Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 2, No. 242. Sunday, 29 Sep 1991.
 
From: 		Ken Steele <
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Subject: 	New on the SHAKSPER Fileserver
Date: 		Sun, 29 Sep 91 0:05:54 EDT
 
 
Two announcements regarding the SHAKSPER Fileserver, and some
interesting statistics regarding SHAKSPEReans:
 
1)	Hardy Cook has sent me the first seventy of Shakespeare's
	*Sonnets*, and they have now been posted to the SHAKSPER
	Fileserver as SONNETS 1609Q.  Many thanks again for his
	generosity in making this text file available!
	
2)	I have updated the SHAKSPER Discussion Index for the first time
	since March.  It is a handy listing of subject lines for
	the past 377 digests on SHAKSPER, and can be retrieved as
	DISCUSS INDEX on the SHAKSPER Fileserver.
 
3)	No-one ever wants to be reduced to a statistic or slotted into
	a category, so my apologies if I am causing anyone offense here,
	but in reviewing the member biographies I've constructed the
	following cross-section of the SHAKSPER membership, and I
	think it's revealing:
	
		89 Professors of English
			(61 specializing in Shakespeare or Renaissance)
		18 Professors from other areas
			(largely Theatre, Music, Classics, History,
			but also Psychology, Sociology, Communications,
			Law, Statistics, Medicine, Math, Biochemistry...)
		34 Graduate Students
			(19 in English, usually Shakespeare or Renaissance)
		20 Undergraduate Students
		17 Humanities Computing folk
		13 Librarians
		18 Others
			(Computer Corporations, Planetaria, Oceanographers,
			University Administrators, Journalists, etc.)
 
	Also, in categories overlapping those above, SHAKSPER involves
	10 actors, 10 directors or producers, and 4 playwrights (and
	those of you who didn't admit it in your biographies aren't
	counted here).
 
	You may notice that the numbers add up to slightly more than
	our current membership total -- there has been some slight
	attrition over the past 14 months, and the biography files
	remain unchanged.	
 
	The totals tell us that Professors make up 56% of the group,
	Graduate Students a further 18%, and figures I haven't quoted
	here indicate that 82% of our members are in the USA.  Now I,
	for one, can stop guessing about the composition of our
	colloquium!
 
						Ken Steele
						University of Toronto