ABSTRACT
Archives of Shakespeare’s text and performance have been greatly enhanced by the advent of digital technology. The resources I helped to create – the Cambridge CD-ROM: Text and Performance Archive for King Lear (Carson and Bratton 2000) and Designing Shakespeare: An Audio Visual Archive, 1960–2000 (Carson 2003) – were guided by the desire to make archival material, which previously was constricted and constrained by libraries and theatre companies, more widely accessible for scholars and students. But, as the Internet has become increasingly pervasive and commercial, the pioneering and possibly naïve spirit of this early work has been superseded by large commercial ventures guided by the desire to commodify content, the result of which has been the closing off of open access. In one sense archiving has never been more prevalent or easy, given the uploading possibilities of Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and so on. But the question remains, is this proliferation of “stuff” online the same as an archive? In terms of online availability of information more generally, there seems to be a pull in two opposite directions. The first is towards an automated full-text search model, moderated by algorithms that track popularity (the principle behind the ranking of the Google search engine is number of links to other sites). At the other end of the spectrum is the scholarly digital archive which is carefully described through metadata that give each object context as well as authority.
