Shakespeare and Scale

Curating historical corpora presents challenges, but also opens up possibilities for modeling, search, exploration, and discovery.

This Element problematizes the specific affordances of computation and scale as primary conceptual categories. It then explores how computation can facilitate not only conventional modes of search and access to such a large corpus but how it can truly enable exploratory, experimental modes of discovery that respond to and shape humanistic inquiry.Scale has been the central promise of the digital turn. The creation of corpora such as EEBO and EEBO-TCP have eased the logistics of access to primary sources for scholars of Shakespeare and early English literature and culture and fundamentally altered the ways in which we retrieve, read, think about, and analyze texts. However, the large-scale curation of historical corpora poses unique challenges and requires scholarly insight and significant algorithmic intervention. In sections on 'Text,' 'Corpus,' 'Search,' and 'Discovery,' this Element problematizes the specific affordances of computation and scale as primary conceptual categories rather than incidental artifacts of digitization. From text-encoding and search to corpus-scale data visualization and machine-learning, it discusses a range of computational techniques that can facilitate corpus curation and enable exploratory, experimental modes of discovery that not only serve as tools to ease access but accommodate and respond to the demands of humanistic inquiry.