Adding annotation support to the texts in Open Shakespeare is the main item for the next 0.4 release. This is a rather large undertaking and the last 2 months has seen substantial work on the first stage in the form of porting Geof Glass’ marginalia into a standalone python package named annotater that can then in turn be easily reused in Open Shakespeare.

The main work in porting annotater was twofold:

1. To create and independent annotation store web application which reproduced the restful web interface needed by the marginalia javascript (we’ve also improved this by giving it a normal human-usable CRUD web interface in addition to the restful one)
2. Plugging this together (aka debugging/hacking around) with the existing marginalia javascript (for example the paste-based WSGI store web app just would not process posts sent using x-www-form-urlencoded!)

Annotater is now fully functioning and we can entirely reproduce the basic demo in the original marginalia though with the major difference that our version has a proper store backend so all creation/deletion updates of annotations get persisted to a real db and aren’t just in memory (to try this out just start the demo wsgi app via $ python annotater.py).

The next step after this is to integrate annotater into open shakespeare along with doing any polishing up of the package that is needed to achieve this.

Related posts:

1. Adding Web-Based Annotation Support We intend to add annotation/commentarysupport to the open shakespeare web demo either in this release or next. As a first step we’ve been looking to see what (open-source) web-based annotation systems are already out there. Below is our list of...
2. Thinking about Annotation Annotation means the adding of comments/notes/etc to an underlying resource. For the present I’ll focus on the situation where the underlying resource is textual (as opposed to being an image, or a piece of film or some data). Various things...
3. Texts and Demo Want to find an open copy of one of Shakespeare’s work? Then visit the live demo website at: http://demo.openshakespeare.org/ Other Texts We’ve also posted some texts here on this site: Encyclopaedia Britannica 11th Edition Text More about the Demo Website...