Papers by Jennifer Roberts-Smith
This essay discusses the theoretical implications of a recent experiment with game-based social m... more This essay discusses the theoretical implications of a recent experiment with game-based social media to increase Shakespeare literacy in eleven to fifteen-year-olds. In collaboration with the Stratford Festival, we aimed to make the gameplay of our pilot, Staging Shakespeare, and the social space it generated, experientially theatrical in some way. While the pilot itself was not, in our view, successful, the design process helped us articulate a theory of theatricality grounded in the ontological complexity of theatrical things and the ontogenetic conditions of theatrical environments. Our conclusion is that literal simulations of Shakespeare's plays or of Shakespearean theater production may not be the richest way to teach Shakespeare through social games. Instead, we may need a design theory grounded in the adaptation of theatrical principles to electronic media, and perhaps a new aesthetic and even a rhetoric of gameplay only associatively related to Shakespeare.
Digital Studies/Le champ numérique, 2020
This is a peer-reviewed article in Digital Studies/Le champ numérique, a journal published by the... more This is a peer-reviewed article in Digital Studies/Le champ numérique, a journal published by the Open Library of Humanities.
Games and Theatre in Shakespeare's England, 2021
Shakespeare games are emerging as legitimate objects of study and pedagogy, but a survey of such ... more Shakespeare games are emerging as legitimate objects of study and pedagogy, but a survey of such games reveals that the marriage between “Shakespeare” and “game” is conceptually problematic, offering relatively narrow understandings of what a play by Shakespeare might be. We briefly identify two broad trends in digital pedagogical Shakespeare games before discussing how their reliance on the act of “play” and their favoring of Shakespeare as a textual ontology ignores the complexity of theatrical performance. We identify three overlooked complexities, the first giving rise to the other two: the audience’s contribution to theatre’s ontology, the different kinds of work that actors and spectators undertake in performance, and the primacy of collaborative ontogenesis in theatre over artifactual ontology.
Games and Theatre in Shakespeare's England, 2021
Games and Theatre in Shakespeare's England brings together theories of play and game with the... more Games and Theatre in Shakespeare's England brings together theories of play and game with theatre and performance to produce new understandings of the history and design of early modern English drama. Through literary analysis and embodied practice, an international team of distinguished scholars examines a wide range of games—from dicing to bowling to role-playing to videogames—to uncover their fascinating ramifications for the stage in Shakespeare’s era and our own. Foregrounding ludic elements challenges the traditional view of drama as principally mimesis, or imitation, revealing stageplays to be improvisational experiments and participatory explorations into the motive, means, and value of recreation. Delving into both canonical masterpieces and hidden gems, this innovative volume stakes a claim for play as the crucial link between games and early modern theatre, and for the early modern theatre as a critical site for unraveling the continued cultural significance and perfo...
Technology|Architecture + Design, 2018
Digital Studies/Le champ numérique, 2003
... Jennifer Roberts-Smith. ... and English Tongues, 1611; John Florio's Italian-English Que... more ... Jennifer Roberts-Smith. ... and English Tongues, 1611; John Florio's Italian-English Queen Anna's New World of Words, 1611); six are English hard-word dictionaries printed between 1596 and 1656 (Edmund Coote's English primer, The English schoole-maister, 1596; Thomas ...
Scholarly and Research Communication, 2012
This article discusses the creation of various prototypes of Watching the Script, a reading tool ... more This article discusses the creation of various prototypes of Watching the Script, a reading tool designed to enhance users’ interactions with theatrical texts by providing three key tools: a panel with an overview of the entire document; a reading view that shows the text in readable scale; and a stage view that shows text as speeches and associates them with coloured dots representing characters. The latter feature liberates speeches from their typographical sequence and associates them with mobile character dots, thus focusing the user’s attention of smaller units of text and the relationship between the text and the speaker.
Early Theatre, 2012
25 Di Maria, The Italian Tragedy in the Renaissance. Di Maria devotes an interesting and signific... more 25 Di Maria, The Italian Tragedy in the Renaissance. Di Maria devotes an interesting and significant discussion to the specific role of sound in the theatre and one work that he examines in detail is Aretino's tragedy, Orazio. 'The Great Choreographer': Embodying Space in Fuenteovejuna Social dances embody and perform kinesthetic structures of courtesy and courtship. The relative positions of dancers, their gestures, eye contact and posture, and manipulation of personal accoutrements (hats, gloves, fans, etc.), communicate at once both social hierarchies and personal desire. Furthermore, floor patterns, large and small group forms, contact between male and female dancers, and varying musical rhythms all contribute to the degrees and modes of human interaction, whether legitimized or transgressive. This was no less true in early modern Europe as it is today as is evident in the various treatises on dance in Europe such as Raoul Feuillet's Chorégraphie, ou l'art de decrier la dance, Pablo Minguet e Irol's Arte de danzar a la francesa, and Juan de Esquivel Navarro's Discursos sobre el arte del danzado. Nevertheless, of all of the branches of performance historiography, historical dance
Theatre Topics, 2012
Since 2008, I have been teaching a large (100-120 students), one-term Introduction to Theatre cou... more Since 2008, I have been teaching a large (100-120 students), one-term Introduction to Theatre course, whose goal is to teach. .. I am still not sure what. When I first inherited the course it was a lecture survey perceived as a recruiting tool for the drama program at my technology-oriented institution-the University of Waterloo-as well as an outreach tool for the program, since many students from the science, mathematics, and engineering faculties were taking it to fulfill degreeprogram requirements for courses outside of their major disciplines. It might have been a theatre "appreciation" course, if appreciation could be aligned loosely with "information" and "enjoyment." Then again, the course also needed to introduce humanities research, writing, critical-thinking, and academic-integrity skills. These tend to crowd out some of the space devoted to information in a traditional lecture survey and rarely contribute to anyone's anticipation of enjoyment. To complicate matters further, since this was a required course for aspiring drama majors, it was also supposed to teach foundational knowledge that would prepare students for further study in the discipline. It looked like a recipe for failure: take something students think they will enjoy, ruin it for them, and tell them that this is what it means to study theatre.
Language and Literature, 2012
Fulfilling a central goal of a generation of Elizabethan English metrical theory often referred t... more Fulfilling a central goal of a generation of Elizabethan English metrical theory often referred to as the ‘quantitative movement’, Thomas Campion succeeded in demonstrating the role of syllable quantity, or phonological weight, in Elizabethan iambic pentameter. Following Kristin Hanson (2001, 2006), this article parses Campion’s scansions of Early Modern English syllables, according to moraic theory, into resolved moraic trochees. The analysis demonstrates that (1) Campion distinguished between syllable weight (syllable quantity) and stress or strength (accent) in Early Modern English; (2) Campion prohibited syllabic consonants in English iambic pentameter, despite the fact that they were attested in Early Modern English as a whole; (3) in a successful adaptation of the Latin rule of ‘position’, as described by William Lily and John Colet’s Short Introduction of Grammar (1567), Campion re-syllabified coda consonants followed by vowels; and (4) Campion employed syllabic elision as a ...
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 2020
Digital Oral Histories for Reconciliation (DOHR) is a history education initiative to teach Grade... more Digital Oral Histories for Reconciliation (DOHR) is a history education initiative to teach Grade 11 students about the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children (NSHCC). The NSHCC, opened in 1921, was a segregated welfare institution for African Nova Scotian children. Residents suffered the effects of institutionalized racism in the Home throughout its 70 years. DOHR has partnered in the educational mandate of the restorative inquiry into the Home to co-design with the former residents a curriculum about their experiences (Province of Nova Scotia, 2015, p. 26). The purpose of the DOHR curriculum is for former residents to share their oral histories to develop students’ historical consciousness about institutionalized racism and to build right relations in their communities. The project was piloted in two Halifax area schools in October 2019. This symposium introduces attendees to the curriculum and shares initial findings from the pilot. Former residents share their impetus for the pro...
Two decades of destabilizing developments in Shakespeare studies, theatre and performance studies... more Two decades of destabilizing developments in Shakespeare studies, theatre and performance studies, theatre history and historiography, and dissemination technologies remain largely unacknowledged in the print-based editorial conventions of most editions of Shakespeare’s works (Roberts-Smith et al. 2009; Hirsch 2011). Among the challenges to Shakespearean editorial practices that need urgent attention are: 1. If we want to learn anything new about Shakespeare, we need editions of plays by other renaissance playwrights (Gary Taylor 1993). 2. The renaissance theatrical canon is as much collaborative (Hirsch 2011) and reportorial (Hagen 2006) as it is authorial. 3. Renaissance patterns of theatrical source and influence need to be re-imagined as horizontal networks of exchange, rather than vertical lines of descent (McMillin and MacLean 1998; Best 2012). 4. Theatrical text is an unpredictable ‘technology’ that can be co-opted for a variety of uses (Worthen 2010), rather than a material object or a repository of scholarly opinion (Roberts-Smith et al. 2010a). 5. Theatrical ‘text’ is only one of a range of ‘technologies’ essential to any performed work or individual performance; other technologies include the tangible and intangible conditions under which theatre is produced and received (Knowles 1994). 6. Past performance is potentially recoverable in the repertoire (“embodied practice and knowledge”) as well as in the archive (the written word) (Roach 1996; Diana Taylor 2003). 7. A performance archive is an epistemology as well as an ontology (Roberts-Smith et al. 2012; Kovacs, Roberts-Smith et al. 2012b; Roberts-Smith, Harvey et al. 2012). 8. Digital editions should do things that print editions cannot do (Hirsch 2011). This paper addresses the eight challenges listed above in a radically reimagined digital performance edition of Shakespeare’s Richard the Third, which uses the Queen’s Men’s True Tragedie of Richard the Third (1594) as its copy text. Using the Simulated Environment for Theatre (SET) (Roberts-Smith et a. 2010b), we visualize the text of the True Tragedie according to its potential performance functions rather than its provenance as a print artifact; we offer three-dimensional simulations of multiple performance possibilities in a scale model of the sixteenth-century stage used at Queen’s College Cambridge (following Nelson 1994); we include evocations of the affective impact of its use of child characters; we illustrate the significance of the performance practices associated with it, rather than its narrative; we incorporate records of live, modern performance that reveal historical performance practices; we position ‘readers’ of our edition as agents in its creation; and we relegate Shakespeare to the footnotes.
The Shakespearean International Yearbook 2014 Part 1, Special Section: Digital Shakespeares: Innovations, Interventions, Mediations. Ed. Brett D. Hirsch and Hugh Craig. Ashgate Press, 2014
Two decades of destabilizing developments in Shakespeare studies, theatre and performance studies... more Two decades of destabilizing developments in Shakespeare studies, theatre and performance studies, theatre history and historiography, and dissemination technologies remain largely unacknowledged in the print-based editorial conventions of most editions of Shakespeare’s works (Roberts-Smith et al. 2009; Hirsch 2011). Among the challenges to Shakespearean editorial practices that need urgent attention are:
1. If we want to learn anything new about Shakespeare, we need editions of plays by other renaissance playwrights (Gary Taylor 1993).
2. The renaissance theatrical canon is as much collaborative (Hirsch 2011) and reportorial (Hagen 2006) as it is authorial.
3. Renaissance patterns of theatrical source and influence need to be re-imagined as horizontal networks of exchange, rather than vertical lines of descent (McMillin and MacLean 1998; Best 2012).
4. Theatrical text is an unpredictable ‘technology’ that can be co-opted for a variety of uses (Worthen 2010), rather than a material object or a repository of scholarly opinion (Roberts-Smith et al. 2010a).
5. Theatrical ‘text’ is only one of a range of ‘technologies’ essential to any performed work or individual performance; other technologies include the tangible and intangible conditions under which theatre is produced and received (Knowles 1994).
6. Past performance is potentially recoverable in the repertoire (“embodied practice and knowledge”) as well as in the archive (the written word) (Roach 1996; Diana Taylor 2003).
7. A performance archive is an epistemology as well as an ontology (Roberts-Smith et al. 2012; Kovacs, Roberts-Smith et al. 2012b; Roberts-Smith, Harvey et al. 2012).
8. Digital editions should do things that print editions cannot do (Hirsch 2011).
This paper addresses the eight challenges listed above in a radically reimagined digital performance edition of Shakespeare’s Richard the Third, which uses the Queen’s Men’s True Tragedie of Richard the Third (1594) as its copy text. Using the Simulated Environment for Theatre (SET) (Roberts-Smith et a. 2010b), we visualize the text of the True Tragedie according to its potential performance functions rather than its provenance as a print artifact; we offer three-dimensional simulations of multiple performance possibilities in a scale model of the sixteenth-century stage used at Queen’s College Cambridge (following Nelson 1994); we include evocations of the affective impact of its use of child characters; we illustrate the significance of the performance practices associated with it, rather than its narrative; we incorporate records of live, modern performance that reveal historical performance practices; we position ‘readers’ of our edition as agents in its creation; and we relegate Shakespeare to the footnotes.
Making Humanities Matter. Ed. Jentery Seyers. University of Minnesota Press, 2016
Traditionally, design has been about planning for the creation of products or communications. Mor... more Traditionally, design has been about planning for the creation of products or communications. More recently however, the design remit has expanded to include less tangible results, including interactions, services, speculative design, and even design fiction. Possibly of most interest for the digital humanities (whose makerspace has tended to operate principally in the traditional mode) is the growing body of knowledge on the design of experiences, from retail shops to theme parks to augmented reality games. In this paper, we look at the factors that go into a blended physical and technological humanities-oriented experience, with a specific interest in the boundary experiences that exist around cultural events such as music and theatre. Drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives, we explore a set of working hypotheses about experience design in the digital humanities, focusing primarily on the preparatory and departure experiences that occur in liminal spaces around the principal event. With that in mind, we distinguish between the primary cultural experience (e.g. a performance, concert, exhibition) and the digital humanities experience that exists as an encouragement to interpretive activity (e.g. a hashtag, game in the lobby, augmented reality).
Technology | Architecture + Design, 2018
This paper argues that design research has an epistemological mode that differs from those in the... more This paper argues that design research has an epistemological mode that differs from those in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, but is shared with other generative fields such as engineering and computer science. Because the mode is generative, it relies to a heavier degree on creative practices, which means that some of its standards for determining validity are distinct from the standards in the other modes. However, it shares with the other modes the goal of producing new understanding for people who have expertise in the field. That understanding might be predicated on a range of new or improved information, processes, models, or theories. People have expertise if they can: describe what is already understood; identify where that understanding was communicated; and evaluate and explain the relative strength of the supporting evidence and arguments. Adopting these principles, basic design research outcomes can be identified and evaluated.
Bitacora Urbano Territorial, 2017
Concept models are common guides to living , and some more specialized ones, which have been deve... more Concept models are common guides to living , and some more specialized ones, which have been developed and validated in other fields have been adopted by designers for use in their work. In particular, concept models serve as templates for decision-making and action, and valid concept models make decision-making and action faster, more efficient , and more successful. It is not necessary that the concept models be complete to be useful, but it is necessary that the elements they do contain are relevant to the activity at hand, and that the model itself is a sufficiently accurate representation to be predic-tive. However, the field of design, like many other inventive disciplines (e.g. architecture , landscape architecture, urban planning, engineering, computer science) has not traditionally concerned itself with the development and validation of concept models beyond those that are applicable within the confines of a single project. In this paper, we argue that the time has come for the inventive disciplines to increasingly produce their own concept models to benefit practitioners in many different kinds of projects, both within the inventive disciplines and beyond, into disciplines where knowledge production is sequential (as in much of science) or aggregative (as in much of the humanities).
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Papers by Jennifer Roberts-Smith
1. If we want to learn anything new about Shakespeare, we need editions of plays by other renaissance playwrights (Gary Taylor 1993).
2. The renaissance theatrical canon is as much collaborative (Hirsch 2011) and reportorial (Hagen 2006) as it is authorial.
3. Renaissance patterns of theatrical source and influence need to be re-imagined as horizontal networks of exchange, rather than vertical lines of descent (McMillin and MacLean 1998; Best 2012).
4. Theatrical text is an unpredictable ‘technology’ that can be co-opted for a variety of uses (Worthen 2010), rather than a material object or a repository of scholarly opinion (Roberts-Smith et al. 2010a).
5. Theatrical ‘text’ is only one of a range of ‘technologies’ essential to any performed work or individual performance; other technologies include the tangible and intangible conditions under which theatre is produced and received (Knowles 1994).
6. Past performance is potentially recoverable in the repertoire (“embodied practice and knowledge”) as well as in the archive (the written word) (Roach 1996; Diana Taylor 2003).
7. A performance archive is an epistemology as well as an ontology (Roberts-Smith et al. 2012; Kovacs, Roberts-Smith et al. 2012b; Roberts-Smith, Harvey et al. 2012).
8. Digital editions should do things that print editions cannot do (Hirsch 2011).
This paper addresses the eight challenges listed above in a radically reimagined digital performance edition of Shakespeare’s Richard the Third, which uses the Queen’s Men’s True Tragedie of Richard the Third (1594) as its copy text. Using the Simulated Environment for Theatre (SET) (Roberts-Smith et a. 2010b), we visualize the text of the True Tragedie according to its potential performance functions rather than its provenance as a print artifact; we offer three-dimensional simulations of multiple performance possibilities in a scale model of the sixteenth-century stage used at Queen’s College Cambridge (following Nelson 1994); we include evocations of the affective impact of its use of child characters; we illustrate the significance of the performance practices associated with it, rather than its narrative; we incorporate records of live, modern performance that reveal historical performance practices; we position ‘readers’ of our edition as agents in its creation; and we relegate Shakespeare to the footnotes.
1. If we want to learn anything new about Shakespeare, we need editions of plays by other renaissance playwrights (Gary Taylor 1993).
2. The renaissance theatrical canon is as much collaborative (Hirsch 2011) and reportorial (Hagen 2006) as it is authorial.
3. Renaissance patterns of theatrical source and influence need to be re-imagined as horizontal networks of exchange, rather than vertical lines of descent (McMillin and MacLean 1998; Best 2012).
4. Theatrical text is an unpredictable ‘technology’ that can be co-opted for a variety of uses (Worthen 2010), rather than a material object or a repository of scholarly opinion (Roberts-Smith et al. 2010a).
5. Theatrical ‘text’ is only one of a range of ‘technologies’ essential to any performed work or individual performance; other technologies include the tangible and intangible conditions under which theatre is produced and received (Knowles 1994).
6. Past performance is potentially recoverable in the repertoire (“embodied practice and knowledge”) as well as in the archive (the written word) (Roach 1996; Diana Taylor 2003).
7. A performance archive is an epistemology as well as an ontology (Roberts-Smith et al. 2012; Kovacs, Roberts-Smith et al. 2012b; Roberts-Smith, Harvey et al. 2012).
8. Digital editions should do things that print editions cannot do (Hirsch 2011).
This paper addresses the eight challenges listed above in a radically reimagined digital performance edition of Shakespeare’s Richard the Third, which uses the Queen’s Men’s True Tragedie of Richard the Third (1594) as its copy text. Using the Simulated Environment for Theatre (SET) (Roberts-Smith et a. 2010b), we visualize the text of the True Tragedie according to its potential performance functions rather than its provenance as a print artifact; we offer three-dimensional simulations of multiple performance possibilities in a scale model of the sixteenth-century stage used at Queen’s College Cambridge (following Nelson 1994); we include evocations of the affective impact of its use of child characters; we illustrate the significance of the performance practices associated with it, rather than its narrative; we incorporate records of live, modern performance that reveal historical performance practices; we position ‘readers’ of our edition as agents in its creation; and we relegate Shakespeare to the footnotes.