ENG 5100 — Digital Humanities Practicum: Records of Early English Drama, 1325-1642 

(What’s posted below is either my next upcoming, current, or most recent graduate course syllabus. Click through here for prior course syllabi: ENG 1006, York’s Plays and Records; ENG 1007, Morality Plays.)

The Records of Early English Drama (REED) project, headquartered on Floor 8 of the JHB, has been working for over four decades “to locate, transcribe, and edit historical documents containing evidence of drama, secular music, and other communal entertainment and ceremony from the Middle Ages until 1642.” Medieval and early modern drama studies generally focus on extant play texts, though these represent only a small fraction of performance culture in early England; REED fills in that gap, bearing witness to the ubiquitous existence of performance, though not always being able to reveal more about performances than that they did exist. The operative idea of REED has always been to know more — to compile all available archival evidence of early performance practices (far beyond simply contextualizing extant plays), a mass of information unprecedented in historical drama studies, at once comprehensive and tantalizingly incomplete — and to leave it to drama scholars to figure out what to do with it all.

Of course, during those same four decades, new technologies have arisen that have shifted how scholars work with, and think through, masses of information.  REED has, as a result, has gone digital: a process whose fundamental reorientation of the archives must provoke a rethinking of early drama historiography itself — and which reaffirms the necessity of digital humanities training for twenty-first-century medievalists and early modernists. In lieu of traditional essay writing, ENG5100H will give students real hands-on experience in the digital humanities, leading them step by step as they transcribe, format, edit, index, and tag entries in REED’s “York Protoype” (that is, in the digitization of REED material gathered from medieval and early modern York, only currently available in hard copy).  Each student in ENG5100H will be able, by the end of term, to point to a set of online REED entries and say that they were the one to have digitized it (thus adding a valuable line to their CV). In exchange for the real contributions that ENG5100H will make to REED, staff members from REED will provide training and presentations not only on the digital elements of REED, but on the full range of paleographical and archival work that REED does. Meanwhile, weekly readings (and periodic student presentations on those readings) will introduce students to, and provoke discussions about, the crucial role that archival research, digital or not, plays in the study of medieval and early modern drama. ENG5100H is geared toward students who are new to digital humanities and archival study: no prior experience in or knowledge of technology is necessary here, only patience, and willingness to try something new. (However, we will be reading many texts in fourteenth- through sixteenth-century English — please review your early English reading skills ahead of time.)

Class Meetings

Starting on Wednesday, 11 September 2024, this course will meet once per week on Wednesdays for two hours (10am to 12 noon).

Meetings will be in person in the Jackman Humanities Building (JHB), room 616 (except on 9 Oct, when we’ll meet in JHB 718), on the University of Toronto campus, on the shared territory of many First Nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Wendat, and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, under the Dish With One Spoon Treaty, and under Treaty 13 between the Mississaugas and subsequent settlers.

I keep Zoom (or an equivalent application) open on my laptop during all meetings; I audiorecord all meetings through that application. While I prefer that students attend my graduate seminars in person, any student in these seminars can thus opt to attend remotely at any time.

I do require attendance, whether in-person or remote, at every meeting. If a student misses a session for any reason, that student must listen to the audiorecording of each missed session, then email our course list to share thoughts and comments on that session, including in that single email individualized responses to every student who spoke up during the meeting.

I have no attendance policy other than that. Make-up emails must be sent as soon as possible, and no later than four weeks, after the missed class session; however, the last day I’ll accept make-up emails will be two weeks after our final class meeting, so class sessions later in term may have to be made up more quickly. Two weeks after our final class meeting, I will deduct one grade level (i.e., from A to A-) for any missed session for which a student has not sent the required email responses during the required span of time.

Required Texts

There are no texts required for purchase for this course, because the hard copy version of our core text of study, the Records of Early English Drama: York (2 vols, eds. Johnston and Rogerson, U Toronto Press, 1979), is both out of print and prohibitively expensive. The REED staff encourage us to use the pdf versions of REED York available readily online: find them here or at the Internet Archive; hard copies may at times be easier to work with, and you can find those either in the REED offices on Floor 8 of the Jackman Humanities Building or in six different campus libraries.

Important: the York index at REED Pre-Publication Collections has superseded that of the 1979 edition. You’ll need the index when you get to EATS tagging — see the instructions above.

I will share all our other weekly readings in pdf through our Google Drive file; see below for the full schedule of readings.

Course Requirements/Grading Weight

Contribution to REED: York Digitization (satisfactory completion will constitute an A), 40%

Engagement and Participation in class discussions
(or, if necessary, in substantial email commentary after the fact), 20%

Two 10- or 15-Minute Presentations during class discussions, 15% each (totalling 30%),
including a final presentation on your REED: York digitization during the final two weeks of term

Annotated Bibliography assignment, delivered alongside your final presentation, 10%

Every student must attend all class sessions (or make them up, as above), must be reachable by and responsive to an email list shared with the full class, and must read all assigned readings and have them ready to hand on the day we are scheduled to discuss them.

10-Minute Presentations

Every student is required to give two 10-minute presentations during term (if there are 7 or fewer students enrolled in the seminar, the presentations should be 15 minutes; if there are 8-12 students enrolled, the presentations should be 10 minutes; if there are more than 12 students enrolled, then I will reduce the number of presentations per student to one). Be prepared to field questions that your classmates and I may ask.

The first of these presentations may happen at any point during our meetings in weeks 4 through 10; we can have up to three student presentations on any given day EXCEPT when we already have guest speakers scheduled (see below), when we’ll only have one student presentation. Just give me a week’s advance warning when you’re ready (I won’t allow more than three presentations per session, and prefer to have two, so I may ask you to delay a week). Every presentation should involve a visual aid of some kind (slides, a handout, or something similar); include therein any long passages you will read, as well as clean citations for all sources you’ve consulted. You can choose any one of the following three prompts for your first presentation:

Option 1: choose any academic article or chapter we’ve already been assigned (it doesn’t have to be one we were assigned on the day you present!) and present an informal (but well-prepared and well-organized) critique and analysis of that chapter. Your aim is to provoke conversation; it will be your job, after your presentation, to moderate your fellow students’ discussion for about 20 further minutes.

Option 2: choose any three-minute passage from a dramatic text or record we’ve already been assigned (it doesn’t have to be one we were assigned on the day you present), memorize it, and perform it as a dramatic piece (you can do so in the original early English, or in a light adaptation/translation). After that, offer us an informal (but well-prepared and well-organized) close reading and analysis of that passage. (You can also do analysis first, then performance).

Option 3: seek out, and read, any text that is not already on our list of readings, but that would fit well into our class. Present an informal (but well-prepared and well-organized) lecture on that chapter, which includes a rough summary, basic historical contexts, an original bit of analysis, and at least short passage of the text to be read aloud (it doesn’t have to be a dramatic reading; you can also prompt us to read dialogue with you).

The second of these presentations must happen during one of our final two meetings (if need be, we’ll sign up for slots ahead of time). The prompt for this final presentation is simple: introduce us to the record(s) that you digitized; situate the record(s) in relation to publications and scholarly conversations that are relevant to it; identify and describe possible further publications and scholarly conversations that may arise once the digitized record(s) becomes available online; explain and defend any changes and additions you made, or details you were unable to carry over, in digitizing the record(s). Please bring a visual aid of some kind to help familiarize us with your record(s).

Annotated Bibliography

This short assignment is really a companion to your final presentation — preparing the bibliography will be part of preparing the presentation (and the two can overlap as much as you feel is appropriate). The bibliography should include full references (in REED house style) to 4-6 sources relevant to the record(s) you chose to digitize, with short summaries (about 75-150 words each) of how and why these sources are relevant to your record(s); needless to say, you’ll have to read all of your chosen sources with enough care and attention that we’ll be able to ask you questions about them. The best choice of sources is to find and add any published material that engages directly with your record(s); failing that, search out publications that deal with topics or archives comparable to or resonant with what you’ve digitized. You’ll need to turn in your annotated bibliography at the same time that you give your final presentation.

REED: York — Digitizing the Archives

During term, REED staff will present a series of in-class workshops on digital humanities training: very basic stuff, only as much as will allow each student to convert an assigned set of pages from REED: York (1979) into a digital, searchable, tagged document compatible with eREED standards. All the software we’ll use is free of charge.

Over the course of these workshops and the intervening weeks, each student will be responsible for the following:

  1. Choosing 175-225 lines’ worth of REED: York to be your digitization assignment. Use line enumeration provided in the margin of REED to determine line counts; you’ll almost certainly need to combine multiple entries in order to reach this number. You must choose whole entries rather than leaving off partway into one. If your combination of entries comes up a little short or a little long, that’s probably fine — just run it by me. Base your choice of material on your own interests and skills, including your interest in any particular historical period. (If you have Latin proficiency, please do choose Latin records to digitize: you’ll have to add the REED translation to your file as well, so you should count each line of translated text as half a line toward your assignment requirement). Lay claim to your REED entries in this shared document. (OPTIONAL: If you wish, and if you have sufficient training in paleography, you may opt to choose a record for which REED retains microfilm images, and correct your REED entry against the microfilm images in the REED offices — we will provide in-class training in how to use the microfilm machines, but not in paleography.)

  2. Transcription of the REED entries in their assigned pages, including all explanatory notes, dates, shelfmarks, and translations attached to them, into a file ready to be converted to XML file (i.e., readable through Visual Studio Code, below), using Transkribus and correcting its output against a hard-copy or pdf version of REED.

  3. Encoding of the REED entries into XML (i.e., formatting that will appear clearly and cleanly at the eREED website, using the same mise-en-page that eREED already uses), using Visual Studio Code. Once this is done, email your finished XML file to Illya Nokhrin.

  4. Mark-up of the assigned pages with EATS tagging, according to instruction provided by the eREED staff, still using Visual Studio Code, but now combining it with the eREED EATS Database. Be sure to use the York index at REED Pre-Publication Collections, which supersedes the 1979 version, as the basis for your tagging: identify the original hard-copy pagination for your records, then search (ctrl+f, etc) through the index for each of those pages, including forms with commas and hyphens. (For example, if you have a record that spans pages 45-47, then plug in searches for [_45_] [_45,] [-45] [_46_] [_46,] [-46] [_47_] [_47,] [-47]). That way, you can make sure you have at least indexed everything the original editors did (unless you see good reason to leave something out of the eREED index, which you should articulate in your report to us).

  5. Adding at least one note of your own (clearly marked as such!) to your record (this may be as straightforward as a reference to relevant new research since 1979); proofreading of your marked-up XML file and of a fellow student’s XML file (partners will be assigned by me), to ensure faithfulness to the original documents.

From there, we will collaboratively submit our work to REED’s current staff; they will be able to enter our work into eREED itself as part of the York prototype! You will earn an A as long as you complete your portion of the work and diligently ensure that the work is relatively free of errors. This assignment presents an opportunity to dip your toe into the digital humanities (and to get real DH experience under your belt!), to fine-tune your command of Middle English, to gain a practical and deep experiential understanding of how archives and archival research (both digital and analog!) are put together, and to become deeply familiar with one particular area in REED: York and in northern dramatic history.

Schedule of Meetings and Readings

If you are new to Middle English, I'm happy to share with you some handy materials I've used in my undergraduate classes. Email me for links.

Week 1 — Wed 11 September:

We’ll cold-read texts together in class, which I’ll provide in hard-copy handouts: York’s Doomsday play (Davidson and Fitzgerald versions) and the 1433 Mercers’ Indenture (REED). In so doing, we’ll figure out where we all stand in terms of Middle English, and have a bit of fun with the dramatization.

During this class, Matt will lead a quick trip to the REED offices, including their microfilm collections and reader (using these is optional).

Week 2 — Wed 18 September:

Before this class meets:

Week 3 — Wed 25 September:

During this class, REED’s Illya Nokhrin will lead a workshop on Transkribus.

Before this class meets:

After this class meets, start the process of feeding your entries into Transkribus, following Illya’s instructions. Once you have registered for your Transkribus account, send Illya (illya.nokhrin @ mail.utoronto.ca) a quick message with the email that you used for your Transkribus account. He will use this to add you to the REED York Digitization Project "Collection" on Transkribus. 

Week 4 — Wed 2 October:

In-class presentations today: Hafza, Velanna

Before this class meets:

Week 5 — Wed 9 October (special meeting location: JHB 718):

During this class, REED’s Illya Nokhrin will lead a workshop on Visual Studio Code.

Before this class meets:

After this class meets, start the XML mark-up of your REED entries. Install Visual Studio Code on your own computer, according to instructions provided by the eREED staff. (From Illya: “In addition to installing VSCode, you will also need to install the VSCode XML extension: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=redhat.vscode-xml. Once you have installed VSCode, clicking "Install" at that link should open VSCode and take you through the installation steps for the extension.  By default, VSCode seems to set the language of documents you are working on to HTML. To get the proper syntax highlighting, you will need to change the language to XML. To do so, click on the bit of text that says "HTML" on the bottom menu bar (it'll probably also say something like ‘Ln 1, Col 1 Space: 0 UTF-8’ etc.), then type in ‘XML’ (without quotes) in the search bar and click on the pop-up that says XML. The bottom menu bar should now say XML. If you want to stop VSCode from auto-generating closing XML tags every time you insert an opening XML tag, go to File -> Preferences -> Settings in the top menu, search for ‘Auto Close Tags’ (without quotes), and uncheck the check-box beside ‘Enable/disable autoclosing of XML tags’.”

 

Week 6 — Wed 16 October:

During this class, REED co-founder Alexandra F. Johnston will make a special presentation. Depending on how long that presentation and subsequent discussion turns out to be, we may delay our discussion of the Groeneveld and Beckett readings until the week following (but have them ready today).

In-class presentations today: Navid

Before this class meets:

Week 7 — Wed 23 October:

In-class presentations today: Elisa, Zoey, Jia

Before this class meets (note change to assigned readings):

Wed 30 October: NO CLASS (Reading Week)

Week 8 — Wed 6 November:

In-class presentations today: Madelyn, Vanessa, Sophia

Before this class meets:

Week 9 — Wed 13 November:

During this class, REED’s Illya Nokhrin will lead a workshop on EATS tagging.

In-class presentations today: Brandon, Zoey (make-up)

Before this class meets:

  • complete the VSCode encoding of your portion of REED: York (read the instructions above and follow them carefully), being sure to email your final XML file to Illya.

  • if you have time, read through Eileen White’s contributions of new York records to the REED newsletter (this is a resource newly introduced to me, so I’m not sure what to expect, nor will we have much time to discuss it, but it seems worth a look!)

After this class meets, start the EATS tagging of your REED entries, following Illya’s instructions.

Week 10 — Wed 20 November:

In-class presentations today: Aria, Thomas, Shelby

During this class, we’ll split into two halves — with half of us presenting on our digitization work in Week 11, and half in Week 12.

Before this class meets:

Week 11 — Wed 27 November:

During this class, REED’s Patrick Gregory will lead a short workshop on REED paleography. After that, Aria, Hafza, Velanna, Elisa, and Madelyn will present on their digitization projects (no more than 10 mins each!). If any time remains, we’ll discuss the assigned reading.

Before this class meets:

After this class meets, begin the process of adding at least one note of your own (clearly marked as such!) to your record and proofreading your marked-up XML file and of a fellow student’s XML file.

Week 12 — Wed 4 December:

Shelby, Thomas, Vanessa, Brandon, Jia, Zoey, Sophia, and Navid will present on their digitization projects (no more than 10 mins each!). If any time remains, we’ll look back across all our readings from this term.

Before this class meets:

  • complete the EATS tagging of your REED entries (read the instructions above and follow them carefully);

  • complete your Annotated Bibliography and send it to Matt as an email attachment;

  • complete at least one added original note to your REED entry (see above), adding the text of any notes you added to your Annotated Bibliography.

After this class meets, complete the final stages of your REED: York digitization, including proofreading, by twelve days after our final class session (Mon 16 December).