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).

It aims to:

1. Provide the complete works of Shakespeare, along with textual apparatus (introduction, notes) and tools (concordance, search etc) all in an open form.
2. Deliver this material as a knowledge package that allows for easy deployment, redistribution and reuse.

Recent changes include:

• Major refactoring of internal code to be cleaner and simpler
• A new cleaner and reorganized web interface
• Search support via Xapian: http://www.openshakespeare.org/search/
• Statistical analysis and graphing
  • By word: http://www.openshakespeare.org/stats/word/love/
  • By text: http://www.openshakespeare.org/stats/text/hamlet_gut
• Start on Open Milton

As it says on openshakespeare.org, the site itself is only a small part of what the project is about. We actively encourage you to take and modify the Shakespeare package to do things we haven’t yet done – or even thought of!

If you’ve re-used the package, you have an interesting idea for how it could be built upon, or you’d like to help out with anything from developing the code to growing the content – we’d love to hear from you!

Related posts:

1. v0.3 of Open Shakespeare Released 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...
2. v0.4 of Open Shakespeare Released We’ve been doing more work on the Open Shakespeare project with the result that a new version (v0.4) is ready for release (full details including the Changelog can be found below). For those unfamiliar with the project, Open Shakespeare has...
3. v0.4 of Open Shakespeare Released A new version of open shakespeare is out. Get it via the code page: http://www.openshakespeare.org/code/ Changelog Annotation of texts (js-based in browser) (ticket:20, ticket:21) (http://www.openshakespeare.org/2007/04/10/annotation-is-working/) Switch to unicode for internal string handling (resolves ticket:23: some texts breaking the viewer) Add...