Doug Reside | New York Public Library (original) (raw)
Papers by Doug Reside
iBroadway, 2017
There has been much anxiety over the last decade about the effect the increasing dependence on di... more There has been much anxiety over the last decade about the effect the increasing dependence on digital tools in all art forms will have on the historical memory of this present moment. Chapter 11 discusses how the typescripts, film negatives, and telegrams that tell the story of the theatre of a generation or two ago have been replaced by Google Docs, JPEGs, and posts on Facebook walls. Today, much of the history of Broadway is stored on a variety of digital storage devices, some owned by corporations with little incentive to invest in long-term preservation. Libraries and archives must figure out how to preserve this content, but researchers must also figure out how to use it. Born-digital archives are as varied as their traditional analog counterparts, and it is clear that these collections provide new and more complete ways of understanding the individual’s creative process: reconstructing productions, discovering hidden social networks, and comparing interpretations of texts in performance.
The Palgrave Handbook of Musical Theatre Producers, 2017
For many, contemporary theatre is represented by the musical. The form remains, however, virtuall... more For many, contemporary theatre is represented by the musical. The form remains, however, virtually unstudied by literary scholars. In part, this may be a result of the difficulty of accessing the texts. Reading a musical from a traditional codex is no easy matter. The integration of text and music in a musical make it inappropriate to separate the two. One can try to follow along with a cast recording. In most cases, though, this is awkward. Many cast albums record a significantly modified version of the score and lyrics and few include the entire work. Further, musical theatre texts often exist in many different versions. This work begins with a summary of the problems one encounters when editing a multi-authored text (musicals often have a lyricist, librettist, and composer) which may be revised for practical (rather than aesthetic) reasons. The merits of restoring the material changed during the production process are debated. In this discussion some attempt is made to identify who should be considered the dominating collaborator (or auteur) of a musical. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that the notion of trying to restore an "authorial Ur-Text" makes little sense given the multitude of collaborators involved in the process of making musicals. Instead, an electronic variorum edition is presented as an alternative means of studying and teaching musical theatre texts. The study concludes with a narrative of the author's own work on an electronic edition of the 1998 Broadway musical Parade and ends with a critical introduction to this text.
Digital Humanities Level 1 Start-Up funding ($11,708) was received in support of a series of site... more Digital Humanities Level 1 Start-Up funding ($11,708) was received in support of a series of site visits and planning meetings for personnel working with the born-digital components of three significant collections of literary material: the Salman Rushdie papers at Emory University's Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Library (MARBL), the Michael Joyce Papers (and other collections) at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin, and the Deena Larsen Collection at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland. The meetings and site visits were undertaken with the twofold objective of exchanging knowledge amongst the still relatively small community of practitioners engaged in such efforts, and facilitating the preparation of a larger collaborative project proposal aimed at preserving and accessing the born-digital documents and records of contemporary authorship.
RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage
In the first section of the submission guidelines for this esteemed journal, would-be authors are... more In the first section of the submission guidelines for this esteemed journal, would-be authors are informed, “RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage uses a web-based, automated, submission system to track and review manuscripts. Manuscripts should be sent to the editor, […], through the web portal[…]” The multivalent uses of the word “manuscript” in this sentence reveal a good deal about the state of our field. This journal is dedicated to the study of manuscripts, and it is understood by most readers that the manuscripts being studied are of the “one-of-a-kind” variety (even rarer than the “rare . . .
The Library Quarterly, 2012
New Theatre Quarterly, May 1, 2013
![Research paper thumbnail of Music Theatre Online [Final Report]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/75282610/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Music Theatre Online (originally the Electronic Broadway Project) was launched in March of 2010 t... more Music Theatre Online (originally the Electronic Broadway Project) was launched in March of 2010 to coincide with the launch of the Glory Days cast album by Ghostlight Records. The announcement of the site was frequently tweeted and picked up by the web-based crowd-edited digital humanities publication, DH Now. The annotation code has been adapted by the Chymistry of Issaac Newton project at Indiana University, the audio linking tool has been used for a Danny Kaye web exhibit currently being developed at the Library of Congress, and the project was the basis for a new grant application by the project staff to Scholarly Editions Program at the NEH. Although that application was not funded, grant reviewers acknowledged that the project staff had demonstrated technical expertise and remarked that "It is attractive that the project materials are to be made available free of charge on the web in the Music Theater Online archive." The site was widely praised by the Twitter-verse, and has been visited by users from around the globe (including England, Australia, and Japan). We selected Glory Days as our initial title because we were able to get the rights and because, during its run in Washington D.C. it was very well reviewed and showed a great deal of promise. When we submitted our grant application, it had just been announced that the musical was headed to Broadway. Unfortunately, the New York production was less well received and the show closed after a single performance. Perhaps partly as a result, actual use of the site has thus far been relatively limited. According to Google analytics, in an average month there are less than 25 unique visits to the site. In part, we believe this is because the content currently in the archive is of limited interest to the scholarly audience for whom the archive is intended. Had the show run longer, we suspect interest in the site would have been much greater. Nonethless, the infrastructure we have built is content agnostic, and new titles could easily be added if funding could be obtained. We are currently collecting content from several out-of-copyright musicals including The Black Crook and Jerome Kern's Sally which we hope to add to the site in the near future. Additionally, Northwestern theatre scholar Tracy Davis has shown interest in editing the British musical, Dorothy, as a future contribution to the site. We feel we have successfully built a usable interface for this exceptionally multimodal artform, and believe when content of broader interest is added to the archive, use and reception will improve. Process MTO was built using the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) JavaScript framework, a very small amount of PHP, QuickTime for music playback, FlowPlayer for Video Playback, and TEI-compliant XML to encode the texts. Music Theatre Online is one of the very few TEI-based projects that attempts to link text, music, video, and image to
New Theatre Quarterly, 2015
The Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship, 2013
Library of Congress, UIeRA#2008-01111-00-00 published or submitted for publication not peer reviewed
Studies in Musical Theatre, 2006
Abstract While many humanities scholars have explored how computers might assist them in their wo... more Abstract While many humanities scholars have explored how computers might assist them in their work, there have been very few attempts to use electronic tools to study the musical. Musical theatre seems particularly well-suited, though, to the multimedia capabilities of the ...
New Theatre Quarterly, 2012
qt7d3465vg repo Digital Materiality: Preserving Access to Computers as Complete Environments digi... more qt7d3465vg repo Digital Materiality: Preserving Access to Computers as Complete Environments digital materiality preserving access to computers as complete environments kirschenbaum kk::Kirschenbaum, Matthew ff::Farr, Erika L. kk::Kraus, Kari M. nn::Nelson, Naomi pp ...
Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2010
Theatre Survey, 2011
Music theatre scholarship, and indeed theatre history research in general, can be accurately desc... more Music theatre scholarship, and indeed theatre history research in general, can be accurately described as a subset of media studies. As much as we might claim the contrary to our theatre students, theatre scholarship is not, by and large, the study of live performance but is instead an analysis of our own reconstructions built from the traces theatrical events leave behind. We study not moments but materials, not what was live but rather what was left. Increasingly, these leavings are likely to be digital. Much has been written of late about the current and imminent challenges these “born digital” materials pose for librarians and archivists, and many are now developing processes and procedures for preserving and providing access to them. Relatively little published scholarship has been done using these archives, however, so the emerging practices have yet to be thoroughly tested by researchers.1 In this article I narrate my experiences using the born-digital artifacts in the Jonath...
![Research paper thumbnail of Off the Tracks: Laying New Lines for Digital Humanities Scholars [White Paper]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/71000768/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](The emergence of digital humanities centers over the last twenty years has generated a new set of... more The emergence of digital humanities centers over the last twenty years has generated a new set of career possibilities for scholars working within the field. Many digital humanists with both an advanced degree in the humanities and strong technical expertise are now finding jobs in centers-often accepting lower salaries than they could receive in for-profit industries because they value the space these institutions provide for working at the intersection of humanistic and technical modes of inquiry. Digital humanities centers are eager to hire such individuals as they bring not only expertise in multiple domains, but an ability to communicate technical concepts to their humanist colleagues. Unfortunately, though, once hired these hybrid scholars are often considered service professionals rather than academics with active research agendas. They are often classified as staff rather than faculty and are seen by the administration and tenured faculty not as fellow scholars, but as skilled laborers like accountants and lawyers-valuable but separate from the scholarly enterprise. Digital humanities centers support forms of humanistic research that are rapidly changing, and that require a new infrastructure for knowledge production. Competent decision-making and implementation at such centers (at all levels) requires expertise and knowledge in topics as various as:.
iBroadway, 2017
There has been much anxiety over the last decade about the effect the increasing dependence on di... more There has been much anxiety over the last decade about the effect the increasing dependence on digital tools in all art forms will have on the historical memory of this present moment. Chapter 11 discusses how the typescripts, film negatives, and telegrams that tell the story of the theatre of a generation or two ago have been replaced by Google Docs, JPEGs, and posts on Facebook walls. Today, much of the history of Broadway is stored on a variety of digital storage devices, some owned by corporations with little incentive to invest in long-term preservation. Libraries and archives must figure out how to preserve this content, but researchers must also figure out how to use it. Born-digital archives are as varied as their traditional analog counterparts, and it is clear that these collections provide new and more complete ways of understanding the individual’s creative process: reconstructing productions, discovering hidden social networks, and comparing interpretations of texts in performance.
The Palgrave Handbook of Musical Theatre Producers, 2017
For many, contemporary theatre is represented by the musical. The form remains, however, virtuall... more For many, contemporary theatre is represented by the musical. The form remains, however, virtually unstudied by literary scholars. In part, this may be a result of the difficulty of accessing the texts. Reading a musical from a traditional codex is no easy matter. The integration of text and music in a musical make it inappropriate to separate the two. One can try to follow along with a cast recording. In most cases, though, this is awkward. Many cast albums record a significantly modified version of the score and lyrics and few include the entire work. Further, musical theatre texts often exist in many different versions. This work begins with a summary of the problems one encounters when editing a multi-authored text (musicals often have a lyricist, librettist, and composer) which may be revised for practical (rather than aesthetic) reasons. The merits of restoring the material changed during the production process are debated. In this discussion some attempt is made to identify who should be considered the dominating collaborator (or auteur) of a musical. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that the notion of trying to restore an "authorial Ur-Text" makes little sense given the multitude of collaborators involved in the process of making musicals. Instead, an electronic variorum edition is presented as an alternative means of studying and teaching musical theatre texts. The study concludes with a narrative of the author's own work on an electronic edition of the 1998 Broadway musical Parade and ends with a critical introduction to this text.
Digital Humanities Level 1 Start-Up funding ($11,708) was received in support of a series of site... more Digital Humanities Level 1 Start-Up funding ($11,708) was received in support of a series of site visits and planning meetings for personnel working with the born-digital components of three significant collections of literary material: the Salman Rushdie papers at Emory University's Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Library (MARBL), the Michael Joyce Papers (and other collections) at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin, and the Deena Larsen Collection at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland. The meetings and site visits were undertaken with the twofold objective of exchanging knowledge amongst the still relatively small community of practitioners engaged in such efforts, and facilitating the preparation of a larger collaborative project proposal aimed at preserving and accessing the born-digital documents and records of contemporary authorship.
RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage
In the first section of the submission guidelines for this esteemed journal, would-be authors are... more In the first section of the submission guidelines for this esteemed journal, would-be authors are informed, “RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage uses a web-based, automated, submission system to track and review manuscripts. Manuscripts should be sent to the editor, […], through the web portal[…]” The multivalent uses of the word “manuscript” in this sentence reveal a good deal about the state of our field. This journal is dedicated to the study of manuscripts, and it is understood by most readers that the manuscripts being studied are of the “one-of-a-kind” variety (even rarer than the “rare . . .
The Library Quarterly, 2012
New Theatre Quarterly, May 1, 2013
Music Theatre Online (originally the Electronic Broadway Project) was launched in March of 2010 t... more Music Theatre Online (originally the Electronic Broadway Project) was launched in March of 2010 to coincide with the launch of the Glory Days cast album by Ghostlight Records. The announcement of the site was frequently tweeted and picked up by the web-based crowd-edited digital humanities publication, DH Now. The annotation code has been adapted by the Chymistry of Issaac Newton project at Indiana University, the audio linking tool has been used for a Danny Kaye web exhibit currently being developed at the Library of Congress, and the project was the basis for a new grant application by the project staff to Scholarly Editions Program at the NEH. Although that application was not funded, grant reviewers acknowledged that the project staff had demonstrated technical expertise and remarked that "It is attractive that the project materials are to be made available free of charge on the web in the Music Theater Online archive." The site was widely praised by the Twitter-verse, and has been visited by users from around the globe (including England, Australia, and Japan). We selected Glory Days as our initial title because we were able to get the rights and because, during its run in Washington D.C. it was very well reviewed and showed a great deal of promise. When we submitted our grant application, it had just been announced that the musical was headed to Broadway. Unfortunately, the New York production was less well received and the show closed after a single performance. Perhaps partly as a result, actual use of the site has thus far been relatively limited. According to Google analytics, in an average month there are less than 25 unique visits to the site. In part, we believe this is because the content currently in the archive is of limited interest to the scholarly audience for whom the archive is intended. Had the show run longer, we suspect interest in the site would have been much greater. Nonethless, the infrastructure we have built is content agnostic, and new titles could easily be added if funding could be obtained. We are currently collecting content from several out-of-copyright musicals including The Black Crook and Jerome Kern's Sally which we hope to add to the site in the near future. Additionally, Northwestern theatre scholar Tracy Davis has shown interest in editing the British musical, Dorothy, as a future contribution to the site. We feel we have successfully built a usable interface for this exceptionally multimodal artform, and believe when content of broader interest is added to the archive, use and reception will improve. Process MTO was built using the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) JavaScript framework, a very small amount of PHP, QuickTime for music playback, FlowPlayer for Video Playback, and TEI-compliant XML to encode the texts. Music Theatre Online is one of the very few TEI-based projects that attempts to link text, music, video, and image to
New Theatre Quarterly, 2015
The Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship, 2013
Library of Congress, UIeRA#2008-01111-00-00 published or submitted for publication not peer reviewed
Studies in Musical Theatre, 2006
Abstract While many humanities scholars have explored how computers might assist them in their wo... more Abstract While many humanities scholars have explored how computers might assist them in their work, there have been very few attempts to use electronic tools to study the musical. Musical theatre seems particularly well-suited, though, to the multimedia capabilities of the ...
New Theatre Quarterly, 2012
qt7d3465vg repo Digital Materiality: Preserving Access to Computers as Complete Environments digi... more qt7d3465vg repo Digital Materiality: Preserving Access to Computers as Complete Environments digital materiality preserving access to computers as complete environments kirschenbaum kk::Kirschenbaum, Matthew ff::Farr, Erika L. kk::Kraus, Kari M. nn::Nelson, Naomi pp ...
Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2010
Theatre Survey, 2011
Music theatre scholarship, and indeed theatre history research in general, can be accurately desc... more Music theatre scholarship, and indeed theatre history research in general, can be accurately described as a subset of media studies. As much as we might claim the contrary to our theatre students, theatre scholarship is not, by and large, the study of live performance but is instead an analysis of our own reconstructions built from the traces theatrical events leave behind. We study not moments but materials, not what was live but rather what was left. Increasingly, these leavings are likely to be digital. Much has been written of late about the current and imminent challenges these “born digital” materials pose for librarians and archivists, and many are now developing processes and procedures for preserving and providing access to them. Relatively little published scholarship has been done using these archives, however, so the emerging practices have yet to be thoroughly tested by researchers.1 In this article I narrate my experiences using the born-digital artifacts in the Jonath...
The emergence of digital humanities centers over the last twenty years has generated a new set of... more The emergence of digital humanities centers over the last twenty years has generated a new set of career possibilities for scholars working within the field. Many digital humanists with both an advanced degree in the humanities and strong technical expertise are now finding jobs in centers-often accepting lower salaries than they could receive in for-profit industries because they value the space these institutions provide for working at the intersection of humanistic and technical modes of inquiry. Digital humanities centers are eager to hire such individuals as they bring not only expertise in multiple domains, but an ability to communicate technical concepts to their humanist colleagues. Unfortunately, though, once hired these hybrid scholars are often considered service professionals rather than academics with active research agendas. They are often classified as staff rather than faculty and are seen by the administration and tenured faculty not as fellow scholars, but as skilled laborers like accountants and lawyers-valuable but separate from the scholarly enterprise. Digital humanities centers support forms of humanistic research that are rapidly changing, and that require a new infrastructure for knowledge production. Competent decision-making and implementation at such centers (at all levels) requires expertise and knowledge in topics as various as:.