Jennifer Roberts-Smith

University of Waterloo | UWaterloo · Department of Communication Arts

Looks at the use of prototyping in design research across a range of disciplines. Uses case studies to demonstrate theoretical and methodological transferability among disciplines not typically thought to be related to one another. This is an important contribution to the emerging field of integrative design.

This paper argues that materializing data may be a useful methodology in intersectional feminst digital humanities, because it requires close attention not only to the content of data and the contexts in which it is produced, but also to the individual, situated, differing knowledges that researchers leverage in the processes of generating, analyzi...

This paper presents the first phase in the development of a new, TEI-based protocol for the encoding of promptbooks. Because the principal function of a promptbook is to record spatiotemporal events whose communicative importance supersedes that of the book in which they are recorded, current standards for digital encoding do not always apply. With...

The digital humanities (DH) has a long and successful history of creating, using, and maintaining DH centres, as evidenced by the vast centerNet network. Furthermore, some of the most successful centres are constantly evolving in form and function. In this paper, we propose that the next phase in the evolution of the DH centre may involve a related...

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...

The authors of this book ask how digital research tools are changing the ways in which practicing editors historicize Shakespeare's language. Scholars now encounter, interpret, and disseminate Shakespeare's language through an increasing variety of digital resources, including online editions such as the Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE), searcha...

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, an...

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 opera...

This article is published in Revue d’Historiographie du Théâtre 4. http://sht.asso.fr/revue/etudes-theatrales-et-humanites-numeriques/ The text is in French. Please contact me for the English translation. Abstract: "After a critical presentation of the state of the art in scholarly activities at the intersection of theatre and digital humanities...

The starting point for this essay is the design of the Simulated Environment for Theatre, or SET, a digital system for visualizing theatrical text and performance created by a multi-institutional team over six years. Throughout its development, the research team has used SET as a tool for archival theatre history research; most recently, we have re...

This article is published in Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare Appropriation Special Issue: Social Media Shakespeare. Abstract: "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 Fe...

Was Shakespeare really the original genius he has appeared to be since the eighteenth century, a poet whose words came from nature itself? The contributors to this volume propose that Shakespeare was not the poet of nature, but rather that he is a genius of rewriting and re-creation, someone able to generate a new language and new ways of seeing th...

In its 2011 season, Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre Company contributed to a notable and “problematic,” to cite Globe and Mail critic J. Kelly Nestruck, revival movement in the history of Canadian theatre (“Canadian Revivals”). The two “revivals” mounted by the company, Guillermo Verdecchia’s Fronteras Americanas and Judith Thompson’s White Biting Dog...

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 Shakesp...

The Simulated Environment for Theatre (SET) is an experimental three-dimensional interface for use in blocking plays. Created using the Unity3D game engine, SET allows directors or student directors to associate character movement and speech with a timeline that represents the line of action, as well as to annotate choices, change the script, place...

As non-specialist researchers gain increasingly direct online access to digital and digitized theatre archives, archivists can no longer expect to be able to provide essential, post-positivist archival literacy training to individual researchers on a case-by-case basis. Archival literacy training must now be embedded directly into the design archiv...

This article is published in Early Theatre 15.2. Abstract: "The Queen’s Men use the bodies of actors as the principal spatial medium of their plays; in the True Tragedy of Richard the Third, for example, the bodies of child actors playing representatives of the monarchy are the focus of their audience’s affective responses to the play. Consequently...

This essay is published in Digital Studies/Le champ numerique, Special Issue Text Tools for the Arts https://www.digitalstudies.org/62/volume/3/issue/2/ Abstract: "This essay considers the opportunities afforded by the Simulated Environment for Theatre (SET) for exploring the functions of and relationships between historical theatrical texts and ot...

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...

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 out...

In this paper, we describe a recent evolution in thinking about our digital tool called Watching the Script (WtS), which was designed for actors, directors and theatre researchers. In its original conception, WtS was centred on the text. We conceived of text primarily as a material object; speeches were visualized as impenetrable integral units del...

In this paper, we describe a recent evolution in thinking about our digital tool called Watching the Script (WtS), which was designed for actors, directors and theatre researchers. In its original conception, WtS was centred on the text. We conceived of text primarily as a material object; speeches were visualized as impenetrable integral units del...

This essay is published in Early Theatre 10.1. Abstract: "Two Norwich inns, the Red Lion and the White Horse, are known to have been used by patronised performers between 1583 and 1624. The non-theatrical documentary and material records presented here elucidate the inns’ locations, functions, and dimensions; ownership, status in the community, and...

In The Arte of English Poesie, putative author George Puttenham applies the word “tune”, which he says refers to musical structure, to poetic metre, saying “our maker by his measures and concordes of sundry proportions doth counterfait the harmonicall tunes [my italics] of the vocall and instrumentall Musickes”. He uses “tune” to refer, literally,...