Bibliographic References in Textus

Textus is the OKFN’s open source platform for working with collections of texts. It harnesses the power of semantic web technologies and delivers them in a simple and intuitive interface so that students, researchers and teachers can share and collaborate around collections of texts. Sites such as the upcoming openphilosophy.org and the existing openshakespeare.org contain […]

Prizewinning bid in ‘Inventare il Futuro’ Competition

By James Harriman-Smith and Primavera De Filippi On the 11th July, the Open Literature (now Open Humanities) mailing list got an email about a competition being run by the University of Bologna called ‘Inventare il Futuro’ or ‘Inventing the Future’. On the 28th October, Hvaing submitted an application on behalf of the OKF, we got […]

Forthcoming Series of Open Articles on Open Shakespeare

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 […]

Update: Text Camp: 13th August 2011

The Open Knowledge Foundation’s first ever Text Camp will be taking place this Saturday 13th August, thanks to JISC offering us the use of their meeting rooms in London. Details Where? Brettenham House, 9 Savoy Street, WC2E 7EG, London. – Meet outside ‘The Savoy Tup’ Pub, Savoy Street, at 10am to be guided to the […]

Announcing… Text Camp 2011

The following post is from James Harriman-Smith, coordinator of the OKF’s Open Literature Working Group, and Lecteur at the ENS de Lyon. The OKF’s first ever ‘Text Camp’ hopes to bring together many different people, all interested in the relationship between digital technologies and literature, with a strong focus on the creation of open knowledge. […]

Open Shakespeare Annotation Sprint

The following is a guest post by James Harriman-Smith who is coordinator of the Open Shakespeare project. This weekend we’re holding the first Open Shakespeare Annotation Sprint — participate and help change criticism forever! We’ll be getting together online and in-person to collaborate on critically annotating a complete Shakespeare play with all our work being […]

Open-Source Annotation Toolkit for Inline, Online Web Annotation

This is a post by Rufus Pollock, a long-time Open Knowledge Foundation member and coordinator of the Open Shakespeare project. We’ve been working on web-annotation — inline, online annotation of web texts — for several years. Our original motivation was to support annotation of texts in http://openshakespeare.org/ so we can collaboratively build up critical notes […]

Latest Developments on Open Shakespeare (v0.8)

The last six months have seen significant developments on our Open Shakespeare project, many of which have are reflected on the website: http://www.openshakespeare.org/ The most major advance is the availability of new HTML and PDF editions of the texts, see, for example, these versions of Twelfth Night: http://www.openshakespeare.org/resource/view/92/twelfth-night-moby/ http://www.openshakespeare.org/pdf/twelfth_night_moby.pdf We’ve also made improvements to multiview, […]

“Open Shakespeare Edition” Book Design

We’ve been thinking for a while that it would be a nice addition to the Open Shakespeare project to produce an “Open Shakespeare Edition” of the Bard’s works. By an ‘Edition’ we meant something designed as a book and suitable for printing: so an elegant title page, relevant front-matter, properly typeset text etc. This could […]

Shakespeare v0.6 Released

See http://pypi.python.org/pypi/shakespeare/0.6 which includes full installation instructions. We’ve also reorganized the sites so that the news/blog is here at http://blog.openshakespeare.org/ and the Shakespeare package web interface is at http://www.openshakespeare.org. Main 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 […]

More Text Up from Shakespeare’s Entry in Encyclopaedia Britannica 11th Edition

Another 3 pages (4600 words) are up from the EB 11 Entry on Shakespeare covering most of Shakespeare’s plays in chronological order. Current material can be found on: Encyclopaedia Britannica 11th Edition page Source version (plain text in subversion) can be found at: http://knowledgeforge.net/shakespeare/svn/trunk/shksprdata/ancillary/britannica-11th.txt

Open Shakespeare / Milton Mini Hackathon and Planning Session

After a fairly quiet period over the last 6 months development will be hotting up again thanks to discussion at Open Knowledge 2008 and the involvement of Iain Emsley (who will be focusing especially on a sister Milton project). To kick this off we’re planning a mini-hackathon: Wiki page: (sign up here) http://www.okfn.org/wiki/MiniEvents When: Saturday […]

First Text Up from Shakespeare’s Entry in 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica

We’ve completed the proofing and correcting of the first 5 pages of Shakespeare’s Entry from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica. This is quite a bit of material (those EB pages are big) and includes full biography and a listing of plays. We’re posting this material on this site on Encyclopaedia Britannica 11th Edition page and will […]

Proof-Editing Shakespeare Entry from Encyclopaedia Britannica 11th Edition

Since the previous post we’ve succeeded in using tesseract and we now have a nice plain text version of the EB entry on shakespeare: http://knowledgeforge.net/shakespeare/svn/trunk/shksprdata/ancillary/britannica-11th.txt What we now need to do is ‘proof’ this to correct the OCR errors. This kind of think is perfect for distributed volunteers so if you’d like to help out […]

OCRing Shakespeare Entry from Encyclopaedia Britannica 11th Edition

One of next things we want to do for open shakespeare is provide an open introduction for to his works. The obvious idea for this was to use the Shakespeare entry in the 11th ed of the Encyclopaedia Britannica as detailed in this ticket: http://p.knowledgeforge.net/shakespeare/trac/ticket/24 We’ve now written code to grab the relevant tiffs off […]

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 functional tests for the web interface (ticket:11) Substantial improvements to speed of concordance (ticket:22) (http://www.openshakespeare.org/2007/01/03/improvements-to-the-concordance/) […]

Annotation is Working!

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 […]

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 of porting Geof Glass’ marginalia into a standalone python package named annotater that can then […]

Improvements to the Concordance

One of the main items scheduled for v0.4 of open shakespeare is improvements to the responsiveness of the concordance. Using the v0.3 codebase, using just the sonnets as test material, loading up the list of words for the concordance alone took around 24s on my laptop. This is because even with a single text there […]

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 what we’ve been able to find so far (if you know of more please post […]

Switch from Kid to Genshi for templating in the Web Interface

Today we made the switch from kid to genshi as our templating toolkit in the web interface. Kid has served us well but there are some issues with debugging and including input that can’t be guaranteed to be well-formed. Genshi, as a direct derivative of Kid, delivers very similar syntax but is both simpler and […]

Does an ‘open’ scan of a shakespeare folio exist?

We’d really like to have some nice images of a shakespeare first folio (if possible from Hamlet) for use in the Open Shakespeare project. However all the scanned copies we’ve managed to find seem to be under full ‘all rights reserved’ copyright. For example there’s an online version from the Schoenberg Schoenberg Center for Electronic […]

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 might be forgiven for asking why do we need another shakespeare project? In the new […]

Open Shakespeare v0.2

With a little bit of free time over the last couple of weeks I’ve managed to do some more work on open shakespeare. The new version (v0.2dev) is up and running on the site: http://openshakespeare.org/ (formerly http://demo.openshakespeare.org/). NB: concordance only includes sonnets (this is not a necessary restriction but saved on concordance build time). Many […]