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:
- Provide the complete works of Shakespeare, along with textual apparatus (introduction, notes) and tools (concordance, search etc) all in an open form.
- 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
- 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!
Dr. Jonathan Gray is Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, where he is currently writing a book on data worlds. He is also Cofounder of the Public Data Lab; and Research Associate at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) and the médialab (Sciences Po, Paris). More about his work can be found at jonathangray.org and he tweets at @jwyg.
