Impalpable Hits: indeterminacy in the searching of tagged Shakespearian texts

In Shakespeare studies, as in the rest of early modern literary studies, the new information technologies have been neither rapidly nor effectively adopted in research. One reason is a misplaced attention upon the notion of hypertext and the seeking of spurious analogies with the early modern printed codex. This essay is concerned with machine applications of textual searching technologies, which is where we should be focussing our energies, and it argues that important recent products for Shakespearian research are weak, and more importantly non-standard, in their searching mechanisms. The desirability of adopting an existing standard, called 'regular expressions', is argued.