At the Axis of Reality: Melville's Marginalia in The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare

On Links To Be

“…One of the immediate consequences would be a paradigm shift, enabling for the first time a standardised approach to marginalia in critical editions, and therefore supporting practices such as "social text critical editions" [10]. For example, the extension of the TEI format (https://tei-c.org/) to include links to be is indeed on the agenda of several research projects, such as Melville's Marginalia [24]. Thirdly, a formal language of links to be has strong implications for authorial workflows and the design of authoring tools.…”

Theater as Data

“…The marginalia are not beyond the scale where a single reader could easily read everything, but their disjoint structure means that it is hard to detect patterns in them. Digital text analysis revealed that Melville annotated Shakespeare's work much more than he did other writers, and that the passages annotated in Shakespeare tended to contain words with low frequency within Shakespeare's lexicon (Ohge et al 2018). These two results can help draw conjectures about the reading practices, and perhaps the creative processes of Melville.…”