Moving Parts: Digital Modeling and the Infrastructures of Shakespeare Editing

This essay asks what bibliographical and book-history perspectives can reveal when applied to digital editions themselves as artifacts in the long continuum of Shakespeare editing. What is the history of Shakespearean information architecture, digital and otherwise, and how does it take material form in the working practices of editors? To what extent does available infrastructure determine editorial theory, or vice versa? What does a basic editorial concept like precision mean in the context of technologies like XML that allow us, paradoxically, to make rigorously formal models of textual ambiguity? We approach these questions via the concept of modeling as it has developed in the digital humanities. A digital model is not merely a static representation of something but rather, in the words of computing historian Michael Mahoney, an "operative representation" with moving parts-literal and figurative-that calls for manipulation, conjecture, and play. The essay begins by considering data modeling in relation to the dramaturgical modeling practices of scenic designer Edward Gordon Craig, and then turns to the data-modeling practices evident in the working papers of three predigital Shakespeare editors (Howard Staunton, Horace Howard Furness, and Edward Capell). Like digital editors today, these precursors were forced to confront an existing model of the text; through their struggles with paper-based information architectures, they illuminate the sometimes invisible infrastructures in which editorial work takes place. The essay concludes with an examination of textual scaffolding in digital editions and considers how the information architecture of the text, while invisible to the reader, impacts how the texts can be read, analyzed, and modeled.