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:
- 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)
- 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.
Rufus Pollock is Founder and President of Open Knowledge.
