We’ve been thinking for a while that it would be a nice addition to the Open Shakespeare project to produce an “Open Shakespeare Edition” of the Bard’s works.

By an ‘Edition’ we meant something designed as a book and suitable for printing: so an elegant title page, relevant front-matter, properly typeset text etc. This could then be downloaded by users and printed or even offered in dead-tree version directly using print-on-demand.

Recently, we’ve made a start on this endeavour using the moby XML sources, xsl and latex. An example of the results can be seen at:

http://www.openshakespeare.org/images/twelfth_night-v0.2.pdf

As a cursory look at that will show, while the body of the play doesn’t look too bad, the front-page could do with improvement (and the front-matter generally needs some planning). So, questions for readers:

1. Anyone out there with design skills or suggestions who could help us out?

   • Would it make sense to run a design competition?

2. What kind of general look should we go for? For example, should we go for:

   • Ultra traditional (but perhaps with some mods e.g. replacing the standard ‘copyright’ section with something about open knowledge)
   • Something irreverent, for example along the lines of the sketch on http://okfn.org/wiki/ShakespeareBookDesign

Any ideas or suggestions post a comment or drop us a line we’d love to know what you think.

Adding annotation support to the texts in Open Shakespeare is the main item for the next 0.4 release. This is a rather large undertaking and the last 2 months has seen substantial work on the first stage in the form of porting Geof Glass’ marginalia into a standalone python package named annotater that can then in turn be easily reused in Open Shakespeare.

The main work in porting annotater was twofold:

1. To create and independent annotation store web application which reproduced the restful web interface needed by the marginalia javascript (we’ve also improved this by giving it a normal human-usable CRUD web interface in addition to the restful one)
2. Plugging this together (aka debugging/hacking around) with the existing marginalia javascript (for example the paste-based WSGI store web app just would not process posts sent using x-www-form-urlencoded!)

Annotater is now fully functioning and we can entirely reproduce the basic demo in the original marginalia though with the major difference that our version has a proper store backend so all creation/deletion updates of annotations get persisted to a real db and aren’t just in memory (to try this out just start the demo wsgi app via $ python annotater.py).

The next step after this is to integrate annotater into open shakespeare along with doing any polishing up of the package that is needed to achieve this.