what do digitized first folios do for us?

Last August, Emma Smith’s The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s First Folio was published and I was and am delighted to have a piece in this one-stop-shopping introduction to F1. My contribution, to the surprise of no one, is on digitized copies of the First Folio. It’s a bibliographical and cultural-materialist inflected examination of what is available, how they present themselves, and what we might learn from them. “Digital First Folios” is a piece that I’m proud of and that I think is a useful contribution to conversations about digitization projects. And so I’m really happy that not only can you read it as part of the Companion, but that I can share it with you here on my site. You’ll have to read the piece for the details of my argument, but as a lure, here are some of my key points. Digitized F1s are presented nearly completely without any information about…