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From Here Forward shares stories and ideas about amazing things UBC and its alumni are doing around the world. It covers people and places, truths, science, art, and accomplishments with the view that sharing better inspires better. Join hosts Carol Eugene Park and Jeevan Sangha, both UBC grads, in exploring solutions for the negative stuff out there — focussing on the good for a change, from here forward.
[00:00:00] Carol Eugene Park: Hello, friendly alumni. Welcome back to From Here Forward, your favorite UBC Podcast Network podcast.
[00:00:06] Oh Jeevan, Jeevan, wherefore art thou, Jeevan?
[00:00:10] Jeevan Sangha: Really? I gotta say, Carol, that was so unoriginal. I mean, I was expecting a much stronger opening.
[00:00:16] Carol Eugene Park: Okay, how about this one?
[00:00:18] If music be the food of love, play on. Give me excess of it, that surfeiting. The appetite may sicken, and so die.
[00:00:26] Jeevan Sangha: Can't say I know what that is.
[00:00:28] Carol Eugene Park: Well, I mean, I figured Twelfth Night was a stronger contender to the cliche of Romeo and Juliet, but I have more if you want to hear it.
[00:00:34] Jeevan Sangha: No, no, that's okay. I mean, as much as I'm loving the enthusiasm, I think we'll leave it to the experts. And if it wasn't painfully obvious by now, today's episode is dedicated to the one and only William Shakespeare.
[00:00:46] Carol Eugene Park: Specifically, his first folio, which UBC Library acquired two years ago.
[00:00:50] Jeevan Sangha: We're really excited about today's guest, Dr. Patrick Parra Pennefather, Assistant Professor at UBC Theatre and Film in the Faculty of Arts. He teaches sound design in theater production and design and emerging technology development.
[00:01:02] Carol Eugene Park: He's also a faculty in residence with the Emerging Media Lab at UBC. His research involves creating mixed reality environments, including spatial audio research creations. You might be wondering how his work in digital artifacts relates to Shakespeare's First Folio. But we'll let him get into the nitty gritties of that, but basically, TLDR, he makes Shakespeare fun.
[00:01:22] Jeevan Sangha: And with that, our revels are now ended. Let's get into the interview. In 2022, UBC Library acquired Shakespeare's first folio, published in 1623. And before we get into its significance, could you explain what this First Folio actually is?
[00:01:37] Dr. Patrick Pennefather: Absolutely. So it's a first edition of Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories and Tragedies. It was published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death. So it includes thirty-six of Shakespeare's plays and it was edited by Shakespeare's close friends, writers, actors, and is considered the most authoritative of all of the early printings of Shakespeare.
[00:02:01] It's a rare book, and we need to go back in time to 1623, you know, almost, like, a little over four hundred years ago now, where this type of book was actually kind of new in the public attention and in publishing itself. This is a time of transition as well where oral tradition was shifting into more of a published and mixed culture of oral and published works.
[00:02:27] So the first folio represents all of that. And it was probably, in terms of what's left, I think there are a little over two hundred of them left. And the other thing I wanted to mention is, before that, many of the plays, including Shakespeare's plays, were published on sheets of paper that were just folded. A lot of these were throwaways.
[00:02:51] Very few of these types of publications survive, let alone Shakespeare's. So, that's why this is an important piece of work and that's why it came to be as well. And it was important for those who had known Shakespeare's works, to put time, energy, and investment into getting as many as they could published.
[00:03:13] Carol Eugene Park: And so, in actually acquiring this, um, news outlets have reported that the university paid almost like seven point four million for this rare book. Could you just tell us the story about how the university came to acquire this?
[00:03:27] Dr. Patrick Pennefather: There's this scholar called Peter Blayney and he suggested that at the time of publication an unbound copy of the First Folio costs fifteen shillings. I love this stat. With a pound, or twenty shillings, so about two hundred dollars today, to give you that, that historical fact about it. The story of acquiring the First Folio is an important one to tell. It started back in 2020. And it was really initiated by, uh, Katherine Kalsbeek, who is the head of Rare Books and Special Collections at UBC Libraries.
[00:04:02] And also Dr. Gregory Mackie, who's an associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at UBC. They called me up, and they had heard about me through the Emerging Media Lab. So there's this technology connection that started already in the early initiatives to acquire the book.
[00:04:21] The phone call went like this in 2020, Patrick, we need your support. And wondering if you're interested in supporting the acquisition of this book. We need to raise a lot of money. And of course, my immediate response was that we're in a pandemic. Uh, that's sounds like it might be a lot of money if it's going up for auction, because that's how it was acquired. And you never know with auctions, the starting price versus the finishing price. So you have some idea of the amount that was quoted to you. We had no idea what this book would actually cost at the time. There were indications, right? Most likely in the millions because of the rarity of this book.
[00:04:59] So what the initial prompts were for me to be involved was that both Katherine and Greg were talking about some type of digital initiative, and this was already embedded in the process of thinking about this book, because we already knew this is going to be a rare book. This is going to be a fragile book.
[00:05:18] This is going to be a book that not everyone will be able to access. And in fact, a small number of people would be able to access it. If you consider that this book could be for anyone, not just UBC, the community around UBC, we were already thinking, how can we make this folio digital. And not just digitized because there are a lot of scanning technologies that are available to do that. And it already had been digitized and that was, and is, publicly available off the Internet. We were trying to think, okay, what could be a different approach to this that might actually entice funders to come on board and support this initiative.
[00:05:56] So that's the story that's not always told that I like to tell is that we were already starting to brainstorm, okay, wait, can we make this book in a digital form that is immersive? Well, yes, because I was involved with different types and still am of emerging technologies that we'll talk about soon. Like VR, like augmented reality, like mixed reality. The number one thing we needed to do was to create a digitized pamphlet of some type.
[00:06:22] And for that, I lent on my previous alumni from UBC's program that they are in collaboration with at the Master of Digital Media program and graduate Yangos Hadjiyannis was instrumental in really bringing the visual potential and implications of Shakespeare and the First Folio into some type of tangible form that people could go, oh, right, it's not just a folio collection of books, this is history. This is theater. This is not just theater, but other different media over the years. This is an important work. And we're excited to be part of, of trying to propel this acquisition. So, that work was really two humans, and I don't take very much credit, even though they like to give me some.
[00:07:15] It was really two humans at UBC who are passionate, and that's how these things start, right? So, when we say UBC acquired it, it's a longer process than that. It's individuals who work at UBC, but they have to have that passionate drive because without that passionate drive, we would not have a First Folio at UBC.
[00:07:33] Jeevan Sangha: That's such a fascinating story. And it's so nice to hear people who are so passionate about their work come together and create something new and different. And I guess, um, from my perspective as someone who hasn't, you know, viewed it myself, when you talk about this, like, you know, it's different from just a simple digital archive. It's an experience. Um, can you illustrate that a bit more for someone who doesn't know, like, what does that feel like? And what does that look like?
[00:07:56] Dr. Patrick Pennefather: Yeah, really interesting. So, so many different digital projects have emerged from the folio. We were already thinking, what are different ways in which people can take in Shakespeare beyond the usual of either reading a text like this folio or going to a theatrical production. My background in theatre and specifically in composing music for different Shakespeare plays brought in already a mindset of, okay, there are different ways to bring Shakespeare to life using different types of media that people can resonate with. And I looked at the technology of the day and really it's constantly shifting. But let's say we want to give people who cannot access the book because of its fragility, because of, you know, you need to be trained to handle this book.
[00:08:46] It's over four hundred years old. A slight turn of the page in the wrong way could make the whole thing start to fall apart. We took that into consideration and I thought, well, how do we, what's the closest in this first stage that we can give people of a tactile experience? At least. Now, I know it's not going to replace the tactile feeling of a book.
[00:09:04] We know that. And we can talk about some of the things that are lost without touching the book. But at least the creation of this touch table experience was the first stepping point where we thought, okay, at least we can give people as close as we can to a simulation of flipping a book by touching it and using your hands and developing the user experience in such a way on this touch table, which is large.
[00:09:27] It allows people to zoom into the text. They can get a real feel, not feel, virtual feel for what it might be like. Of course, it involves the imagination, right? In terms of that, but it also using different technologies also affords us 2D and 3D experiences of the folio. So what we're working on now is how do these characters come to life from a touch table or from a virtual reality experience and really give people a more immersive experience of Shakespeare's characters, of Shakespeare's work. So those were some of the ideas that we've already been working on. There was also augmented reality, which allows you to superimpose different 3D or 2D objects in front of your regular world. So if you take your, the best and easiest example is, if you take your phone and you're about to take somebody, someone's photo with a phone.
[00:10:25] So imagine now that these 3D objects that you've designed or co designed with a team can appear in front of your reality. That's what augmented reality is. And that's what we try to do in the initial phases, experimenting with the three witches of that Scottish play. I'm going to try not to say the Scottish play, just for those listening who are, you know, the diehard fans, they're like, don't say the Scottish Play.
[00:10:49] Okay, so if you don't know what I'm talking about, it was written in 1606 ish is the estimate and it's about a Scottish king and it's a, a tragedy. Okay? So we've seen lots of versions of this. The three witches were particularly appealing and those were brought to life through augmented reality at the Vancouver Art Gallery as an accompaniment to the release of this folio to the public at the art gallery where people could come and see not just the folio UBC acquired. But two other folios that were secured from other collectors. So it was a big deal to have this public installation and to start to showcase both the tangible book, which yes, it was behind glass. Hard to touch, right?
[00:11:34] We know that about these old, ancient, amazing texts. So we wanted to create that touch table experience as the first version of it. And also augmented reality. So those are some examples. You know, you put your phone up, it's triggered by a QR code, and you start to see these characters come to life from Shakespeare's plays.
[00:11:54] Carol Eugene Park: You talked about, or you mentioned the things that are lost when things are digitized, or they go digital. Um, could you speak more about that in relation to the First Folio?
[00:12:03] Dr. Patrick Pennefather: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the first obvious thing, or maybe it's obvious to me, it's just the physical sensation right of handling a book and it's kind of there's an awe to that. And I do recognize that, especially because I've handled ancient texts, but with the gloves, with, and you need training with this. So for sure, it's a book. Now, I'd like to challenge all of us into thinking about a book for a moment. And when was the last time you touched a book? I asked that question openly because it's like, have these book things that have they become such a rare commodity even now, right?
[00:12:44] Even with the book published last year, how many opportunities do we have to actually pick up a book and get that physical sensation along with these older books? They're very ornate, right? Because publishing was different and was thought of as a short runs because it was so expensive. This is the beginning in 1623.
[00:13:05] And with this book, it's no exception. It's not like it's the beginning of the printing press, but it really is the beginning of people starting to think about making books that are beautiful. That did happen before, I should say. But in this case, you know, the cover is beautiful. The tactile nature of this book. It's been four hundred years. For those of you who have allergies, you can turn off the podcast right now, but people like the smell. You know, like some people just like to smell it. It's like, oh yeah, the smell of an old book just makes me feel old. It's just like the time at which it was published. Well, four hundred years is a long time. I wouldn't deeply inhale that book.
[00:13:42] Uh, so there's something about that. There's the color, right? There's the fidelity of the detail, uh, the, that feeling that you can't replace digitally, which is the flipping of the page and holding a book in your hand, right? And I can do it now. I have one here and just like, you know, that sound of the page is turning. The wind, it creates brushing in your face, imagining as if the characters are coming off the page into your face.
[00:14:10] Okay, maybe I went too far. There's lots of elements about that are important. The other key thing, which can be produced digitally, but it's different, right? If you, there are a lot of annotations and marginalia on these books. So in other words, what we might now call more doodles. Okay, maybe not just doodles, like people wrote important things inside of some of these copies of these books.
[00:14:33] And there's a whole area of research just on that. Which is fascinating, right? Like getting into that detail with individuals who love books. So if you love books, you will love this book. If you love to touch books, it gets harder. And it's not just this book. It's all ancient texts that are probably over two hundred years old.
[00:14:56] You need to know that when you start to imagine or maybe get frustrated at the fact that you can't handle a book that's this old. And for sure, it can be a source of frustration, right? But at the same time, there has to be a part of us that also understands that these are museum artifacts in a way, right? They're so old and precious. That we have to take care of them, because we want them to last longer, because that's part of why we do this whole collection thing, is that legacy.
[00:15:24] Jeevan Sangha: Yeah, and in speaking about that legacy as well, I mean, from an academic perspective, also an institutional perspective, like, why is it important or exciting for institutions like UBC to have access to collections like this? Why is it exciting for you as an academic? I'm listening to how passionately you speak about this as well. Like, what does it do for you in your practice?
[00:15:43] Dr. Patrick Pennefather: Yeah, so I can't answer for everyone for sure in terms of the importance of the book, but I can refer to some of the quotes and comments that colleagues, uh, have mentioned. And it's important to mention that because they are just as important as the book itself and the telling of the importance of the book.
[00:16:03] So, uh, Dr. Linc Kesler, Associate Professor of First Nations and Indigenous Studies, he wrote, and they had a quote from him in one of the articles. Just like the folio was produced in this rapidly changing cultural economy where printed artifacts, like this folio began to displace the largely oral culture of the stage and what had preceded it. That's significant to understand, right?
[00:16:29] So it's not just, oh, it's a collection of Shakespeare's plays and a book that was published in 1623. There's a connection to the history of published books themselves. And so that, so there's one importance, right? There, there's also the importance of Shakespeare's works themselves and how they have influenced so much.
[00:16:51] Uh, some people call them, and I love this language, but the cornerstone of English literature. Okay, cool. A cultural treasure. Yes. Okay, great. When we look at story, when we look at character development, when we look at theatrical productions, and we go, what is the classic? What is the bar? It's Shakespeare. Why is that? Is a good question.
[00:17:15] And that's an important one that a lot of researchers take the time and effort to go into. Dr. Patricia Badir, who's Professor of English and head of the Department of English, Language and Literature at UBC, she wrote about Shakespeare's works have been agents of colonialism.
[00:17:32] Well, that's interesting. Like, in what way? Well, you could in some cases say that Shakespeare's works colonize theater. I mean, they're everywhere, right? The influence on story, the influence on character development is pretty huge and thinking about this is important, right? The fact that we have Shakespeare's plays with us now at UBC in terms of the First Folio, it's not like the questions have just come up, right?
[00:17:59] But they kind of affirm other questions like, and Patricia writes about global questions about sexuality and gender, religious tolerance, politics, power, race, social justice. How did all of these connect to our real worlds? That is another important aspect of how Shakespeare's plays and their characters have continued resonance over the years.
[00:18:22] It's not just in the production of how the play was conceived, it's in the restaging of it. So now we have this book, right? And we have these plays that are written down, but it's in the interpretation. It's in the staging. It's in like, how do I find meaning in the Scottish play? Or Romeo and Juliet, or other plays that Shakespeare wrote? How do we find resonance with that today in our modern context? And I think that's an important aspect of Shakespeare and Shakespeare's works. The one thing that I found through my own research, too, is, and I think this is on the Folger site as well, if I remember that right, is that the folio was proofread as it was printed.
[00:19:10] What? Wait a minute, that's not a regular publication process. No, because they were iterating on the act of publishing. So I think that's awesome. That led to variations. So there's different variations of Shakespeare that turn up in some copies and not others. It's not like it was an assembly line of every word is the same in every single edition of Shakespeare's First Folio. It's pretty close.
[00:19:31] But we have to remember, let's go back four hundred years. It's not like mass reproduction now. Not at all. So over time, it's important to understand that some copies also acquired notes and drawings. And copies were damaged. And a lot of them have missing pages, and then you find people that, like, you can tell, I think in the one that we have, there's notes, and it looks like there's notes on, you know, how to stage a certain scene.
[00:20:00] Well, that's cool. There's page edges that were trimmed for rebinding. There are different versions of this text that have different meaning for different people over these four hundred years. And that, in a way, is, uh, is just a fascinating journey for many people to, to dive into and talk about. In terms of my own interests, that's a different story, actually.
[00:20:24] And at a certain point, honestly, uh, in about 2018, I would say, 2017, I, because of my exposure to Shakespeare, because of having written and composed music for the same play, actually, Merchant of Venice, at least three times in my career, I got a bit saturated. Like, you can get a bit saturated as well with the things you love, right?
[00:20:51] But at the same time, look, Shakespeare is around, has been around, will continue to be around. And for me now, Shakespeare's corpus, which is how I'm going to refer to it now as we move into this, uh, territory and recent obsession with generative AI and large language models. Well, most of the large language models that we can access freely and the ones that you pay for, they all have Shakespeare's works embedded in them somehow.
[00:21:23] So my thought was, okay, let me ask a large language model, like ChatGPT, for example, because this is how my experiment started, if it can write in the style of Shakespeare. Oh, that's curious, because it looks at patterns. Can it look at this form of English and create something? And then I thought, oh, wait a minute, wait a minute. What if new stories were told using the language of Shakespeare? And, you know, if I wanted to do honor to Shakespeare, then I would say, okay, well, just like others have done, I'm thinking of this movie called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. So go back to that reference, if you're listening, it's a great movie. Where people were creating and have been creating derivative works based on Shakespeare's characters.
[00:22:04] And then I thought, ah, okay, there's something here. There's something in this reinvention of Shakespeare in the time of AI that might have some actual fuel. So I'm going to explore this a little bit. And that's one of my explorations and my, uh, enduring passion with Shakespeare is yes to do honor to Shakespeare. Fantastic. Thank you. You created this great corpus of works. You created characters that have a narrative arc. Oh my god. In fact, you created characters that have self-discoveries throughout a play. Awesome. Now, how does your treatment of that Scottish king, how does that relate to the real Scottish king?
[00:22:45] Oh, wait a minute. There's something there too. And so, that's my interest right now. My interest right now and evolving is to look at some of these characters that are embedded. They're historical characters embedded in Shakespeare's plays and for, you know, artistic liberty, which we see all the time now with different historical characters being summarized in two or three hours, right?
[00:23:07] We see that in a lot of movies with biopics. Okay, cool. Have people thought about this comparison? And in fact, people have. And people have written books about the real Macbeth. Now I'm not stating the play, the character, uh, with the character in the Scottish play. So suddenly we have something that we can actually create with a large language model.
[00:23:34] And so I started to do that. And I can tell you honestly, and this is feedback from experienced directors who've directed Shakespeare. When I first sent a script that was a monologue of Macbeth's questioning Shakespeare as to why he was so demonized in his own play, the response from the director was, well, that's a great experiment and the writing is absolute crap.
[00:23:57] And I think he said it with a Scottish accent, which, you know, emphasized it even more. But that's important, right? So it's a starting point. And for me, that's a repetitive theme in my own work with generative AI. It's a starting point. It's a tool. It, you know, it pointed me to a direction and now we can bring that direction in front of a dramaturg, in front of a director, in front of actors who are going to interpret this. And maybe something can come out of it. Maybe a new insight into Macbeth can come out of it.
[00:24:25] Carol Eugene Park: And I think that's a great segue into kind of your specific work with Emerging Media Lab and your interest as well. Like, um, there's a lot of opportunities in UBC with your work, your interests. Um, I'm just wondering, like, do you know of any plans that might come forward, you know, aside from this folio that you personally are in or that you know might happen?
[00:24:48] Dr. Patrick Pennefather: There are so many projects that I've been thinking about in terms of the folio and my continued interest in both generative AI and emerging technology. One of them happened last summer, and it was a prototype. And it was inspired by the Scottish play, and we thought, okay, there's this new technology that captures actors in three dimensions.
[00:25:13] So unlike a two-dimensional screen where you, where it's typical and we see an actor on TV or an actor on film. With this technology, with the right equipment like a VR headset, you can walk around that actor and see them from every single perspective. It's crazy. I love it. Really expensive technology, but we were determined. Okay, let's partner with this company locally called Departure Lounge, who does the technology called volumetric capture, and that the volume refers to capturing objects, people, props, whatever you want in three dimensions.
[00:25:53] So imagine a giant green screen stage and green screens everywhere and lights everywhere, beaming down and a hundred and twenty-eight cameras, uh, at least sixty to seventy mics trying to capture everything in three dimensions. All of that had, you know, the tech involved was crazy, but what we wanted to do was at least create a prototype of Act 2, Scene 3. Now, Act 2, Scene 3 is an important one in the play Macbeth. And the reason it's important is this is the discovery of the King Duncan, who has been recently killed by Macbeth and is discovered by Macduff.
[00:26:33] So we decided, how can we do this differently? How can we, and by we, I mean, uh, myself, uh, involved with Departure Lounge, the volumetric company, involved with Kreis Immersive. Again, alumni from the Master of Digital Media program, so a strong UBC connection, which I loved. How can we recreate Shakespeare and thinking of this scene and the characters in VR.
[00:27:02] And what's going to be interesting to people? Should we just tell the story again? And the answer was no, unequivocally no, because we wanted to be creating some type of immersive and responsive environment. So what we did was, everyone is a ghost. You come in, multiplayer, fifteen people at a time, you put on your headset, you are all assembled as ghosts.
[00:27:29] And what you need to do, and it's a little dramatic irony, you know, like when we know what the story is already and we're like, he did it, man. We know Macbeth did it. No, he did it. But the job of the ghost is to uncover clues to help the other characters realize that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are responsible.
[00:27:51] So that involved triggering sounds to wake up the porter, because there's a porter at the beginning of that scene. And you know, you hear knocking at the door and it's Macduff and he's knocking and he's knocking on the porter won't let him in because he's sleeping and he keeps coming up with excuses.
[00:28:07] It's a brilliant comedic turn in that play. And so we thought, okay, uh, we need to help Macduff wake up the porter. Oh my god. Suddenly you have something immersive. Suddenly you're placing the players, the humans, giving them that responsibility to wake up the porter, to get the scene going.
[00:28:32] So really we had the scenes as is, no recreation. It was the script as it is. But the, the scene could not move forward without the help of the audience. The audience is transformed, right? It's no longer a passive audience. It's an audience that is engaged. They can speak to each other. It was absolute chaos and people loved it.
[00:28:56] So that's an example of how I've been rethinking with others, right? How do we create more immersive experiences of Shakespeare. Uh, the other experiments that I've been doing have more to do with generative AI and the future of how to create and, or I should say, use a pre trained machine learning model to, and work with actors, work with a director, work with a dramaturg, and create, uh, an Elizabethan English Shakespeare text to speech model that people can enjoy. I laugh because it sounds like it just rolls off my mouth so easily, but it's really hard. But the important thing about it, and I'm raising funds now for this project. So if you're listening and you want to give me money, please do. But, uh, the idea of it really, it's not just about creating a text to speech, generative AI, not at all.
[00:29:54] It's actually the process itself is working responsibly. And ethically, and giving ownership of the voices, how they're used, to everyone involved. The actors. Absolutely. Like, look at the controversies now with AI, and rightly so, where actors are highly concerned, and we already know. We've heard the horror stories of, you know, actors who are not even well-known doing voiceovers.
[00:30:22] And there's a little clause in the contract that says, we own your voice and we can use it to train an AI. No, wrong, bad. This process is also about reinventing an ethical process of creation. Just like we try to do in theater, right? It's a collaboration. Let's treat it like a collaboration. Let's give people voice in that collaboration.
[00:30:40] And I think that goes to the roots. Not just of collaborative theater productions, but also in terms of when we go back and we read stories about Shakespeare's plays and how they were produced, right? Very, a lot of improvisation, a lot of last-minute changes, writing on the spot. Like, do we bring back more excitement to these stories that, uh, are rich?
[00:31:03] Whose, whose characters are rich? Because when I think of, when we even think of narrative arc or character journey, a lot of that is owed to Shakespeare. A lot of it. So let's keep doing that. Let's keep building those characters out. How would they respond to being in contemporary societies? And a lot of the work that Bard on the Beach does, and other Shakespeare companies really try to push that, right? They try to give us Shakespeare in a new light. It still has resonance.
[00:31:33] Jeevan Sangha: That was awesome. I just have to say, before we jump into our next question, that I need to be signed up as a ghost immediately, because that sounds extremely fun. And I love me some dramatic irony. So,
[00:31:44] Dr. Patrick Pennefather: It was totally fun.
[00:31:44] Jeevan Sangha: Like, that's gonna cure mine and Carol's, like, high school Shakespeare sort of hatred. Right, Carol?
[00:31:55] Dr. Patrick Pennefather: Yes.
[00:31:56] Carol Eugene Park: Trauma. Trauma. That's what it was.
[00:31:58] Dr. Patrick Pennefather: Trauma. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hear you. I hear you. Yeah.
[00:32:02] Jeevan Sangha: We love reinventing the wheel.
[00:32:04] Dr. Patrick Pennefather: And it's interesting, right? And the important thing too is like, how do you find resonance with these characters? And, or do you, right? Like, not everyone does. That's okay.
[00:32:14] But it is interesting to, to even ask that question. Can I do any of these characters? So when people are all like, oh, AI is going to kill everything. I'm just like, well, no, um, you've got to go in depth with it and you have to be able to really ask the right questions and the right prompts. So my prompts were, um, why are the witches considered, like, where does that start?
[00:32:44] What's the history of witchcraft in, at least in the culture of England? Oh my god. Well, it so happens that I would say about, uh, let me see, three, nine, maybe ten years before Macbeth was written, uh, James the first, who was not James the first at the time, but he later ascended to the throne right around the turn of uh, a century.
[00:33:11] So in the early 1600s. Well, just before that, he wrote this edict, it's called Demonology, which pretty much demonized women and witches. So then, wait a minute. Is there a correlation between Shakespeare writing this and being sponsored by James the first? What about this ascension to the throne? What does that even mean? Well, it actually meant this was the first king to rule both and represent the rule of both England and Scotland. They had their independent, uh, governance, but that's the first time in history. Is there a coincidence between that and the play Macbeth? I don't think so. I think it's a direct correlation when I look at it.
[00:33:59] A lot of people are like, well, you can't just say that because you don't really know and they're right. Who saves Scotland from that dastardly Macbeth? It's the English. Coincidence? I don't know. I don't know. So when I read that in a play, I get excited. And I get, you know, I start to understand now the play more.
[00:34:25] When I read about the witches, I start to understand it. And then I'm just motivated to say, well, what did the witches think about being represented in that way? And that's why I go back to that theme about these different characters, these historical characters that were, that we, in a way we've embedded in our understanding of those characters through Shakespeare.
[00:34:46] Well, that's interesting. Uh, do we encourage further research on that? To fact check? Just like we're saying that about AI? You should fact check what you get. Um, no. Or maybe we are. Maybe some key researchers and scholars are doing that, which I completely applaud. But that's the type of stuff that this stuff brings up. Right?
[00:35:09] We look at this publication. It's like, it provokes, it's provocative. Shakespeare's provocative. That's a good thing. What does it provoke? It's up to us. How we contextualize Shakespeare now is up to us. The characters, their meanings, completely up to us. And as individuals. And those stories are limitless for me. Like, look at, oh my god, in that folio, there's like, there's thirty-five works. Each of them unique. Most of us only know the surface of them.
[00:35:42] Jeevan Sangha: Given how technology is changing and in the extended reality and AI sort of spaces, what enhancements are you excited for in addition to those? Like, what do you hope to see in the future?
[00:35:54] Dr. Patrick Pennefather: There's always, uh, going to be this tension with technology Uh, meaning older works or technology, meaning older generations, truly, right? There's always this tension that is going to be present. It's no different right now with AI and Shakespeare's folio, right? Like I'm sure there are some listeners who are probably aghast at my comments about generative AI and reinterpreting Shakespeare and how dare I, and you know, that, that should be untouched work. But then there are the more I think the more scholarly researchers who are probably listening going, yeah, what do you think we've been doing for ages in theater?
[00:36:36] Reinventing, recontextualizing, using technology of stagecraft to tell new stories. Thanks, Patrick. But truly there are other really, uh, useful, pragmatic uses of different technologies when they need older technologies like a book. And so let's look at what we can do with the Shakespeare folio. And that is another funding project that I'm raising money for.
[00:37:05] It's four hundred years later, and we have these ancient texts and the Shakespeare First Folio is not the only one we have. There's many, many ancient texts older than that that could, with the help of optical character recognition, which has, is an intelligence system that's developed over many, many years, combined with large language models, they can interpret text on an image. Now that's huge. And this is where one direction where we're going with this technology and where, and those are, that's my interest directly as well, is just like my nerd tech is like, okay, let's as a next step, let's use OCR, optical character recognition, combined with a large language model, like GPT, but it's not the only one. And let's try to, it's not just converting the text from an image to text that we can then manipulate. But now I want to do that with the First Folio on a touch table and let people hit that classic symbol of a magnifying glass called a search function and go compare all the murders in Shakespeare's plays. Well, that's a great prompt, right?
[00:38:23] It's specific to that. It has, it's fantastic for a researcher, uh, you still are looking at the First Folio. Because you could do this type of search if you were just to do it on a large language model, right? But now we have this embedded mechanism using AI to help us improve how we search these texts for different types of meanings, for different types of research objectives.
[00:38:49] And really, we are in a time where we can safely say we are leveraging technologies to, uh, look at other technologies. And that is how I see the First Folio at the time that it was published. We don't tend to refer to books as technologies, but they are, and they were, and what a fantastic meeting place of this old tech called the First Folio with this fairly new tech.
[00:39:18] It's not that new, with AI, but maybe decades old tech. Sure. Wow. What's going to happen with this? I'm curious. And that curiosity for me is what drives the research and the research questions that evolve. And again, to relate it to, uh, the real world, right? Always relating it to the real world because in a way, and everyone listening has the right to say, why bother or why this now? Right?
[00:39:48] And we should ask those questions. And I'm constantly asking those questions. And so for me, why now is, is because this body of work has had a big influence on, not just on entertainment, but on how we think about ourselves as humans. So there, there is a humanity aspect to it, right? We, there are moral lessons from Shakespeare. It's not just about story and character, right? We look at that and we look at these tragedies and we go, right? It was just that little thing they did. That if they had not done that little thing, okay, maybe not killing Duncan is a little thing, but at the same time, you know, it's those moments that Shakespeare captured so well, that can and do have educational value.
[00:40:40] So I think there, there's that aspect and that tension that's always there and present. So technology can make us, make these texts more accessible through different mediums, but it can also draw us and draw our attention to these older technologies called books. And maybe after you listen to this podcast, you might be inspired to go and look at a book that I mentioned, or other books that write about Shakespeare, books that compare Shakespeare historically.
[00:41:12] You start to look at all the scholarly underpinnings of Shakespeare. And Shakespeare, it's an iceberg of knowledge and critical thinking. And the plays really provoke us to think of philosophical questions about being human. And that, to me, is the right approach to all of this work, right? How does the technology draw our attention to our own humanity? What is it doing to our own humanity? Did Shakespeare write about this?
[00:41:47] Jeevan Sangha: That was such a fun conversation. Thank you so much for joining us.
[00:41:51] Dr. Patrick Pennefather: Thank you.
[00:41:51] Carol Eugene Park: I hope listening to Dr. Pennefather's enthusiasm for Shakespeare healed everyone's high school English class trauma.
[00:41:57] Jeevan Sangha: May we all have English professors as fun and forward thinking as him. Well then, there's only one thing left to say. Goodnight, goodnight. Parting is such sweet sorrow.
[00:42:08] Carol Eugene Park: I shall say goodnight, till it be 'morrow.
[00:42:11] Thanks, everyone, for listening. Make sure you catch our next episode by subscribing or following our show on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're feeling your feels, please drop us a review. You can find me on Twitter or X @CarolEugenePark.
[00:42:25] Jeevan Sangha: And me @JeevanKsangha. From Here Forward is an alumni UBC podcast produced by Podium Podcast Company.