The Art of Curation

Searching for Global Shakespeares in the Digital Archives

Authors

Christy Desmet University of Georgia

Abstract

Scholarly sites devoted to global Shakespeare are strictly curated, usually by one or two persons with impeccable credentials. By contrast, YouTube, as the quintessential crowd-sourced and user-structured video archive, depends on individual contributions for its raw material, and on a combination of imitation, dialogue, and a complicated computer algorithm to establish relationships among the videos. This essay considers how differences in curation and context between these two kinds of archives might affect the understanding and reception of global Shakespeares. The paper compares cognitive and intellectual strategies brought to bear in the YouTube environment with the more structured methods of curating and providing intellectual paratexts in three sample scholarly archives: Bardbox, CASP (Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project; and the Global Shakespeares Video & Performance Archive (MIT).

Author Biography

Christy Desmet, University of Georgia

Christy Desmet is Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Georgia. She is the author of Reading Shakespeare's Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, and Identity (1992) and editor or co-editor of Shakespeare and Appropriation (with Robert Sawyer 1999), Harold Bloom's Shakespeare (with Robert Sawyer, 2001), Shakespearean Gothic (with Anne Williams, 2009), and Helen Faucit (2011). Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare, coedited with Natalie Loper and Jim Casey, is forthcoming from Palgrave in 2017. With Sujata Iyengar, she founded and edits Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation.