Will’s World: Walking Through Shakespeare (Discovery 2012)

Duration

1 December 2011 to 30 September 2012

Website

EDINA Contacts

Summary

JISC invited EDINA to develop an aggregation of online sources of digital resources relating to William Shakespeare, covering performance, interpretative and contextual resources in order to demonstrate the value and principles of metadata aggregation as part of the JISC/RLUK Discovery initiative. This followed a ‘competition’ at the launch of discovery.ac.uk.

Our approach recognised the added value in assembly for tactical purpose – to improve ‘discoverability’ and to make it easier for developers and service providers to build services: improving the usability of the underlying metadata and clarity about provenance and licensing.

Project Deliverables

We envisaged the design, construction and initial population of “Shakespeare’s Registry”, as a means by which (a) those with content can register (and so ‘advertise’) that online content with appropriate metadata and publication of machine interfaces (APIs) and (b) developers can have easier means for constructing new and interesting presentations. We intended to demonstrate the value of metadata enhancement through text mining of some aggregated content – such as ‘places in the plays’, and to seed potential applications with mobile apps drawing upon such as Walking Thru Time and Addressing History.

This was a short project with broad scope, seeking firm focus for source material and thematic selection, in order to deliver ‘scaffolding and platform’ for developers at a Hackfest for Shakespeare’s Birthday (23rd April 2012), and report on work done (July 2012) together with demonstrator(s) of using ‘aggregation as a tactic’.

Shakespeare Registry
Will’s World Online Hack
- Wiki
- YouTube Channel

Funder

JISC

Partner Institution

British Museum