This is a cross-posting from Open Shakespeare to announce the culmination of a project run over the summer to encourage greater participation in the website and greater awareness of its goals of promoting open critical commentary.
From Monday 12th September to Monday 10th October, Open Shakespeare will host a series of articles on the topic of ‘Shakespeare and the Internet’. When we invited contributions, the theme was deliberately kept as broad as possible in order to facilitate a wide and diverse range of responses from each of those who have written a post for us. Our contributors range from teachers and students of Shakespeare to an experimental theatre company.
Having already read the majority of the contributions, I can say now that the series fulfils its goal of offering what the Bard would call a “multitudinous” range of approaches to the topic of Shakespeare and the Internet; subjects range from why Polonius would appreciate hypertext to the problems and opportunities of online abundance. The contributions will appear in the following order:
- Monday 12th September: Sylvia Morris, Finding Needles in Haystacks: Shakespeare and the Internet
- Monday 19th September: Heather Nolen, “The wise man reads both books and life itself”
- Monday 26th September: Erin Weinberg, Why do I blog about Shakespeare? It’s a Choice
- Monday 3rd October: Caroline Bicks and Michelle Ephraim, Good Night, Tweet Prince
- Monday 10th October: The Propaganda Company, [title forthcoming]
Every article in this series is published under a Creative Commons 3.0 SA BY licence; as with all the other material on Open Shakespeare, we hope that publication under such a licence will encourage the diffusion and development of our contributors’ ideas.
My thanks to all those who have contributed their time and thoughts to this project, particularly Erin Weinberg, whose proof-reading skills have been extremely useful in the preparation of these pieces for publication. Depending on the success of this series, we intend to publish similar, themed posts under an open licence in the future: if you would like to participate as either a writer or an editor, please get in touch through the usual channels.
Now, to conclude, I leave you, I hope, in approximately the same state of anticipation as Leonato leaves an impatient Claudio in Much Ado about Nothing:
till Monday […] which is hence a just seven-night; and a time too brief too, to have all things answer my mind.
James is the Coordinator of the Open Humanities Working Group and is currently studying for a PhD in English Literature at the University of Cambridge.
