The Records of Early English Drama (REED) Patrons and Performances Web Site has been working towards a long-standing shared desire of the scholarly world to trace Shakespeare’s theatre-related activities “through the provincial boroughs and households that were visited by the companies to which he belonged.” This article serves as a step-by-step guided tour of the website where users can explore the four main categories: Patrons, Events, Venues, or Troupes. It also demonstrates how to navigate the embedded interactive maps where users can investigate the location of different venues, playing routes, and other details, as well as calculate the distance between different entities. When this article was published, the website contained over 3569 recorded events and 600 patrons, with a prospective of vastly increasing its entries.

The United Kingdom Reading Experience Database 1450-1945 (UK RED) is an open searchable resource with over 30,000 entries of readers’ responses. In this article, Shafquat Towheed offers a glimpse into the wide range of materials in which evidence of readers’ response is found, varying all the way from marginal marks to letters to editor sections for newspapers. The UK RED offers around 150 categories to accurately store this information and allows for qualitative and evaluative approaches in recovering and exploring the experiences of readers in the past. The resource is continuously expanding through the social construction of knowledge of users who can access and contribute to the project. The UK RED team is working with research partners in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, and New Zealand in building readers’ responses databases in their regions, “capitalizing upon the respective strengths of resources and needs of each particular society, as well as pursuing best practices in the Digital Humanities.”

The white paper details the creation of a prototype digital edition using REED research materials. The primary aim of this project "was to explore how REED’s primary scholarly output, currently produced as a series of print collections, could be both edited and published online and integrated with REED’s current digital resources, Patrons and Performances and Early Modern London Theatres (EMLoT)." One of the primary editorial undertakings was transferring the REED records from at-codes into TEI-XML. The researchers also discuss their difficulties navigating between physical and digital copies of documents and how they combatted these struggles. To conclude the white paper Boyd et al. list some of future research endeavours. Included also in this white paper are three appendices: a subversion folder structure for eREED; a list and description of the files in the FTR project ZIP folder; and guidelines for REED at-codes application and TEI P5 markup.

This article addresses the central concerns of editing a performance text by taking up the case study of Richard Brome Online archive. Cave, Lowe, and Woolland emphasize how important audience is to editing a play text. The research team behind Richard Brome Online interacted with actors in workshops throughout their development process to gain insight on how this group of people would interact with a play text. This collaborative essay addresses the structure of each workshop and the insights gained through this methods; the process of the workshop and the blending of disciplines/training; and the larger issues of editing Brome. The article concludes by emphasizing how innovative this process of editing a dramatic text was. As the team worked on a trial-and-error basis, they freely admit that followers of this methodology may tweak their approach. Cave, Lowe, and Woolland foreground in their conclusion how productive this editing approach is for the early modern time period.

This article addresses the use of Early English Books Online (EEBO) as a way of conducting research on responses to historical texts and locating contemporary references to a work through the case study of George Sandy’s A Relation of a Iourney begun An: Dom: 1610 (1615). Although Anders Ingram acknowledges the many limitations of EEBO, such as poor image quality and the absence of the material book, he also demonstrates the possibilities that EEBO offers. For example, since the researcher is distanced from the material form of the historical source, this allows them to reveal hitherto unseen connections between the different sources of the database, as well as discover new possibilities for interpretation through the data retrieval and search systems of the digital archive. Ingram also demonstrates how EEBO complements conventional research of contemporary responses to and readings of works through the example of Relation’s and how it broadens the context in which the work may be interpreted. EEBO allows researchers to explore the broad set of contexts in which the work had been cited and to delve into numerous contemporary responses to a work, an option that had been previously limited and that offers a possibility for new interpretations of literature in the early modern period.

This article begins by recounting the lengthy history of developing the Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL) database and its implications for current scholarship. Morrissey remarks that scholars understanding intellectual history, discourse analysis, and linguistic research have made use of the database. ARTFL has also been successfully integrated into the classroom. Morrissey argues that working with the database is relatively straightforward and that the complex search function of Philologic (which the database uses) helps to facilitate research. However, some scholars are skeptical that ARTFL can offer any new and worthwhile conclusions on the material it catalogues. Overall, Morrissey argues that ARTFL (and databases like it) "break down the boundaries separating texts and allow us to reshuffle those texts."

This article by Andrew Murphy discusses the merits and challenges of three, open-access, digital editions of Shakespeare. Murphy begins with Johnson's Open Source Shakespeare. Johnson's site builds upon the work of Farrow and Hylton but leveraging a "much wider range of programming tools now available to computer specialists" to enhance features like the search function. The best characteristic of Open Source Shakespeare is its integration of text tools. The downfall of Open Source Shakespeare comes in its choice of base text, which makes it "fundamentally (and often fatally) outdated." Shakespeare's Words also falls into the problem of working around a less than up-to-date version of the text. While the interface is clean and navigable, the collaborations with a commercial publisher means that there is a "certain amount of hard sell on the site." Finally, Murphy explores the Internet Shakespeare Editions, started by Michael Best in 1996. Overall, Murphy finds the work on the site patchy and incoherent. The greatest potential for the Internet Shakespeare Editions lies in its treatment of variance; however, inconsistencies remain a core problem. To conclude, Murphy seems to suggest that you get what you pay for - or what you don't pay for.

This article details the launch of a new integrated digital resource called Connected Histories. Connected Histories is an umbrella resource that aggregates eleven electronic archives relating to British History from 1500 to 1900. This article highlights the various functions contained in the Connected Histories database that help defeat the "siloed" organization of many digital resources: allows users to draw content from across the eleven resources in a single search; bridges the gap often found between academic and commercial websites in merging them together under a single umbrella resource; "facilitate[s] both cross-resource searching and all the new methodologies associated with text and data mining."

This article documents the digital humanities aspects of The Holinshed Project at the University of Oxford. It outlines the nature of the project, in particular the need to compare paragraphs of the 1577 and 1587 editions of Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland. In order to accomplish these comparisons, a tool known as the TEI-Comparator was created. This is a bespoke fuzzy text comparison engine with a frontend web interface designed for the project. The TEI-Comparator automatically matches reorganised and fragmented paragraphs in the two editions. It is then used for confirming, removing, creating and annotating the links between the editions. This article describes the steps necessary to use the TEI-Comparator, its comparison algorithm, and the handling of the output it creates with respect to its use for The Holinshed Project. The TEI-Comparator was launched in 2009 as an open source project on Sourceforge and is available for other projects to use.

This article explores the ways in which the English Short-Title Catalogue (ESTC) is utilized by its main users, the 'bibliographical community' of scholars and antiquarian booksellers, to gain information about physical books. It discusses the relationship between ESTC's descriptions of 'ideal copies' and the reports of library holdings attached to them, and shows the most common causes of disruption to this relationship, which result in ambiguous or incorrect records. Implications of current methods of online user input are considered. The article argues for allowing all users to view the error-resolution process while records evolve, and for encouraging ESTC's exposure to new information coming from the bibliographical community

This article looks at the parallel development of two research projects at the Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory (ETCL): the Renaissance English Knowledgebase (REKn) and the Professional Reading Environment (PReE). REKn was created by a group of scholars who both recognized "value of collaboration and centralized coordination," and the opportunities available for aggregating Renaissance primary sources and secondary information in an online database. Given the scale of this project, the "development of a document viewer with analytical and communicative functionality to interact with REKn was a pressing issue." This led to the creation of PReE. PReE in its proof-of-concept build "could display text data in a variety of forms (plain-text, HTML, and PDF) and display images of various formats." The following functions were prioritized in the reconstruction of PReE: efficiency, visual balance, prototyping, and flexibility. In summary, this essay returns to the musing of James Joyce by noting that "REKn and PReE thus far has shown that the errors we encountered on the way truly were "portals of discovery"."

This article looks into three tools: Shakespeare's Life and Time (essentially a hypertext version of a Companion to Shakespeare Studies), Scenario (where users can virtually direct Shakespeare's plays), and Textual Resources (an environment designed to enable readers to experiment with extents of Shakespere). Shakespeare's Life and Time is noted as "an impressive undertaking" as it amalgamates hyperlinks, music files, and video files to provide curious reader with a further look into Shakespeare. Textual Resources provides another alternative look at Shakespeare by displaying the textual variants and modernized spelling versions of Shakespeare's texts. The tool also includes "individually compile concordances" for each of the plays. Finally, Scenario launches a virtual Globe theatre where users can create scenes using figures and props. While the graphics may be sub-par, the frames can be linked together in a series and accompanied by music to add effect. In conclusion, it is remarked that the Shakespeare Suite would be a great interest to teachers hoping to utilize "IT in the classroom."

This article reflects on the influence of computing on modern, historical research. This article "is based on the experiences of the History Data Service (HDS) which preserves and disseminates a collection of almost 700 mainly quantitative datasets." The biggest advantage of resources like those included under the umbrella of HDS is "that they allow straightforward access to high quality digital images and transcriptions of the original source documents." Importantly, Deswarte highlights that in order to use a resource properly, the user must understand how the material was created and what the resource's "key characteristics are." To conclude Deswarte notes that historical data should be conceptualized as mediated through both the technology and its principal creator.

This article summarizes the aims of the English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA). Fumerton and Nebeker both serve as directors on the project. Each ballad entry on the database is complete with colour facsimile transcriptions, TEI-XML text, and MARC records. Additionally, "like no other website, EBBA provides recordings of all extant tunes for the ballads." Fumerton and Nebeker argue that it is important to understand these textual artifacts as part of an oral tradition. EBBA employs a team of singers, "led by an ethnomusicologist trained in researching tunes," to sing and record each of the ballads. Fumerton and Nebeker note that matching these broadside ballads to tunes and accurately recording them is not without its challenges, but that providing these recordings greatly enhances both the research value and pedagogical value of the EBBA database.

This brief article explores the intentions and features of this digital resource Verse Miscellanies Online. O'Callaghan begins by describing that verse miscellanies can tell us "how literary tastes were shaped and changed, the proximity of elite and popular forms, the creative dialogue between music and the lyric, developments in versification and literary conventions, and the growth of the book trade in England." Verse Miscellanies Online is interested in show how practices are mediated through each other. This is accomplished through the incorporation of "annotations, glossaries, information about transmission and reception." The Verse Miscellanies Online project has partnered with EEBO-TCP in sharing data.

This essay begins by articulating that the greatest benefit of a digital library is not its ability to appropriate the functions of a physical library but rather its ability to carry out tasks are that only possible online. Some such tasks are "the hypertextual linking of related texts, full text searching of holdings, and the integration of knowledge management, data visualization, and geographic information tools with the texts in the digital library." In order to address the challenge of building a system that can facilitate these tasks, the Perseus Digital Library has "developed a generalizable toolset to manage XML and SGML documents of varying DTDs (document type definitions)." Additionally, because the "system abstracts the metadata from the text," scalable tools can be developed "for linguistic analysis, knowledge management, and information retrieval within the digital library." Some of these tools include displaying links to cited material within the document being read online, scanning the document to automatically generate a list of place names, and extracting date information to generate a timeline.

This essay begins by examining what is means to be a hospitable editor and then turns these principles on a case study of the Internet Shakespeare Editions project. Finn asserts that the notion of hospitality, that permeates Shakespeare studies, needs to overflow into today's editing practices if we have any hope of doing the works justice. There is certainly no lack of Shakespearean editions and, therefore, Finn questions: "Which editions are welcoming? Which provide guests with the space necessary to engage with the text?" For Finn, hospitable editing means user-first editing led by an editor "who neither abdicates responsibility nor tyrannizes by forcing certain practices of reading." Finn argues that this style is exemplified in the Internet Shakespeare Editions. In conclusion, Finn asserts that a "hospitable edition is one that creates a space where a number of readers can come and feel welcome."

This essay considers the ways in which crime reports produced in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London mapped — physically and socially — the crimes they described onto the city. Crime-writers tended to presume a primarily urban audience, and employed familiar language that implied readers might already be familiar with the places, and in some cases the stories, about which they wrote. While the writers and readers of early modern crime reports will likely always remain anonymous, these details offer some clue to their identity, and, moreover, suggest that the urban environment was not quite so vastly unknowable as has sometimes been suggested.

This essay describes a "new computational tool in the Perseus Digital Library designed to help students learn vocabulary by generating Latin and Greek word lists" that are specifically tailored to fit individual reading assignments. These lists are easily customized by the users - allowing control over the "sort, filtering, and output options" for the word list. This article is rounded out by a list of approaches or uses for this tool. Among the suggested tactics are using the tool as part of a pre-reading strategy or compiling a list of essential words for a language exam.

This essay explores what component parts define a textual document and how these parts may be represented, translated, catalogued, or lost in transforming a physical object into a digital transcription. Galey uses the transcriptions of Shakespeare's plays from the Internet Shakespeare Editions as a object of inquiry for this essay. Galey begins by addressing the challenges of encoding an Early Modern text that, in many cases, possesses characters or symbols non-existant in Unicode or ASCII and, therefore, not readable by a computer. Galey also discusses the role of the editor in digitally transcribing or rendering texts. The final layer Galey add to this question of interpreting the text is the challenge of encoding performance - an issue near and dear to Shakespearean works. To conclude, Galey urges modern Shakespeare editors to embrace the necessary qualities of questioning and incompleteness in texts.