The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 16.1911 Monday, 21 November 2005
From: Michael Best <
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Date: Saturday, 19 Nov 2005 10:06:21 -0800
Subject: New Internet Shakespeare Editions Website
Shaksper-ians will be pleased to hear that the Internet Shakespeare
Editions has just launched a completely redesigned website, with some
significant enhancements. The address remains the same: ise.uvic.ca.
Apart from improved navigation and a new look -- one which reflects the
increased capacity of the Web to display images and text attractively --
there are two major new resources. Our database of Shakespeare in
Performance is now a reality, and we have a growing library of
easily-browsed facsimiles of the early editions of the plays.
Shakespeare in Performance provides comprehensive information about
Shakespeare on film. Thanks to the generosity of Kenneth Rothwell, we
have put online all the information in his work Shakespeare on Screen:
An International Filmography and Videography. This has been updated by
Tanya Gough and Jose Ramon Diaz Fernandez. We have also begun the
process of digitizing performance materials from a wonderful range of
productions of Shakespeare, beginning with North America. We are
including such items as prompt books, costume designs, and programs, and
will be adding reviews and other kinds of materials as they become
available (and as our research assistants have time).
Another major new feature is our growing library of facsimiles of each
play. We have images of Folios 1, 2, 3, and 4 from the State Library of
New South Wales, and will be adding an additional First Folio soon;
thanks to the generosity of the British Library, we will be able to add
all the significant quartos, some of which are already in our database.
One unusual tool we provide is the capacity to search on the
old-spelling text to find pages in the facsimiles where a word or phrase
occurs. (We will soon be able to add to this the rather nice feature of
"fuzzy" searching, so that the computer will find most variants of
old-spelling words, even if the user types in modern spelling.)
Each play now has a home page that collects information about it from
across the site: the available electronic texts (Quarto, Folio,
Modern-spelling, etc.), the facsimiles (ditto), productions and films on
the play, references to it in the section of the site on Shakespeare's
Life and Times, and links to other sites on the Web that refer to the
play. The first of our fully-edited texts are beginning to appear, and
we are experimenting with ways of displaying them most effectively. We
now have twenty two distinguished editors under contract; the texts are
being completely re-edited and re-imagined for the electronic medium.
A technical note. The original site was largely made up of individually
developed pages, many going back to the early days of the Web (way back
in 1996!). The new site is almost completely created "on the fly" from
databases. The advantage is that navigation across the site is more
unified, new content can be added quickly and easily, and searching is
more sophisticated.
The site has already had some "usability" testing, but we welcome
comments and observations. Please feel free to reply off-list to
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.
Cheers--
Michael
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S H A K S P E R: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List
Hardy M. Cook,
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The S H A K S P E R Web Site <http://www.shaksper.net>
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