Professor Gabriel Egan

Job: Professor of Shakespeare Studies

Faculty: Arts, Design and Humanities

School/department: School of Humanities

Address: De Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester, UK, LE1 9BH

T: +44 (0)116 257 7158

E: gegan@dmu.ac.uk

W: http://www.gabrielegan.com

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Personal profile

I am Director of DMU's:

Centre for Textual Studies http://cts.dmu.ac.uk

Institute of English https://www.dmu.ac.uk/research/centres-institutes/institute-of-english

Research Theme 'Living in a Digital Society'

I am one of the General Editors of the New Oxford Shakespeare and a co-editor of the journals Shakespeare (for the British Shakespeare Association) and Theatre Notebook (for the Society for Theatre Research). I teach computational approaches to literary-historical textual analysis and the art of letter-press printing.

I welcome applications from PhD candidates wanting to undertake research on Shakespeare, early modern theatre history, computational approaches to textual analysis, editing, and cultural theory.

Research group affiliations

Centre for Textual Studies

Publications and outputs

Transforming Middlemarch: A Genetic Edition of Andrew Davies' 1994 BBC Adaptation of George Eliot's Novel
dc.title: Transforming Middlemarch: A Genetic Edition of Andrew Davies' 1994 BBC Adaptation of George Eliot's Novel dc.contributor.author: Smith, Justin; Hobbs, Lucy; Egan, Gabriel; Hayton, Natalie; Blackwell, Anna dc.description.abstract: Welcome to this 'genetic edition' of Andrew Davies' 1994 BBC adaptation of George Eliot's Middlemarch. This multimedia resource, believed to be the first of its kind, uses XML textual encoding - following the principles of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) - to enable comparative analyses charting the journey of a literary adaptation from source novel to script and screen. Users can navigate from the Shooting Script backwards (to the novel) and forwards (to the Post-production Script), following diamond icons leading to Notes, intertextual references, a range of assets and additional extended Commentaries on key scenes and adaptive moments. In this way, the genetic edition demonstrates both the creative skills of the screen adaptor and script editor, and (via additional production history research) the collaborative nature of classic serial television adaptation. The 'genetic edition' has been created by an interdisciplinary team of researchers at De Montfort University, UK, in partnership with the British Library and in consultation with the George Eliot Archive. The project (2022-3) was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
What are interfaces for, really?
dc.title: What are interfaces for, really? dc.contributor.author: Egan, Gabriel dc.description.abstract: In computing, context is everything. The same pattern of zeroes and ones (binary digits) represents a number in one context, a letter of the alphabet in another context, and an instruction to the processor in another. The computer instructions that create the on-screen “furniture”’ of our human-computer interfaces are, at the lowest level, no different from the texts to which they seem to give shape, enabling our interactions. The best interfaces make apparent this ontological sameness while the worst reify abstract high-level distinctions between form and content, enforcing power relations between the makers of digital content and their consumers.
'I would I had that corporal soundness': Pervez Rizvi's analysis of the Word Adjacency Network method of authorship attribution
dc.title: 'I would I had that corporal soundness': Pervez Rizvi's analysis of the Word Adjacency Network method of authorship attribution dc.contributor.author: Egan, Gabriel; Eisen, Mark; Segarra, Santiago; Ribeiro, Alejandro dc.description.abstract: In his two-part article "An Analysis of the Word Adjacency Network Method" (Rizvi 2022a; Rizvi 2022b), Pervez Rizvi attempts to replicate the Word Adjacency Network (WAN) method for authorship attribution and show that it does not produce the new knowledge that we, its inventors, claim for it. In the present essay we will show that Rizvi misrepresents fundamental aspects of the WAN method, that his attempted replication fails not because the method is flawed but because he erred in replicating it, and that Rizvi misunderstands key aspects of the mathematics of Information Theory that the method uses dc.description: The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.
Changes in the length of speeches in the plays of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries: A mixed models approach
dc.title: Changes in the length of speeches in the plays of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries: A mixed models approach dc.contributor.author: Egan, Gabriel; Colyvas, Kim; Craig, Hugh dc.description.abstract: Since 2007 a number of investigators have compiled statistics on the length in words of speeches in plays by William Shakespeare and his contemporaries, focusing on a change to shorter speeches around 1600. In this article we take account of several potentially confounding factors in the variation of speech lengths in these works and present a model of this variation in the period 1538-1642 through Linear Mixed Models. We confirm that that the mode of speech lengths in English plays changed from nine words to four words around the turn of the seventeenth century, and that Shakespeare’s plays fit this wider pattern closely. We establish for the first time that this change is independent of authorship, dramatic genre, theatrical company, and the proportion of verse in a play’s dialogue; that the chosen time span can be segmented into pre-1597 plays (with high modes), 1597-1602 plays (with a mixture of high and low modes), and post-1602 plays (with low modes); that some additional secondary modes beyond 4 and 8 or 9 words are evident in speech lengths, at 16 and 24 words, suggesting that the length of a standard blank verse line (around 8 words) is an underlying unit in speech length; and that the general change to short speeches also holds true when the data is viewed through the perspective of the other statistical averages, the median and the mean. The change in speech lengths is part of a wider collective drift in the plays towards liveliness and verisimilitude and is evidence of a hitherto hidden constraint on the playwrights. The authors hope that the full modelling of this variation in the article will help bring this change to the attention of scholars of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. dc.description: Open Access
Multiple regression techniques for modeling dates of first performances of Shakespeare-era plays
dc.title: Multiple regression techniques for modeling dates of first performances of Shakespeare-era plays dc.contributor.author: Egan, Gabriel; Moscato, Pablo; Craig, Hugh; Haque, Mohammad Nazmul; Huang, Kevin; Sloan, Julia; Oliveira, Jon Corrales de dc.description.abstract: The creation of new computational methods to provide fresh insights on literary styles is a hot topic of research. There are particular challenges when the number of samples is small in comparison with the number of variables. One problem of interest to literary historians is the date of the first performance of a play of Shakespeare’s time. Currently this must usually be guessed with reference to multiple indirect external sources, or to some aspect of the content or style of the play. This paper highlights a dating technique with a wider potential, using this particular problem as a case study. In this contribution, we introduce a novel dataset of Shakespeare-era plays (181 plays from the period 1585–1610), annotated by the best-guess dates for them from a standard reference work as metadata. We introduce a memetic algorithm-based Continued Fraction Regression (CFR) which delivered models using a small number of variables, leading to an interpretable model and reduced dimensionality, applied for the first time here in a problem of computational stylistics. Our independent variables are the probabilities of occurrences of individual words in each one of the plays. We studied the performance of 11 widely used regression methods to predict the dates of the plays at an 80/20 training/test split. An in-depth analysis of the most commonly occurring 20 words in the CFR models in 100 independent runs helps explain the trends in linguistic and stylistic terms. The use of the CFR has helped us to reveal an interesting mathematical model that links the variation in the use of the words through time, which helps to provide estimates of the dates of plays of the Shakespeare-era. We check for genre effects as a possible confounding variable.
How the Word Adjacency Network (WAN) algorithm works
dc.title: How the Word Adjacency Network (WAN) algorithm works dc.contributor.author: Brown, Paul; Eisen, Mark; Segarra, Santiago; Ribeiro, Alejandro; Egan, Gabriel dc.description.abstract: This essay will describe the algorithm underlying a new method of computational authorship attribution, the Word Adjacency Network (WAN) method, and introduce an Open Source implementation of this algorithm as a Python script freely available for any investigator to experiment with. A mathematically rigorous description of the WAN method and accounts of its application to various problems in authorship attribution have been provided in a series of previous publications (Segarra, Eisen & Ribeiro 2015; Segarra et al. 2016; Eisen et al. 2018), and the specific purpose here is to offer a relatively non-technical account of the underlying algorithm in order to help dispel misconceptions about it and encourage its use by other investigators. dc.description: The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version.
A response to Rosalind Barber's Critique of the Word Adjacency Method for Authorship Attribution
dc.title: A response to Rosalind Barber's Critique of the Word Adjacency Method for Authorship Attribution dc.contributor.author: Segarra, Santiago; Eisen, Mark; Egan, Gabriel; Ribeiro, Alejandro dc.description: The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.
Shakespeare and Marx: The writer and the society
dc.title: Shakespeare and Marx: The writer and the society dc.contributor.author: Egan, Gabriel
The New Oxford Shakespeare: Critical Reference Edition (Vol. 2)
dc.title: The New Oxford Shakespeare: Critical Reference Edition (Vol. 2) dc.contributor.author: Egan, Gabriel; Taylor, Gary; Jowett, John; Bourus, Terri
Introduction to a special issue on computational methods for literary-historical textual scholarship
dc.title: Introduction to a special issue on computational methods for literary-historical textual scholarship dc.contributor.author: Egan, Gabriel dc.description: The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.

Click here for a full listing of Gabriel Egan‘s publications and outputs.

Key research outputs

SCHOLARLY EDITION The New Oxford Shakespeare, 6 volumes (Oxford University Press, 2016-21)

JOURNAL ARTICLE "Attributing the Authorship of the Henry VI Plays by Word Adjacency" Shakespeare Quarterly 67 (2016): 232-56

MONOGRAPH Shakespeare and Ecocritical Theory (Arden Shakespeare, 2015)

MONOGRAPH The Struggle for Shakespeare's Text: Twentieth Century Editorial Theory and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2010)

Areas of teaching

Computational stylistics; 16th-17th century plays in performance and as print editions

Qualifications

BA, MA, and PhD

Courses taught

Textual Studies Using Computers

Text Technologies

Membership of external committees

I chair the Advisory Board of Jisc Historical Texts, a UK state-owned rival to ProQuest's Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Gale Cengage's Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) databases, based on the same images and data but cheaper and better.

I am an Arts and Humanities Research Council Strategic Reviewer

Membership of professional associations and societies

Shakespeare Society of America, 2004-, The largest Shakespeare society in the world

British Shakespeare Association, 2002-, Britain's Shakespeare association of which I am a trustee

Renaissance Society of America, 2006-, The world's largest society for Renaissance studies

Malone Society, 1996-, A small learned society dedicated to the publication of materials for the study of English Renaissance drama

Society for Theatre Society, 2002-, A small learned society dedicated to the study of the history and technique of British Theatre

The Tony Hancock Appreciation Society, 1998-. A cultural and discussion group dedicated to the betterment of mankind

Projects

I am Co-Investigator on the £252,557 AHRC-funded research project 'Transforming Middlemarch' (2022-23) that is making an online multimedia 'genetic' edition of Andrew Davies's groundbreaking 1994 adaptation of George Eliot's novel.

I was Principal Investigator on the £312,012 AHRC-funded research "Shakespeare's Early Editions (SEE)" (which ran from 2016 to 2018) that explored the differences between the quarto and Folio versions of his plays to see if they can be quantified and explained in terms of textual corruption and authorial and non-authorial revision.

I was Principal Investigator on the two-year project "Shakespearean London Theatres (ShaLT)" (running from 2011 to 2013) which was a collaboration with the Victoria & Albert Museum to get tourists walking around and learning about the London sites where there were theatres 400 years ago. The project had £331,000 of Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funding.

Forthcoming events

As Principal Investigator on the project "Quantitative Methods for Literary and Historical Scholarship" (funded by the British Academy Talent Development Award number TDA21\210025) I led a digital skills training event at University of Leeds on 21-22 July 2022 and will lead another at De Montfort University on 6-7 September 2022. See http://cts.dmu.ac.uk/events/QMLHS for details.

I will give a paper at the International Shakespeare Conference in Stratford-upon-Avon (19-22 July 2022) on the topic of "Sir Thomas More: Editing a manuscript play within an XML edition created for printed plays" in the seminar "Editorial Theory and Practice in the Digital Era"

Conference attendance

Too many to list: see my website for all past papers (available in full text download).

Recent research outputs

All my outputs are in DORA, the university's Institutional Repository

Consultancy work

I read prospective journal articles for Shakespeare Quarterly, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Review of English Studies, and others.

I read proposals for monographs and scholarly editions for Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Manchester University Press, Routledge, and others.

Current research students

Eddie Burton "The Philosophies of Hamlet", part-time, 1st supervisor

Externally funded research grants information

See 'Projects' above

Professional esteem indicators

Image of the front cover of The New Oxford Shakespeare The Complete Works Image of the front cover of Shakespeare Ecocritical Theory by Gabriel Egan