Textual Analysis for a Community Shakespeare Troupe

I work with a community Shakespeare troupe that puts on a yearly outdoor “original practices” production–in this case, that means no rehearsal or formal blocking. The first full run-through of the show is the first night of the performance. It’s an unusual case in that developing strong textual analysis skills is an immediate and urgent necessity for the actors. I became interested in seeing whether digital humanities textual analysis could help enhance their decisions. Ultimately, I found that for my analysis to be meaningful, I had to embrace the community’s methodology, which led to all sorts of interesting experiments about trying to embody word clouds and act out network graphs. (See the actors’ page for more information.)