Impact case study database

Over the census period, the reach, significance and impact of Robinson’s new standards for describing and editing literary-historical manuscripts has been sustained and global: it has contributed to the cultural preservation of internationally significant manuscripts and it has benefited libraries and archives managing world-class manuscript collections, editors, commercial publishers and readers, through positive changes in the way books based on manuscript sources are created, published and catalogued.

(1) LIBRARIES AND ARCHIVES: ENHANCING THE PRESERVATION AND CATALOGUING OF LITERARY-CULTURAL HERITAGE

The impact of Robinson’s research has been felt by libraries and archives managing manuscript collections, via the MASTER and ENRICH projects. In this REF census period, Robinson’s standard has been used within the MASTER project to achieve catalogue integration across the holdings of the Royal Library in the Hague; the Arnamagnaean Institute, Copenhagen; L’Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes, Paris; the National Library of the Czech Republic, Prague; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the British Library; the Vatican Library; and the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan. This amounts to 61,000 manuscripts – the core of Europe’s rare manuscript holdings – being more discoverable by readers than would have been possible without Robinson’s standard [C2].

The EU-funded EUR45,570,000 ENRICH project (2007–2009) built upon Robinson’s achievement with MASTER and adopted his standard [C3]. It created a base for a digital library of European cultural heritage, which now makes available more than 5,000,000 digitised pages for a wide range of non-academic users, including libraries, museums and archives, policymakers and lay readers. Examples include the National Library of the Czech Republic, Prague; Centro per comunicazione e l’integrazione dei media, Florence; SYSTRAN SA, Paris; and Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid. This digital library, enabled by Robinson’s standard, puts Europe’s manuscript collection before the eyes of thousands of lay and scholarly readers each year every year in the current census period.

(2) COMMERCIAL PUBLISHING: ENHANCING MANUSCRIPT EDITING AND PUBLISHING PRACTICES

The impact of Robinson’s research has been felt by publishers of books based on manuscripts, via the TEI P5 Guidelines [C1]. Since 2014, large-scale digital projects have continued to adopt the TEI P5 standard incorporating Robinson’s work [C4] and so have commercial publishers [C5]. When publishing materials based on manuscript sources, publishers’ use of Robinson’s standard provides a simpler, more efficient means of encoding manuscripts than was previously available and thereby enables the production of trade and scholarly editions of those manuscripts at lower costs.

(3) READERS: ENHANCED PUBLIC ACCESS TO CULTURALLY ENRICHING LITERARY-HISTORICAL SOURCES

Since 2014, trade and academic publishers have used the Robinson manuscript-encoding standard to create editions of works by a range of public figures and canonical and non-canonical authors. This includes 77 editions of writers’ personal correspondence [C5], such as The Letters of John F. Kennedy (2013), The Letters of Noël Coward (2014), The Correspondence of Charles Darwin (2014), The Letters of Samuel Beckett (2014), The Correspondence of Sigmund and Anne Freud (2014), Jane Austen’s Letters (2014), The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia (2015), The Letters of Ernest Hemingway (2015) and The Letters of Oliver Goldsmith (2018).

Other editions made from manuscript sources using Robinson’s digital edition standards [C5] include works by well-known authors, such as Ben Jonson’s Walk to Scotland: An Annotated Edition of the ‘Foot Voyage’ (2014), The Works of Robert Burns (2014), The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins (2014), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Heidelberg Writings (2015) and The Sermons of John Donne (2015), as well as historically significant texts such as The Complete Bill of Rights: The Drafts, Debates, Sources, and Origins (2015).

Commercial publishers of books based on manuscript sources are under no obligation to adopt any particular standards and have chosen Robinson’s as it simplifies manuscript-encoding protocols, lowering their costs and enabling them to produce editions that otherwise might not have been commercially viable. Non-canonical manuscript editions that have benefited this way and been made publicly available, include: The Household Account Book of Sarah Fell of Swarthmoor Hall (2014), Every Day Lasts a Year: A Jewish Family’s Correspondence from Poland (2014), The Letters of Lady Anne Bacon (2014), In Defence of the Slave Trade: Stephen Fuller, Jamaica and the West India Parliamentary Lobby at Westminster, 1788–1795 (2014), The Correspondence of John Campbell MP with His Family, Henry Fox, Sir Robert Walpole and the Duke of Newcastle, 1734–1771 (2014), The Egyptian Historian ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Jabartī: His Life, Works, Autographs, Manuscripts and the Historical Sources of ʿAjāʾib al-Āthār (2014) and Lady Nugent’s East India Journal (2016) [C5].

Keenan’s research on Shakespearean acting companies has achieved cultural benefit for BBC audiences and for British tourism and heritage via her collaboration on a regional approach to the BBC’s Shakespeare 400 public programming and the co-creation of resources which preserve Shakespeare’s cultural heritage and promote interest in places visited by Shakespearean players. This collaboration started with her invited presentation (‘Shakespeare on Tour’) at a 2014 AHRC/BBC workshop, designed to help the BBC with its programming plans for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death [R3].

(1) CO-CREATED CULTURAL ARTEFACTS / PRESERVING SHAKESPEARE’S CULTURAL HERITAGE

‘Shakespeare on Tour’

‘Shakespeare on Tour’ is a web resource of around 200 short essays about Shakespeare and Shakespearean performances in and beyond London, from his own day to the present [C1a], inspired by Keenan’s research presentation [R3] and the British Library’s playbill collection. Keenan collaborated closely with the BBC Head of Programmes, English Regions and a research student at the British Library (BL) to develop the resource.

Keenan identified key performance locations visited by Shakespearean acting companies that could be the basis of essays for the site and brought in REED’s Director of Research and other scholars involved in the REED project as collaborating researchers and essay writers. Keenan authored 16 essays for the site. Drawing on her scholarship about the centrality of acting companies and touring in Shakespearean England, Keenan provided stories about the places where such companies performed, enhancing public knowledge of the rich regional dimension of Shakespearean theatre.

The online resource was launched on the BBC website (21 March 2016). Keenan promoted the research via BBC television and radio interviews, including with East Midlands Today (7 March 2016), and Radio Oxford (18 March 2016) and, globally, via a BBC Radio 3 ‘Essay’ about ‘Shakespeare Beyond London’ (broadcast 29 April 2016; available as a podcast) [C2].

‘Shakespeare on Tour’ had received over 270,000 page views globally before the end of 2016, pointing to its significant audience reach [C1b]. The BBC Head of Programmes, English Regions highlights the value of the project to the BBC and its users, as well as the importance of Keenan’s research expertise to its development: ‘ Shakespeare on Tour is a brilliant illustration of how well the BBC can deliver original and compelling stories to its audience only through meaningful partnership. … Throughout the whole course of this … project, we were able to reference the stories against the knowledge held by Siobhan, by REED [and] the British Library’ [C3].

Countryfile Shakespeare special**

In April 2016 Keenan was the academic consultant for a feature on the touring of Shakespeare’s company for the BBC’s first Countryfile Shakespeare special. The feature, which saw Keenan appear alongside Judi Dench, was inspired by her BBC essay about the King’s Men’s visit to Fordwich. The feature was the subject of considerable advance press coverage, including articles in The Independent [C4a], The Huffington Post [C4b] and The Guardian [C7]. The programme was broadcast on BBC1 (24 April 2016) with an average of 6,393,000 viewers and a high score of 82 on the Audience Appreciation Index [C5]. The episode’s director emphasises the importance of Keenan’s research to the feature: ‘Her expert knowledge [and] ability to bring to life the details of Shakespeare’s players … revealed new aspects of the Bard’s life and plays not only to our audience, but even to a veteran Shakespearian actor’ like Dench [C6] who observed, ‘it was wonderful to learn that Shakespeare had toured with his company’ [C7]. A number of viewers responded in similar terms, tweeting comments such as ‘Learnt a lot about #thebard I didn’t know’, and ‘Shakespeare is amazing, I learnt loads [of] new stuff’, highlighting how the programme enriched their knowledge of Shakespeare and their awareness of his regional connections, as in the case of the viewer who commented, ‘My folks live 5 mins away from Fordwich – been there many a time! Never knew about the Shakespeare connection!’ [C8].

(2) IMPACTING SHAKESPEAREAN TOURISM/HERITAGE

As a result of the public dissemination of her work with the BBC, several of Keenan’s stories have fed into tourist and heritage materials promoting interest in regional places visited by Shakespearean players, including Leicester, Londesborough Hall, Wilton House and Nottingham, where Keenan’s story about Shakespeare’s company’s visit to the city was read by the author of a post on ‘Shakespeare and Nottingham’, which references the visit, for the Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature literary locations blog [C9a–C9d]. Keenan’s BBC stories have also attracted wider engagement with Shakespeare’s regional heritage, providing part of the inspiration, for example, for a blog about ‘William Shakespeare: Traces in Kent’ [C10].