Information, Medium & Society: Eighteenth International Conference on Publishing Studies

Abstract

In Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing,” the characters of Beatrice and Benedict speak meanly about and to each other despite the fact that they love each other, which they accept and articulate by the play’s final scene. Actors are taught to analyze a script in order to ascertain the context (what informs the dialogue) and the subtext (what they actually mean by what they say or do). Traditionally, many non-theatrical texts, including scholarly communication, have been able to have been read literally - without too much consideration of context or subtext. In the 2020s, what we are calling the “Post-Truth” Era, communication often does not hold its literal meaning. This paper examines what tools can we might want to borrow take from the actor’s craft of script-reading to help us understand context and how that informs the subtext that underlays the scholarly communication.