The SXP line numbering alternative is called RLN or "Relational Line Numbering." This new system allows any edition to be privileged over others and still allows textual collation, juxtaposition, or superimposition without awkward and unnatural line numbering. This alternative method of markup only embeds code that is directly related to navigational coordinates (act.scene.line, TLN, and RLN), dramatic context (for example, speaker, listener, and over-hearer), and properties of languages; any further markup uses X-Pointer to apply new XML tags dynamically to the appropriate coordinates in the text, and by implication, to all their corresponding lines variants in different media (theatrical and cinematic scripts) and language translations. Third and finally, I will briefly discuss the SXP's use of a genealogical phonetic tool called Soundex as an alternative way to apply single loose word search across multiple texts with variant orthography. Wikipedia calls Soundex a "phonetic algorithm for indexing names by sound, as pronounced in English" and as good luck would have it, PhP comes with built-in Soundex functionality! [Try entering "self" and "selfe" at ]

RLN (Relational Line Numbering) shifts the focus away from the linear and sequential assumptions (limitations) inherent in the two conventional line numbering systems (act.scene.line and TLN). By assigning a unique identifier to each line much like DNA, all similar lines, regardless of the edition or even language in which they are written, share the same unique RLN. Thus, readers who locate a line in (say) F1 will easily be able to find its equivalents in eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth editions, as well as in films, audio readings, and even translations. Relational mapping allows scholars a more comprehensive way of studying the "versioning" of Shakespeare's plays over time without an awkward and unnatural numbering system that skips the literal sequencing on the page or adds "+" to additional lines. The Shakespeare XML project allows users to use conventional act.scene.line coordinates to find a line, but underneath that search, it is the RLN that makes everything work. In order to be consistent with the TLN system, each edition starts at 1 and increases incrementally by 1 for each line. In other words, SLN (Sequential Line Numbering) does not reproduce the unnatural skips and plusses that Hinman's TLN also produces.

The SXP re-constitutes the old power hierarchy between editor and reader, shifting it away from the control of editorial expertise over to reader preference and empowerment. In so doing, the SXP makes possible the act of editioning, a continuously ongoing process by which multiple and variant chunks (lines or passages) of a play and their corresponding annotations and commentaries can be infinitely and spontaneously re-combined at will. These reader-controlled mashups automatically update through RSS feeds and other Web 2.0 technologies with different filters (linguistic, philosophical, biographical, historical, scholarly, public, country of origin, time period, etc.). Instead of the noun "an edition" or even "editions," both of which come from the book's physicality, the SXP makes a case for editioning, a more ethereal process that emerges from the effects of digitization. Since each reader now modifies their own content ("edition") according to individual preferences, no two editions at any moment in time would necessarily be the same. Imagine collated or variorum lines, annotations, descriptions of sources, embedded media, critical annotations, and other critical features shifting dynamically, like the pieces of colour in a kaleidoscope. Refresh rates will be as short as a few minutes or as long as a few months, and only in the areas that interest the reader.

The SXP signifies a paradigm shift away from the edition as an object (noun), toward editioning as a process (verb); away from a top-down model of scholarly expertise (the editor knows best), and toward a bottom-up model of collective intelligence (the editor merely empowers the reader to make their own editorial choices). Arguably, the material print culture of the book, with its educated and class-based readers, over-determined the power attributed to knowledge producers (editors) and the consequent disenfranchisement of consumers (readers). It is not mere digitization alone that destabilizes this relationship, but the particular way in which Web 2.0 structurally undermines and reforms that "collaborative space where people can interact," to use Berners-Lee's term. The SXP's "texts" do not really exist as .html files on a drive or even as records in a database on a server; they only need to exist for that single moment when the reader calls them forth (assembles them) a customized but transient configuration of texts and annotations. A local "print" (output to paper) is merely a snapshot of the mashup at that moment in time.

Editing Shakespeare is a daunting task with some unique challenges. For starters, the catalog of printed FGEs (First Generation Editions) contains an unusually wide range of discrepant variants with no unequivocal way to resolve the problem of textual authority--even when the stemmatology seems clear. Our problems might be less contentious if it were only a matter of accidentals (punctuation, orthography, line numbering, etc.). However, when lines and whole speeches are added (or missing--depending on your point of view), when lexis and semantics can seem contradictory in two different editions, and when whole scenes have been re-sequenced, deciding on a "reliable" (some might say convincing) solution to the problem of documenting and synchronizing variations is suddenly much more difficult.

These problems are compounded by another fact: it's unusual that a writer of Shakespeare's notoriety left no autograph editions, and consequently, there is no authoritative text to resolve disputes. Ironically, despite scholarly training, editors and critics alike have been seduced by the sirens of speculation in these matters. Led into the dangerous waters of what Walsh calls "psychological intentionalism," or the idea that the texts themselves are "signs or notes of the author's mind" (37: Walsh quoting J. Dover Wilson), we might well ask why so many Shakespearean scholars have felt compelled to speculate about that which is absent, using evidence that is either non-existent or shoddy. Copy-text theory itself is implicated, but so is audience shorthand theory, aabridgmenttheory (Irace), revision theory (Irace, Jowett), "Lost Archetype theory" (Rosenbaum 41), and two-text theory (Blayney), to name a few.

As Rosenbaum (The Shakespeare Wars) and others have suggested, the resultant and highly contentious debates have both informed and undermined the history of Shakespearean editorial scholarship. The long history of editing Shakespeare is fraught with arguments about problems of textual authority (1). And the legacy of editorial scholarship has not, as one might have hoped, helped propel us toward any satisfactory solution. For instance, whether by accident or design, most pre-1980s print editions give a confident (but false) impression of a single, monolithic text which is "the" play as it has been received; even variorum editions take a single (privileged) text as the basis for "the" edition. When faced with "good" and "bad" quartos in Hamlet, for example, and so many significant differences, it becomes apparent that conjectural emendation, speculative stemmatology, and reductionist texts are as obfuscating and misleading as as they are informing and clarifying. And who's to say with any certainty that the Q1 Hamlet can't work as a text (2) ?

F1 has conveniently served as a base text (Copytext) of trusted authority, perhaps because of its posthumous and collaborative publication by Shakespeare's own associates (Heminge and Condell), but also, I suppose, because these editors were the first to impose a navigational order (act.scene.line) on the amorphous quarto versions. Many arguments have been recruited into the service of supporting the inherent literary and editorial superiority of F1, but the evidence is not always convincing. Thus it has come to pass that recent editors (since the 1980s) working electronically and in print have gone beyond the variorum edition by visualizing editorial complexity in many new ways. There are appended, interlocking, and conflated editions. For instance, the second edition of The Oxford Shakespeare (Jowett, Montgomery, Taylor, and Wells: 2005) offers both the folio edition and quarto editions of Lear, one after the other. The second Norton edition (Greenblatt, Cohen, Howard, and Maus: 2008) raises the stakes of that ante and offers three different textual variations of Lear: the Q1 version on the verso side with a matching or synchronized F1 version of the recto side, and additionally, a conflated version that is appended after these two interlocked versions. In Greenblatt's second edition of the Norton, King Lear line 1.3.33 in Q1 reads "Gloucester: 'I shall, my liege'" while F1 shows "lord" instead of "liege." Barbara Lewalski's conflated version adopts the Q1 reading and suppresses F1.

Comparative renderings empower the scholarly reader, but one could argue that they muddy the waters for the neophyte who seeks only the most basic understanding. In conflated renderings, the reader might never be aware that variants exist; for some readers, this is acceptable, but for others, not so. One logistical problem emerging from the complexity of available editions is how to synchronize line numbering across so many textual variants. A second problem is how to markup texts when so many textual variants need to be tracked and synchronized with each other. This paper discusses just a few of how the Shakespeare XML Project ("SXP") offers solutions to these problems. The paper also briefly discusses ways to improve word search sophistication across all textual variations, including modern and translated ones.

The SXP re-constitutes the old power hierarchy between editor and reader, shifting it away from the control of editorial expertise over to reader preference and empowerment. In so doing, the SXP makes possible the act of editioning, a continuously ongoing process by which multiple and variant chunks (lines or passages) of a play and their corresponding annotations and commentaries can be infinitely and spontaneously re-combined at will. These reader-controlled mashups automatically update through RSS feeds and other Web 2.0 technologies with different filters (linguistic, philosophical, biographical, historical, scholarly, public, country of origin, time period, etc.). Instead of the noun "an edition" or even "editions," both of which come from the book's physicality, the SXP makes a case for editioning, a more ethereal process that emerges from the effects of digitization. Since each reader now modifies their own content ("edition") according to individual preferences, no two editions at any moment in time would necessarily be the same. Imagine collated or variorum lines, annotations, descriptions of sources, embedded media, critical annotations, and other critical features shifting dynamically, like the pieces of colour in a kaleidoscope. Refresh rates will be as short as a few minutes or as long as a few months, and only in the areas that interest the reader.

The SXP signifies a paradigm shift away from the edition as an object (noun), toward editioning as a process (verb); away from a top-down model of scholarly expertise (the editor knows best), and toward a bottom-up model of collective intelligence (the editor merely empowers the reader to make their own editorial choices). Arguably, the material print culture of the book, with its educated and class-based readers, over-determined the power attributed to knowledge producers (editors) and the consequent disenfranchisement of consumers (readers). It is not mere digitization alone that destabilizes this relationship, but the particular way in which Web 2.0 structurally undermines and reforms that "collaborative space where people can interact," to use Berners-Lee's term. The SXP's "texts" do not really exist as .html files on a drive or even as records in a database on a server; they only need to exist for that single moment when the reader calls them forth (assembles them) a customized but transient configuration of texts and annotations. A local "print" (output to paper) is merely a snapshot of the mashup at that moment in time.

Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, 2007–08, grant award ($5000).

The VC Instructor" was shared and used by all the English-speaking teaching hospitals in Ontario through the CHEC-CESC (Canadian Healthcare Education Commons).

The VC Instructor" was shared and used by all the English-speaking teaching hospitals in Ontario through the CHEC-CESC (Canadian Healthcare Education Commons).

This project was part of Canarie No. 59, a $2.3 million grant awarded to a consortium of 10 collaborating partners to develop an online course on the pedagogy of videoconferencing in high-bandwidth (dark fiber) environments. My piece at Learn Canada (my company) was ($320,950).

Digital Architecture (DA) is a new way of conceptualizing online content design because it integrates ID (Instructional Design), HCI (Human-Computer Interaction), database design, project management, human communication theory, and the humanist disciplines of history, psychology, cultural studies, and political economy. DA was conceived and developed by Learn Canada with the funding support of the University of Ottawa and Canarie.

The 11 modules of this course are structured to meet a variety of different needs; the course is aimed at all educators and trainers and starts from the premise that knowledge, communication, innovation, motivation, and experimentation are common activities of all educators. Each theoretical module can be enhanced by a workshop, or the whole course can be enhanced by a practicum.

Digital Architecture (DA) is a new way of conceptualizing online content design because it integrates ID (Instructional Design), HCI (Human-Computer Interaction), database design, project management, human communication theory, and the humanist disciplines of history, psychology, cultural studies, and political economy. DA was conceived and developed by Learn Canada with the funding support of the University of Ottawa and Canarie.

The 11 modules of this course are structured to meet a variety of different needs; the course is aimed at all educators and trainers and starts from the premise that knowledge, communication, innovation, motivation, and experimentation are common activities of all educators. Each theoretical module can be enhanced by a workshop, or the whole course can be enhanced by a practicum.

With the support of the University Sydney's Cogniti Project (https://cogniti.ai/), I'm developing a Gen AI agent that can identify 22 different deficiencies in undergraduate Humanities essay writing.

Developing a GenAI Agent (“22 Essay Errors”) to identify and explain writing deficiencies and suggest practical remedies. The agent also identifies essay strengths. Starting soon: experimentation in this AI's ability to autonomously evaluate argumentative, thesis-based essays in the humanities. Thanks to the generous support from The University of Sydney’s Cogniti Project. (https://cogniti.ai/), 2026.