Those who work in my specific area of inquiry, English Renaissance literature, and those who worked in literary text analysis in the early 1990s, may recall a largish review article from that time by Whitney Bolton, published in the journal Computers and the Humanities. Entitled “The Bard in Bits: Electronic Editions of Shakespeare and Programs to Analyse Them” (Bolton, 1990) it was in many ways a tour-de-force for the community that was interested in literary studies of the period and textual analysis; the article documented what was then (as it is now) a very fertile area, rife with discussion of a good number of encoded texts – most derived from accepted scholarly editions or prepared to accepted standards for scholarly editing and transcription – and good mention of what, then, was felt to be the natural companion to such electronic texts: useful, integrated text analysis software.

1. digital library