Open Shakespeare Blog

1. Why do we need yet another shakespeare project?

A brief search on the net turns up many sites about Shakespeare and lots of online copies of shakespeare’s texts. So why do we need another shakespeare project?

1. This project will provide a complete set of shakespeare texts in an open form:
   • Legally open: public domain or cc-by
   • Project Gutenberg has 4 versions of most of Shakespeare and 2 of the 4 are copyrighted
   • See other examples in Shakespeare section of http://www.okfn.org/wiki/OpenKnowledgeRegistry/AsWiki
   • Socially open: provide texts in downloadable form (not just on a website)
   • Technologically open: provide texts in open, machine processable formats (plain text/xml etc)
2. Provide multiple versions of texts (folios/moby/etc)
3. Provide ancillary information such as introductions/chronology etc (again all in open form)
4. Provide a programmatic API
5. Package this all together
   • But ensure that others can easily reuse different parts
   • Focus on local as well as web deployment
   • Demonstration of componentization — see http://blog.okfn.org/2006/05/09/the-four-principles-of-open-knowledge-development/

Most importantly the project is heavily oriented towards reusability. The main aim is not to provide another shakespeare website but to provide the tools and material to allow others to build their own applications and websites. While we will create a simple site using the material we’ve gathered and the API we’ve developed its purpose will be to showcase what can be done and to encourage others to use our work in ways we haven’t even considered.

2. How did the project start?

The original motivation for the project was to create an ultra-simple example of open knowledge ‘development’ but one which would still be useful and interesting — you could think of it as ‘Hello World’ for open knowledge[^1].

While there are already some very impressive examples of open knowledge in the form of projects such as wikipedia, publicwhip, the world-wide molecular matrix etc we thought it would be good have something really, really simple but which would still illustrate what we mean by open knowledge and why it is useful.

Such a project in addition to its illustrative role would provide a valuable use-case regarding tools and processes for open knowledge development and it would also be a good opportunity to do something that could be easily packaged for reuse by others — this being something which slightly differentiates it from the other examples mentioned above.

Shakespeare seemed a good fit because:

1. Shakespeare is well-known — everyone’s heard of Shakespeare

2. Most of Shakespeare’s work should be in the public domain

3. Investigation showed there wasn’t anything already out there similar to what we planned to do. For example just getting together a full ‘open’ set of shakespeare’s work wasn’t that simple (Gutenberg of course have a full set of Shakespeare texts but they usually had 4 versions of each Shakespeare work 2 of which, it turned out, were copyrighted — see the previous faq for more on this.

4. Plenty of ways to add something to the basic texts, for example introductions, notes, concordance, etc etc

(This faq is adapted from the first public post about the Open Shakespeare project: http://blog.okfn.org/2006/05/22/open-shakespeare/).

[^1]: usually the first thing you do when learning to programme is to work out how to display ‘hello world’. Hence a ‘hello world’ project is one which is very simple and oriented towards demonstration.