After another push over the last few days I’ve got the web annotation system for Open Shakespeare operational (we’ve been hacking on this on and off since back in December).

To see the system in action visit:

http://demo.openshakespeare.org/view?name=phoenix_and_the_turtle_gut&format=annotate

Quite a bit of effort has been made to decouple the annotation system from Open Shakespeare so that it can be easily reused elsewhere. You can find the code for the annotation system (nicknamed annotater) here:

http://p.knowledgeforge.net/shakespeare/svn/annotater/trunk/

There are still some substantial issues with the Open Shakespeare implementation the most obvious of which are:

a) large texts bring the javascript to its knees ((The Phoenix and the Turtle is the shortest of Shakespeare’s works which is why I’m using it).

b) security/user authentication for annotation adding/editing/deleting

But the basic system is working.

Related posts:

1. Porting Marginalia Annotation to Python 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...
2. 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...
3. 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...