牛津大学出版社与莎士比亚数字化:从20世纪60年代到21世纪20年代

Oxford University Press and Digital Shakespeare,1960s to 2020s

本文从参与人的视角叙述了由牛津大学出版社委托并出版的莎士比亚数字文本发展历程。这一过程始于20世纪60年代和70年代早期由T.H.崔弗-希尔完成的《牛津莎士比亚索引》,目前正在进行的有《新牛津莎士比亚:替代版本全集》,由特里·博鲁斯、加布里埃尔·伊根及笔者领导的团队编辑。本文描述了具有开拓性的《牛津莎士比亚全集》(1986—1987年出版)数字化的过程。此书由斯坦利·威尔斯构想,1977年与牛津大学出版社签订合作协议,计划以现代拼写打字稿为底本排版,以传统印本书形式出版。此后,通过代码文件和先进的软件,此书很快发展为数字产品,并于1986—1989年起向市场供应印本书和数字文本。这一尝试为后来的《托马斯·米德尔顿作品集》数字化项目奠定了基础。这部作品集最初即定为以数字版本出版,随后也制作了印本书(2007),后来被吸收到更为宏大的牛津学术版本在线项目里。牛津大学出版社将重点放在以上两部作品集的印刷版本,对于后来的《新牛津莎士比亚全集》(2009年委托,2016—2017年出版)也是如此。到了2016年,学者和学生们都开始使用数字文本,在2020—2022年全球疫情肆虐、远程学习大量采用之际,数字文本的使用更是加速得到了巩固。即将面世的《新牛津莎士比亚:替代版本全集》也将同时以印刷和数字两种文本方式出版,但是重心已经明显放在数字文本了。

This essay provides an insider’s history of digital texts of Shakespeare produced for and published by Oxford University Press(OUP)from the Oxford Shakespeare Concordances generated by T.H.Trevor-Hill in the 1960s and early 1970s to The New Oxford Shakespeare:Complete Alternative Versions,currently being edited by a team led by Terri Bourus,Gabriel Egan,and the author.It describes how the ground-breaking Oxford Shakespeare:Complete Works(published in 1986-1987),first imagined by Stanley Wells and contracted by OUP in 1977 as a traditional printed book set from modernized typescripts,quickly morphed into a digital product based on coded files and pioneering software that produced,between 1986 and 1989,both printed and digital commodities.This experiment laid the foundations for the subsequent Thomas Middleton:The Collected Works,a born-digital project that,again,produced a printed edition(2007)that was later absorbed into the much larger digital Oxford Scholarly Editions Online.In both of these editions OUP prioritized the print format,and it did so again with The New Oxford Shakespeare:Complete Works,commissioned in 2009 and published in 2016-2017.But by 2016 both scholars and students had begun to prefer digital texts,a trend accelerated and cemented by the distance learning environments normalized during the global pandemic of 2020-2022.The forthcoming Complete Alternative Versions will,again,be published in dual formats,but the focus and priority is now clearly digital.