Christine M. Gottlieb is an Assistant Professor of English at California State University, East Bay. Support for this project was provided by a 2018-19 Faculty Support Grant from the California State University, East Bay Division of Academic Affairs.
This is the source
The internet has vastly expanded access to Shakespeare resources, as well as the range of materials included in the Shakespeare canon. Online Shakespeare resources often focus on making Shakespeare more accessible to educators, students, and general audiences. Accessibility for people with disabilities, however, is not often mentioned. This article argues for making Shakespeare resources radically accessible and inclusive by incorporating both Universal Design approaches and Disability Studies perspectives. This dual approach emphasizes the importance of accessible technologies and the necessity of incorporating Disability Studies theories and methods, including contributions of Deaf and disabled artists and scholars and critical analyses of cultural representations of disability. While the overrepresentation of Shakespeare in digital space is problematic, the massive scope of Shakespeare’s online presence provides opportunities for radically transforming, or cripping, the digital canon. Cripping the digital Shakespeare canon involves centering accessibility, incorporating anti-ableist content, and promoting new methods of engaging with Shakespeare and digital spaces. Due to Shakespeare’s outsized presence, cripping the digital Shakespeare canon provides a significant avenue for advancing the accessibility and inclusivity of digital resources generally.
This article argues for making Shakespeare resources radically accessible and inclusive by incorporating both Universal Design approaches and Disability Studies perspectives.
The internet has vastly expanded access to Shakespeare resources and has led to the
proliferation of born-digital Shakespeareana. Shakespeare exists online in archival
materials, digital texts, apps, films, recordings of theatrical performances, YouTube
videos, and other digital media. Shakespeare has enough of a digital presence to
justify considering online Shakespeare a subset of the Digital Humanities field
Making Shakespearean texts, performances, and scholarship more accessible to wider
audiences motivates much of the online Shakespeare world. This view of Shakespeare’s
accessibility often focuses on making materials more engaging, comprehensible, and
freely available; accessibility for people with disabilities, however, is not often
mentioned. While there has been productive scholarly dialogue between Disability
Studies and Shakespeare studies (accessible
and
democratized
are often applied in discussions of online Shakespeare.
However, until the world of online Shakespeare fully includes people with
disabilities, it will not be truly accessible or democratized. Following Carson and
Kirwan, I consider the importance of Shakespeare as a case study
to understand the developing nature of the digital world
case
study,
the world of online Shakespeare can be a site in which interventions
are implemented and shared to enhance the accessibility and inclusivity of digital
worlds more broadly.
Scholars have illustrated the need for more inclusivity in Digital Humanities. The
#TransformDH movement has drawn attention to how Questions of
race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability should be central to digital
humanities and digital media studies
canon problem
It has been
well-documented that major digital literary studies projects often focus on
canonical authors. [...] yet comparatively few scholars have critiqued how digital
humanities overrepresents perhaps the most canonical figure in all of English
literature: Shakespeare
Digitization has already significantly transformed the Shakespeare canon. Douglas M.
Lanier writes: The disciplinary field of
Shakespeare
has
expanded dramatically in recent decades. […] Shakespeare
now includes
performances, translations, transmediations, adaptations, appropriations, and even
memes, not just in English but also in myriad languages from around the
worldShakespeare.
Productions of
Shakespeare’s plays by Deaf and disabled artists and Shakespearean criticism by Deaf
Studies and Disability Studies scholarsdistinguish[es]
As someone who grew up oral (speaking and using assistive
listening devices) but is now fluent in ASL and immersed in the deaf community
professionally and personally, I find this nomenclature reductive and
exclusionary in its oppositional binaries
Since digital Shakespeare resources are widely used pedagogical tools, critical reflection upon their accessibility and inclusivity is especially urgent. A recent special issue in
diversity of pedagogical approaches to Shakespeareborne through Shakespeare’s overrepresentation in educational and digital spaces globally
aim[s] to illustrate the cultural hegemonies present in teaching Shakespeare on a global scale, and how digital technologies potentially maintain these hegemonies, or confront them
canon problem
crip the canon,to use Ann M. Fox’s phrase
cripas a reclaimed term that expresses pride, and as a verb that has been used, like
queer,to deconstruct binaries, writing:
to queerorto cripthe known is to twist our expectations of it, defamiliarize it, and render it anew in ways that open up new kinds of possibility. That promise is built on denying the very binarism that would establish queer and crip identities as that against which, respectively,normsof sexuality and ability can be defined
In the following section, I provide an overview of Universal Design, review how it has been critiqued from Disability Studies perspectives, and discuss its continued importance for Digital Humanities projects. I then argue for centering disability in the digital Shakespeare canon and provide an overview of accessibility in Shakespeare studies. Following that, I analyze a key example of a digital work that expands the Shakespeare canon. I then analyze how YouTube functions as a digital Shakespeare archive with significant accessibility failures and discuss how Shakespeare’s overrepresentation in digital spaces can be utilized to improve accessibility. Finally, I discuss how crowdsourcing has been used and can continue to be used to improve accessibility. By highlighting both work that has been done to expand the canon and work that still must be done to make the expanding canon more accessible,I argue for engaging in ongoing critical reflection on the accessibility and inclusivity of the digital Shakespeare canon. Because of its canonicity, cripping online Shakespeare has the potential to impact digital archives generally by promoting increasingly accessible digital environments and anti-ableist content.
Originally an architectural concept, Universal Design was developed by Ronald Mace
who described it as a way of designing a building or facility,
at little or no extra cost, so it is both attractive and functional for all
people, disabled or not
(design that involves conscious decisions about accessibility for all
Aimi Hamraie’s critical analysis of Universal Design defines its key features in the following quote:
- Accessibility by design (design that prioritizes accessibility)
- Broad accessibility (accessibility for the greatest number of people possible)
- Added value (design that benefits disabled people also has benefits for nondisabled people)
Drawing from feminist and disability theories, Hamraie critically analyzes these
principles and discusses how Universal Design can be a broad and
intersectional social justice method through which designers can address more
collective, overlapping, and intersectional exclusions from the built
environment
The purported universality
of Universal Design has been critiqued (When the content of
the universal is unspecified, UD can slip into vague notions of
all
or
everyone
that assume normate users and de-center disabilitybroad accessibility,
writing: Broad accessibility
serves as a more complex notion of inclusion, showing that UD must still center
disability access in order to avoid lapsing into the normate template
Richard H. Godden and Jonathan Hsy’s
Although UD arose out of a real social and political response to the disabling aspects of everyday life for People with Disabilities, I want to suggest that theUniversalin UD can carry with it some unintended and unexpected assumptions about normalcy and our physical orientation to the world
we need to move forward by balancing the Universalist and utopian aims of UD with a more local, attentive approach to individual use
Both UD and DH advocates often invoke an unrealized and idealized conception of collective space (physical or online) in order to challenge dominant beliefs and practices and to encourage people to join in a newly reconfigured sense of common purpose
As Hamraie argues in a section entitled
universality,the term
crippowerfully centers disability, highlighting its critical, political, and cultural resonance
in the early twenty-first century, around the time that Universal Design became a predominantly disability-neutral discourse, critical and crip theories of disability emerged to challenge the social model for overemphasizing the environmental construction of disability oppression over embodied experiences of disablement.Crip,a reclamation of the termcrippledating to the 1970s independent living movement, resists imperatives for normalization and assimilation. Crip theories contribute that disability is a valuable cultural identity, a source of knowledge, and a basis for relationality.
Following Hamraie, I use the term cripping in its radical reclaimed sense to address the problem of discussions of universality and accessibility frequently eliding disability. When universality and accessibility are discussed generally, in both Shakespeare studies and Digital Humanities discourse, people with disabilities are often left out. Cripping Universal Design centers people with disabilities in the project of building an inclusive digital Shakespeare world — or any digital or physical world.
As Tanya Titchkosky access,
are laden with and constitutive of conceptions about who belongs and what disability
signifies. The same is true for digital spaces, and particularly academic digital
spaces. As the physical and the virtual spaces of universities and knowledge
circulation are increasingly blurred, attending to the digital worlds being created
and analyzing who is constructed as I am particularly interested in how disability is socially produced
as something that is not yet considered an essential participant in social life.
Still, including disability as excludable is a scene where the meaning of the
concept of
all people
is forged
Rather than promoting utopian fantasies of Shakespeare as accessible to all
or
design that is truly universal, I call for more attention to be paid to exclusions of
disability in the world of digital Shakespeare, and in digital worlds generally.
While truly Universal Design may be impossible, it is still a useful framework for
pursuing increased accessibility. While truly universal access may be unattainable,
we can still critique and correct inaccessibility, moving in the direction of
broadened access.
Similarly, cripping the digital Shakespeare canon entails critiquing, rather than
reinforcing, Shakespeare’s purported universality.
In advocating for inclusive
Shakespeare programs and performances, Sonya Freeman Loftis cautions against the failure of universal design and the way in which universal
design may become bound up with notions about
universal
Shakespeareuniversality
and
access
in Shakespeare studies highlights the need to incorporate the
Disability Studies critiques of these concepts in the interdisciplinary field.
My argument for cripping the digital Shakespeare canon is founded on Shakespeare’s
ubiquity, not universality. Considering the size of Shakespeare’s massive presence
online and how often these resources are used for educational purposes, the world of
online Shakespeare should be a driving force in advancing Universal Design
approaches. When Shakespeare resources are not fully accessible, people with
disabilities — scholars and non-scholars alike — are excluded from exploring and
co-creating the digital Shakespeare canon. Moreover, incorporating Universal Design
principles into online Shakespeare resources enhances their pedagogical potential for
a broad range of users. Captions on videos of Shakespearean performances make the
work accessible to Deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences, while also aiding
comprehension for hearing audiences. Descriptions of visual images make paintings
accessible to blind users and can provide significant details to sighted audiences as
well. While incorporating Universal Design increases accessibility and can deepen
engagement for a broad range of users, attentiveness to Disability Studies theory is
necessary to combat the tendency to reproduce notions of universal
and
access
that exclude disability (
In addition to designing digital resources that are more accessible, cripping the digital Shakespeare canon must also include analyzing how disability is represented in online content. Shakespeare’s plays are full of characters with disabilities that require critical analysis, as Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood discuss in their introduction to
Shakespeare’s creative output encompasses a broad range of disabled selfhoods: it moves across a spectrum from bodily to metaphysical disfigurement, ranging from instances of blindness to limping, from alcoholism to excessive fat, from infertility to war wounds, from cognitive impairments to epilepsy, from senility tomadness,and from feigned disability to actual.
Shakespeare’s representations of disability can either reinforce or challenge ableism depending on how the plays are taught in classrooms, performed on stage and in film, and — crucially — presented online. Online resources may reinforce stereotypes by presenting Shakespeare’s representations of physical and mental differences without the critical awareness that Disability Studies provides. Cripping the digital Shakespeare canon entails both correcting inaccessible digital forms and confronting ableist content.
Digital humanists can learn from pedagogical and theatrical experiments in cripping content and increasing accessibility. In
how do we make the knowledge about and creative work of disabled people (including activists, educators, artists, scholars, and thinkers) available to our students within our classrooms?
Where could I locate the presence of disability into that which I was already teaching?
locate the presence of disability
To crip the canon might also mean cripping our rather canonical ways of reading, researching, and otherwise approaching and engaging an individual discipline, its core ideas and subject matter, introducing or framing them instead with a disability perspective
Sonya Freeman Loftis’s recent book,
Over the past twenty years, Shakespeare theatres have been particularly innovative in the area of accessibility. This is, in part, because modern Shakespearians have always been driven by the need for access. Shakespeare has a central place in the curriculum, and making Shakespeare accessible to students has long been a goal in the modern classroom. […] four hundred years have already reduced the accessibility of the source text for lay readers and audiences. Indeed, popular culture often depicts Shakespeare as inherently difficult to understand. Shakespeare has become the classic symbol of that which is highbrow, and teachers and directors are charged with making his work accessible for everyone — from popular audiences to reluctant high schoolers. This means that Shakespearians are in a natural position to consider disability access; it makes sense that Shakespeare theatres would approach disability as just one more point of potential inaccessibility.
As Loftis has shown, a commitment to making Shakespeare accessible has led to
Shakespeare theaters becoming leaders in inclusive performance. Loftis writes: it is natural that an emphasis on general accessibility would lead
to increased disability awareness — in the wake of the disability rights movement
and in light of the growing neurodiversity movement, the endeavour to create
access for all
must also include those with physical and mental
disabilitiesDigital tools and services are routinely lauded for
their ability to increase
access kit
to facilitate studying media access
In discussing inventive approaches to accessibility by Shakespeare’s Globe, the Royal
Shakespeare Company, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Loftis writes: Access can be artistic — it can be an integral part of the
performance experience, shaping the interpretation both of the show and of
Shakespeare’s text
an understanding
of disability theory is essential for scholars, teachers, and directors of
Shakespeare. Statistics suggest that as many as one out of four people could
potentially be considered as disabled. Since providing quality accommodations and
pedagogical materials for users with disabilities requires a basic understanding
of disability theory, teachers and directors of Shakespeare who wish to reach
general audiences have a good reason to engage with disability studies
accessibility is always a work in progress, never a static
end goal that can be achieved
I argue that hearing directors who work with
deaf actors and ASL have an ethical responsibility to be inclusive of deaf
audiences. This can be accomplished by centering deaf perspectives and experiences
both onstage and in front-of-house practices
What would it mean to truly welcome Deaf and disabled people into the world of online Shakespeare? How could the digital Shakespeare canon be more accessible and inclusive? I have been arguing that this process includes incorporating Universal Design to increase the accessibility of digital content and incorporating Disability Studies perspectives to confront ableism in both form and content. In the next section, I will analyze a digital work that expands the Shakespeare canon through Universal Design and Deaf studies perspectives.
Tyrone Giordano and Jill Marie Bradbury’s
The description of the project states:
Digit(al) Shakespeares brings Deaf studies perspectives to bear on both disability studies and digital humanities. Deaf studies focuses on what the experience of deafness enables, rather than disables. Just as we can reconceptualize hearing loss as deaf gain, so we can reframe Shakespeare’s works as being at heart visual rather than auditory. This can lead to a richer experience of Shakespeare for everyone, regardless of hearing status. Throughout the video, clips illustrate the power of sign language to convey the Bard’s virtuosity in creating images through words. New media and technology allow Deaf people to share translations and performances of Shakespeare’s works across the globe. Digital archives can collect and preserve these, so they are available for Deaf, hard of hearing, and hearing people to study and appreciate. Deaf and hard of hearing people also need access to digital Shakespeare archives based on spoken language via high quality captioning. Access should be built into digital archives from the start, so that it becomes a central element of the overall project design, rather than a problem to be solved at the end.
This description highlights the pedagogical and scholarly value that a Universal
Design approach adds for all users, a centerpiece of Universal Design philosophy,
through the claim that This can lead to a richer experience of
Shakespeare for everyone
universal
subject, as Universal Design approaches have
frequently done, the project powerfully centers Deaf perspectives, both in
representational content (through curating and presenting a performance history of
Shakespeare in ASL) and through digital design (by featuring built-in accessibility
that centers ASL and by advocating for digital archives to be accessible to Deaf and
hard of hearing people).
The content, methodology, and design of Giordano and Bradbury’s project illuminate the scholarly, artistic, and social value of approaching Shakespeare from a Deaf perspective. The Universal Design of the project welcomes a broad range of users to engage with and respond to this significant and underrepresented approach to Shakespeare. Giordano and Bradbury highlight the need for more accessible digital archives while showcasing what is gained from studying Shakespeare from Deaf studies perspectives.
NOTE: There is no sound throughout the video
Hsy has explored how the
An intriguing aspect of the group discussion ofDSDJ in theAccessible Future workshop in Austin in 2014 was the sense that the lack of audio or captions in these videos make the contentinaccessibleby one set of embodied norms (that is, a set of UD principles that would call for embedded features for internet users who have visual impairments). As I reflect on this conversation afterwards, I have come to realize that the uneven media functionality of the journal suggested a discomforting social reality for those of us who were present at that particular workshop: much of the content of this Deaf-oriented journal was at the time renderedinaccessible to a hearing majority (or, to put things more precisely, the online journal’s content was only partially accessible to non-ASL users).
the current user interface appropriately forces me to confront my own audiocentric (and Anglophone) privilege and I find myself navigating an online linguistic environment that is only unevenly or partially configured for my use
While
universaluser and audist privilege.
Giordano and Bradbury’s project highlights the potential of combining Digital
Humanities and Deaf Studies approaches. Hsy analyzes how Giordano and Bradbury’s
project deftly exploits the manifold valence of the
digit
in its pluralized title So much has happened in the last 15 years, with
smartphones, touchpad technology, video-to-video interaction, Deaf people are
interacting and communicating with one another more than ever before
Digital technology is fast and cheap now, enabling Deaf people the
world over to experience Shakespeare’s poetry and create films and translations to
share so others might enjoy that work
Bradbury continues: It is paramount that we collect those films
and experiences, essentially forming a digital archive for us, not only to
preserve this work for future generations, but also to create a space where deaf
and hearing people both can study and appreciate the work
All this becomes a
library, one that the Deaf community can access regardless of their background:
whether their interests lie in theatre, education, English, or if they are
interested in improving bilingual ASL-English access
Online spaces provide significant opportunities to present and preserve ASL
translations of Shakespeare. The ASL Shakespeare Project’s website
the first bilingual and bicultural website on Shakespeare on the internet
The world of online Shakespeare includes spaces that encourage productive exchange between humanities scholars and the broader public. This traffic is not one-way: while scholars can reach wider audiences online, scholars and students routinely use online content created by non-academics. The Shakespeare canon is curated, adapted, and expanded in these digital spaces. For the evolving Shakespeare canon to be inclusive, these sites of exchange and engagement must be fully accessible.
YouTube is a key platform on which this exchange occurs. Christy Desmet refers to
YouTube as what for the past decade has been one of the most
popular, most prevalent, and most innovative sources for teaching Shakespearean
drama
YouTube was not
founded for the purpose of transforming the study of Shakespeare in performance by
providing a vastly larger range of material to see than had ever been available
before, but that was one of its effects. In this as in other areas of study,
digital approaches became prominent because they had vast numbers of people
outside the academy behind them
the small screens of YouTube grant access to an accidental archive
of Shakespeareana, to user-generated Shakespeares and to such genres as the video
mashup (combining one or more audio tracks with moving images, sometimes with
ironic effect), the vlog (or video diary) and the fan-made movie trailer
YouTube’s seemingly-democratized Shakespeare archive, however, is failing miserably
when it comes to accessibility. Many Shakespeare videos do not have captions or use
automatically generated captions that are grossly inaccurate when attempting to
capture Shakespeare’s verse.
Williams has surveyed ways in which the accessibility of Digital Humanities projects
could be improved and offered suggestions, including crowdsourcing the captioning and
transcriptions of video content
YouTube’s community captions feature had the potential to be used to crowdsource
captions in this way and radically improve the accessibility of the digital
Shakespeare archive, yet this feature was discontinued on September 28, 2020
In addition to captions, audio descriptions are needed to make the Shakespeare
archive on YouTube accessible. Hamraie writes: Miele’s
crowdsourcing technology, YouDescribe.org, enlists sighted people to
audio-describe YouTube videos, creating a database of integrated narrative tracks,
providing information not included in YouTube’s automatic textual captions
Shakespeare
was searched on
In addition to improving the accessibility of YouTube materials, it is important to
critically analyze how disability is represented and performed in YouTube content.
Ayanna Thompson has demonstrated that YouTube’s large and
complex archive of classroom-inspired Shakespeare performances
provides
a window onto production and reception that highlights
uncomfortable aspects of the texts […] specifically, the dynamics of race and
gender
In addition to improving the accessibility of YouTube videos, crowdsourcing can be used to make a wide range of digital content more accessible. Melissa Terras, in an introduction to
Alongside the widespread success of collaboratively produced resources such asWikipedia came a movement in the cultural and heritage sectors to trial crowdsourcing – the harnessing of online activities and behavior to aid in large-scale ventures such as tagging, commenting, rating, reviewing, text correcting, and the creation and uploading of content in a methodical, task-based fashion (Holley, 2010)–to improve the quality of, and widen access to, online collections.
accessis highlighted here, crowdsourcing methods can be used to improve accessibility for people with disabilities
Victoria Van Hyning Virtual volunteers all around the world are eager
to learn and contribute to the vast project of making the world’s textual records
more widely accessible, not only for search, but for those, such as blind and
partially sighted people, who use screen readers
Van Hyning discusses her work on the
The primary goal ofShakespeare’s World is to create base transcriptions forEarly Modern Manuscripts Online (https://emmo.folger.edu/) at the Folger Library, which provides manuscript images and word searchable diplomatic, semi-diplomatic, and regularized transcriptions. Manuscript curator Heather Wolfe and the creators ofEMMO intend for it to democratize access to manuscripts and to give manuscripts parity with print: the name is a deliberate homage toEEBO and ECCO .
its unprecedented ability to bring together early modern scholars, students, and wider public audiences around a digital resource
The success of the
Tyrone Giordano’s thesis,
attempts to address the problem of lack of translation material by proposing an internet-based crowdsourcing model to create and allow for a multiplicity of and successive generations of ASL translations of Shakespeare’s plays to exist
The increasing digitization of Shakespeare, and the market for localization of Shakespeare’s texts, illustrates the need for an online resource utilizing ASL in connection with Shakespeare. This leads to the not-yet-realized vision of what I believe is the next level in ASL translation: an open source internet-based project where anybody can input his or her own translations of Shakespeare’s works, and those seeking a translated body of work can pick and choose from among these translations, making the translations their own.
Hamraie describes bringing a disability justice perspective to crowdsourcing in a
Digital Humanities project mapping campus accessibility, writing: Critical accessibility mapping yields new modes of subjectification
around accessibility, reconceptualizing the labor of critical publics and
participants such that marginalized users retain leadership as experts who devise
accessibility
Incorporating Disability Studies perspectives and methodologies into the wide-ranging
and ever-expanding digital Shakespeare archive will ensure that this critical
awareness reaches a larger audience. Shakespeare has a massive audience, as Sylvia
Morris notes: It’s been estimated that his work is studied
by 50 per cent of schoolchildren worldwide, and at all educational levels. He’s
read and performed in translation [...] and his plays are constantly
re-invented by groups from all over the world. There is huge potential for
digitised versions of his work, for images and video of plays in performance,
to be enjoyed as they are, or to be reinterpreted by creative artists and users
of social media, not just by an academic audience.
canon problem
Disability Studies and other cultural studies approaches to Shakespeare must reach
beyond academic subfields to general readers who engage with Shakespeare’s texts and
to the actors, artists, and educators who mediate and re-create these texts for
future generations. Online environments are ideal for this type of outreach. Alan Liu
The
digital humanities […] can create, adapt, and disseminate new tools and methods
for reestablishing communication between the humanities and the public
move seamlessly between text analysis and cultural analysis
; he writes:
Truly to partner with the mainstream humanities, digital
humanists now need to incorporate cultural criticism in a way that shows
leadership in the humanities
Godden and Hsy I wonder if a general discursive
tendency to conflate UD with narrower discourses of
accessibility
risks
enacting the reverse of what UD initially envisions. Rather than attending to
embodied variance as a way to multiply and sustain diverse modes of interaction
with physical or digital environments, a narrowly conceived notion of UD as a
set of separate (or supplemental) accessibility features
conceives the
challenge of UD as one of integrating disabled people into an existing set of
nondisabled norms.
Conversations about Shakespeare’s accessibility in online spaces, and digital access in general, will always be insufficient if accessibility for people with disabilities is overlooked. As Shakespeare continues to be reinvented in digital space, as streamed videos and remixes inspire educators and filmmakers of the future, let’s ensure that these spaces are not only fully accessible, but also incorporate perspectives from Disability Studies. Doing so will not only benefit Shakespeare studies, but will also promote the creation of more accessible and inclusive digital environments more widely.
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