Shakespeare and the Digital World. Redefining Scholarship and Practice.

• Eric M. Johnson

Should Shakespeare and the Digital World exist in the first place? The question might be unexpected, but it is fair. After all, the thing we call “Shakespeare” isn’t just something that happened around the turn of the seventeenth century: it’s still happening. Novel interpretations of Shakespeare’s works still find their way into every artistic medium; students and scholars are still fascinated by those works and write about them from contemporary perspectives.
The seismic movements in the digital world are even more rapid. Smartphones, WiFi, and social media became ubiquitous in the last decade. The costs of processing power, storage, and bandwidth continue to drop, and another generation of information technologies will inevitably emerge in the next decade.