioned into a more integrated, ubiquitous, and layered form of ‘mixed reality’ – or, as sociologist Nathan Jurgenson prefers to put it, a kind of ‘augmented reality’. ‘People are enmeshing their physical and digital selves to the point where the distinction [between them] is becoming increasingly irrelevant’, Jurgenson writes, and while Jones largely agrees, he also suggests that significant differences between digital and non-digital ways of being still persist, resulting in the increasingly common ‘paradox of living in two worlds at once’.

My interest is in how festival settings, with their unusual emphasis on time and presence – or, to put it another way, on ‘being there’ – have the potential to intensify this paradox of dual-citizenship, and to foreground the questions it raises about physically situated versus digitally mediated ways of being. Can a truly festive atmosphere emerge from a digital performance, or indeed from a digital conversation surrounding a ‘live’ performance? What kind of experience, for instance, is produced by a Twitter exchange around a shared festival hashtag, or the live-broadcasting of a festival performance, and can these kinds of activities be seen as festive in any way?

My working hypothesis is that digital modes of performance and engagement can effectively enhance and extend festivity, but that they don’t naturally do so, mainly because we tend to use them to evade the experience of boundedness and to promote the ability to be in multiple places at once. If, as Roger D. Abrahams suggests, ‘festivals seize on open spots and playfully enclose them,’ digital activity tends to do the opposite, seizing on existing, content-rich spots and fragmenting, layering, disassociating, and dispersing them. The challenge for festival organizers interested in harnessing the power of digital tools, then, is in finding ways of resisting this tendency, and of enabling a more focused, bounded, and ‘present’ form of engagement among digital festival-goers.

There are countless examples of digital activity within Shakespeare festival celebration that we might use to work through such issues, and I’ll be interested to hear about the different digital initiatives other members of the seminar have come into contact with through their own work on Shakespeare festivals around the world. For my own part, my research with Paul Prescott and Paul Edmondson on the Shakespearean celebrations that were a part of the London 2012 Olympics (documented in www.yearofshakespeare.com and A Year of Shakespeare: Reliving the World Shakespeare Festival, 2013) has prompted me to pay special attention to the digital activity and experimentation that took place within and around the Shakespearean events planned as a part of that Olympic year. These events included the Royal Shakespeare Company’s World Shakespeare Festival, the Globe’s Globe to Globe Festival, the BBC’s Hollow Crown series, and also the Olympic and Paralympic Ceremonies themselves, since three of them featured Shakespearean material.

Some notable digital initiatives arising from these events (both planned and otherwise) included the making of 36 of the Globe to Globe productions freely available online during the summer of 2012 on the ‘pop-up’ arts site TheSpace.org; the web-streaming of I, Cinna, Tim Crouch’s adaptation of Julius Caesar for the RSC, to schools across the UK; the creation of MyShakespeare (myshakespeare.rsc.org.uk), a gallery of digital work inspired by Shakespeare and hosted by the RSC; the creation of the Hollow Crown Fans Twitter group (@hollowcrownfans), currently 8,000+ members strong and growing; and the many online conversations that took place around all of these events through discussion boards and social media. In our seminar I’d like to offer some thoughts about a few of these examples of Shakespearean digital festivity, both as a way of exploring the nature of the festival itself as well as the relationship of the digital to it.

References

Abrahams, Roger D. ‘An American Vocabulary of Celebrations.’ In Time out of Time: Essays on the Festival, ed. Alessandro Falassi. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987. 175-183.

Falassi, Alessandro. ‘Festival: Definition and Morphology.’ In Time out of Time: Essays on the Festival, ed. Alessandro Falassi. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987. 1-10. [PDF currently available online at http://bit.ly/1m02RRR]

Jones, Steven E. The Emergence of the Digital Humanities. New York: Routledge, 2014.

Jurgenson, Nathan. ‘Amber Case: Cyborg Anthropologist (a critique).’ Cyborgology blog. 10 February 2011. http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/02/10/amber-case-cyborg-anthropologist-a-critique/

—–. ‘Digital Dualism versus Augmented Reality.’ Cyborgology blog. 24 February 2011. http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/02/24/digital-dualism-versus-augmented-reality/

HiddleMemes, Shakespeare style

When I was writing my post about the NTLive screening of Coriolanus, I inevitably came across a few internet creations that made me laugh. I share a few of them below…

Backstage tumbling

This week the RSC announced the launch of its #rehearsalcam across Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram, the promise being that we can get glimpses of the theatre’s work backstage through occasional posts from actors, stage managers, and others as they bring a show to life. The project at the moment specifically focuses on  Henry IV, but given the fact that the social media feeds are more generally titled ‘RSC’ you get the feeling that this could be a trial of a more permanent initiative in the future.

There are five posts so far – one from actor Youssef Kerkour as he reads his script on what looks like London’s Circle line, a selfie from actor Robert Gilbert in his stage armor, a shot of a smartphone playing Morphine’s ‘Cure for Pain’, a 12-second clip of archery practice, and a group shot of someone (the assistant director?) addressing the cast.

What does it all add up to? I’m not sure yet, but I have enjoyed checking out the snippets they’ve shared — they remind me of the ‘actors’ bower’ video room from the RSC’s Midsummer Night’s Dreaming project last summer, which offered on-the-go insights into the rehearsal process as the show came together over one short week. I’ll be interested to see what the cast does with the #rehearsalcam between now and the opening of the Henry shows (not far off now — 18 March!) and also if the RSC takes the idea forward with future productions, perhaps starting at the very beginning of the process (director brainstorming, casting, etc.) and following it all the way through to opening night.