The Shakespearean Archive: Experiments in New Media from the Renaissance to Postmodernity

Why is Shakespeare so often associated with information technologies and with the idea of archiving itself? Alan Galey explores this question through the entwined histories of Shakespearean texts and archival technologies over the past four centuries. In chapters dealing with the archive, the book, photography, sound, information, and data, Galey analyzes how Shakespeare became prototypical material for publishing experiments, and new media projects, as well as for theories of archiving and computing. Analyzing examples of the Shakespearean archive from the seventeenth century to today, he takes an original approach to Shakespeare and new media that will be of interest to scholars of the digital humanities, Shakespeare studies, archives, and media history. Rejecting the idea that current forms of computing are the result of technical forces beyond the scope of humanist inquiry, this book instead offers a critical prehistory of digitization read through the afterlives of Shakespeare's texts.

Alan Galey is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on intersections between textual scholarship and digital technologies. He has published in journals such as Shakespeare Quarterly and Archival Science, and his article 'The Enkindling Reciter: E-Books in the Bibliographical Imagination', in Book History (2012), was awarded the Fredson Bowers Prize by the Society for Textual Scholarship. He is also the co-editor of Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Form of the Book: Contested Scriptures (2011).