Holger Syme in an empty theare

The literary archaeologist

Deborah M. Buehler

Holger Syme’s research tool is time ­— and a good camera. 

Professor Holger Syme embodies the classic humanities scholar. A professor in the Department of English and Drama at the University of Toronto Mississauga, he wears dark-rimmed glasses and a checked shirt under a dark blazer. One red and white cuff peeks from the sleeve as he points and asks, “Is that a cassette recorder?”

It is. The 1990s recorder provides back-up for the recording app on my mobile phone. 

Everyone has tools of the trade — some old and some new. Syme uses both to study text and performance in theatre: the relationship between “page and stage.” 

Syme researches contemporary theatre and theatre history in the 16th and 17th centuries. “In a funny way, my work about the distant past has been most affected by new technology,” he says, “in the sense that the existing corpus of documents is now largely available digitally.” 

When studying the past, the challenge, Syme explains, is to piece together traces of data from fragments of text and then understand how the text comes alive as a performance. Like an archaeologist excavating bones from dirt, he uncovers an understanding of “events and people that are long gone.” Previously, he had to either travel to read rare documents or else rely on transcriptions. “Now you can get a high resolution photograph.”

Read the full story in the Summer 2014 issue of Edge >