TOMORROW: Annual Shakespeare Lecture and reception with Dr. Jonathan Hope
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| Dr. Jonathan Hope |
Please join us for the George Washington University’s Medieval & Early Modern Studies Institute’s Annual Shakespeare Lecture and reception with Dr. Jonathan Hope
Monstrous Devices or Shakespeare Machines? Can Computers Read Hamlet for You?
Friday, September 8, 2017
4-5:30 pm, Post Hall (on GWU’s Mount Vernon Campus)
Free and open to the public; free shuttle to Mount Vernon campus (more information available here)Please join us as we celebrate the start of the academic school year with our sixth Annual Shakespeare Lecture and reception. All are welcome.
In this talk, Professor Hope will explore how computers, digital texts, data visualization, and statistics are changing the ways we read Shakespeare. In it, Professor Hope takes up questions like: How are Shakespeare’s plays different if we convert them into bags of words instead of books of pages or speeches on stages? What if we count the words instead of reading them? What if machines allow us to read everything his contemporaries printed at the same time we read Shakespeare? In doing so, Professor Hope shows how readily available tools can provide an “in” to texts that might surprise your professors and reveal how everything people tell you about Shakespeare’s inventive vocabulary is wrong. Using these tools we’ll see instead how surprisingly average Shakespeare turns out to be.
Dr. Jonathan Hope is a professor at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland and a contributor to the Mellon-funded, interdisciplinary project Visualizing English Print. He is the author of numerous books, including Shakespeare and Language: (Arden 2010), Shakespeare’s Grammar (Arden 2003), and The Authorship of Shakespeare’s Plays (Cambridge UP 1994). His teaching and research focuses on the intersection of language and literature: he uses techniques from linguistics to explore literary texts as evidence for the linguistic history of English.
