Open Shakespeare
May 22nd, 2006
There are already very impressive examples of open knowledge in the form of projects such as wikipedia, publicwhip, the world-wide molecular matrix etc.
However it would be nice to have something a little simpler, some sort of ‘hello world’ type open knowledge project, which would illustrate what we mean by open knowledge and why it is useful. Such a project in addition to its illustrative role would provide a very valuable use-case for tools and processes involved in open knowledge development. It would also be a good opportunity to try and pick a project that could be easily packaged for reuse by others — this being something which slightly differentiates it from the above examples.
To this end after various discussions the idea of working with Shakespeare was mooted. Shakespeare seems to fit the bill pretty well:
- (Almost) Universal — everyone knows shakespeare
- Shakespeare’s out of copyright but there is still some legal issues to illustrate the problems of closed knowledge
- Plenty of need for versioning, bugfixing etc
- Nice idea of an overall package consisting of the texts, commentary, search tool
Thus back in December the first bare outlines of a project were sketched out in the incubator: http://www.okfn.org/wiki/ShakespeareKnowledgePackage
Since then a bit of work has been done — mainly in spare time here and there – and we now have the rudiments of a package:
http://www.knowledgeforge.net/project/shakespeare/ https://project.knowledgeforge.net/shakespeare/svn/
Related posts:
- v0.4 of Open Shakespeare Released We’ve been doing more work on the
- OCRing Shakespeare Entry from Encyclopaedia Britannica 11th Edition One of next things we want to do for ope
- What can you do with Open Shakespeare? We’ve recently updated Open Shakes
- v0.3 of Open Shakespeare Released We’ve been doing quite a bit of wo
- Latest Developments on Open Shakespeare (v0.8) The last six months have seen significan
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
October 4th, 2006 at 4:15 pm
[...] We’ve been doing quite a bit of work on the Open Shakespeare project (which we’ve mentioned before). Given that a brief search on the net turns up many sites about Shakespeare and lots of online copies of shakespeare’s texts you might be forgiven for asking why do we need another shakespeare project? [...]
February 15th, 2007 at 8:32 pm
Well, I think that’s a good idea. Getting everything under one hat and into one domain might make searching for Shakespeare, his works and the various research results a lot esier.
September 26th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
[...] We’ve recently updated Open Shakespeare. The project was started a while back as an open knowledge ‘exemplar project’ - i.e. as a simple ‘hello world’ type open knowledge package (for more on this see the FAQ). [...]