Thursday, February 24, 2011

Digital Shakespeare

After hearing Gideon talk about digital mediations, I did some quick Google searching about Digital Shakespeare to see what I could find. 




1.  The Shakespeare Standard has a post about Digital Shakespeare, where they highlight a few new things that are happening.  One that interested me is Yoza Cell Phone Stories in South Africa.  It looks like they make texts available on mobile phones, and then allow people to text their comments to be posted on the webpage.  My favorite comment was:

"26 Aug. 2010
7. fluffy!! says

King lear may b a shaksperien buk bt its actually quite a gud buk, think 0f a m0dern day thriller with l0ads 0f family feuds nd a killer ending"
(Translation: "King Lear may be a Shakespearean book but it's actually quite a good book, think of a modern day thriller with loads of family feuds and a killer ending" )


2.  Open Source Shakespeare  --  Full text of the plays online.  But what I think is really fascinating is that you can choose a play and then choose a character and see all of their lines in the play at a glance. This was interesting as it shows you which characters are in which scenes, who dies early, who survives at the end, etc.
 It also has a concordance, where you can look up individual words and see how often and in which plays they occur.  (For fun I looked up Germany, which occurs six times in five lines in five different plays, including King Lear.)  What a cool resource, that is simple to put together once the texts of the plays are digitized, but would be tedious if it had to be put together by hand.  


3. Such Tweet Sorrow-  This one I find particularly fascinating.  Based on the article in the New Statesman about this project, it looks like they teamed up with the Royal Shakespeare Company to do a modernized Twitter performance of Romeo and Juliet.   You can see the Twitter feed, which was live last April it looks like.  It is interesting so far.  Fun to see how they have used Twitter to develop characters and plot based around a familiar story.