We are proud to present the fruits of a recent collaborative effort between the FID AAC and Text+, dedicated to the improved presentation of the works of Shakespeare to researchers of various disciplines. The Folger Shakespeare is a comprehensive digital resource, featuring all 42 of Shakespeare’s canonical dramatic and poetic works available in multiple readable formats as well as encoded in TEI. It can be accessed on the Folger Library's website and is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported license. Previously, the corpus has been integrated into other platforms, such as DraCor. This blog post describes the benefits offered by the enhanced metadata now added to the Folger Shakespeare in the TextGrid Repository (TGR). Find the landing page of the project in the repository here.
The Digital Folger Shakespeare: The FID AAC and Text+ Team up to Offer a New and Enhanced Collection in the TextGrid Repository
Figure 1: Landing page of The Folger Shakespeare in the TextGrid Repository
Advanced Features and Technical Aspects of the Enhancement
To maximize the potential of this collection and to allow users to benefit from the TGR’s advanced features, the Data Domain Collection within the Text+ consortium has made the Folger Shakespeare available in the TGR. The features now activated include options for filtering, searching, reading, archiving, and corpus recomposition, as well as integration with other tools and access via Python library. To get to the list of documents from the landing page, we recommend following the 'Search within fulltext of this project' link. This will take you to a page like the one shown in Figure 2.
To prepare the collection for publication in the TextGrid Repository, several metadata fields were enhanced, including the identification of authors and works through Wikidata and GND authority files. Additionally, the genre and subgenre of each work, such as sonnets, allegories, comedies, tragedies, and historical plays, were annotated using GND-specific genres. Since Shakespeare’s works are notoriously difficult to categorise and genre attributions are subject to debate, several key resources were consulted, such as Ina Schabert’s Shakespeare-Handbuch.
Benefiting from Each Other's Know-How
To make this metadata enrichment possible, Text+ has teamed up with the FID Anglo-American Culture. This collaboration exemplifies the necessity of different kinds of infrastructure projects working together: some with a technical and research data focus, such as Text+, and others with subject-specific know-how, in this case experts in the field of English literature. It sets an example for future shared untertakings of open access infrastructure projects. Working together, we can use each other’s expertises to the greatest advantage for everyone.
Stylesheets for Accurate Representation
The TGR project also uses the XSLT stylesheets from the original Folger Shakespeare, which have been slightly modified for their integration in the repository. The stylesheet can be found as one file in the repository. This ensures that the documents are presented as originally intended. Figure 3 shows the beginning of As You Like It, with the identifiers of the lines on the left and the numbering at intervals of five lines on the right. Further details can be found on the landing page for the Folger Shakespeare within the TGR.
