This Thursday I and James Harriman-Smith will be heading over to the British Library to give a talk on Open Shakespeare and possibilities for “Open Literature”.
Update: Slides from the Open Shakespeare presentation
Outline
This talk will introduce http://www.openshakespeare.org/ – an innovative new approach to Shakespeare’s works, and, eventually, any literary text. The website is, as far as we know, unique in providing both public domain texts and open tools for the analysis of Shakespeare.
One such tool, the annotator, will be a special focus of the presentation, since it offers the potential for producing the first ever critical edition of Shakespeare compiled by thousands and with no restrictions on how it is used.
As well as exploring the technical challenges presented by such a website and such tools, we will also speak more generally on the open-source movement and its impact on literary studies, the problems posed and opportunities offered by openness, and, finally, the future evolution of the project itself.