A Digital Anthology of Early Modern English Drama

The Folger Shakespeare Library has been awarded a $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to launch A Digital Anthology of Early Modern English Drama. A Digital Anthology will make freely available online the approximately four hundred extant English plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries that were publicly performed between 1576 and 1642, the era of the first commercial playhouses in London.

Background and context

A Digital Anthology is administered by the Folger Institute and incorporates staff from the Folger’s divisions of Digital Media and Publication and the Central Library. A distinguished scholarly advisory committee will consult on the two years of work funded by a Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant in the NEH’s Division of Preservation and Access.

As with most textual encoding projects in early modern humanities, A Digital Anthology will be built on the foundations of texts transcribed from digitized images of the subscription database Early English Books Online (EEBO) by its Text Creation Partnership Initiative (TCP). The plays will be presented in XML-encoded transcriptions of early printed witnesses, creating a coherent and well-documented textual corpus for linguistic analysis and an accessible, curated collection of texts for reading. Our flexible online platform, to be built by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, will allow users to browse, search, and read the plays, as well as curate groupings of texts for download in a variety of formats, including XML and PDF.

With over 80% of these plays in its holdings, its suite of digital resources, and the long tradition of advanced scholarship and scholarly editing that it has fostered, the Folger Shakespeare Library is uniquely positioned to sponsor this pioneering initiative. Consultation with peers from related early modern digital humanities projects will sharpen discussion of issues of compatibility, sustainability, and adaptation across the major corpus of EEBO-digitized texts.

Phase one

In this first phase of the project, the Digital Anthology will have a tiered system of encoding. While the full corpus will initially be presented in minimally but consistently encoded transcripts based on texts edited by Martin Mueller for his Shakespeare His Contemporaries corpus, a subset of thirty-six of these witnesses will be further edited and enriched to provide documentary editions for reading and teaching in the undergraduate classroom. Our goal is to allow users to manipulate the texts in a number of genre-specific ways, such as retrieve speaking parts for a specific character or identifying and tagging types of stage directions. Additionally, we foresee students searching for texts that have particular features, such as epilogues, prologues, or songs; or organizing texts by main author, publisher, players, or place of performance. This functionality would create a digital anthology of non-Shakespearean drama that facilitates student and researcher access to a rich array of early modern drama.

New digital facsimiles

New digital facsimiles will be created for a group of six plays from Folger copies. Selected from among the short-list of thirty-six, these will allow us to link the transcription to images of the page, creating easy navigation between searchable text and early modern page layout. This subset will be selected to satisfy a variety of needs: a text may be chosen based on the poor quality of extant EEBO images, because the Folger has particularly rich holdings of that edition, or because the textual history is especially complicated. At least one of the six copies will be selected for its manuscript annotations. This will provide a perspective on EEBO’s selection criteria (see the History of Early English Books Online for an explanation). It will also provide for new methods of image tagging and cross-compatibility with the Folger Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO) project.

Workshops and other programming

The Digital Anthology’s enriched texts and new facsimiles will be the focus of a series of text-encoding, editing, and annotation workshops beginning in the summer of 2016. The first workshop, aimed at college faculty, and a subsequent workshop in 2017, aimed at undergraduates, will allow participants to collectively produce discovery layers, such as online instructions and resources for teaching, to ensure productive access to the corpus. Members of the scholarly advisory committee will lead sessions of the workshops, and Folger encoders will collect lists of interpretive decisions for debate in the workshops.

Looking Ahead

In future stages of the project, the entire corpus may be encoded at the higher ‘enriched’ level. Version control may be established with other digital texts hosted by the Folger, and classroom modules may be developed for distributed curation. Developing the workflows to move individual playtexts from one encoding level to the next is a significant part of this scalable project. These workflows will provide material for future encoders and clear electronic provenance for the resulting texts. Our workflows and transparent standards for metadata will also facilitate collaboration with the variety of other digital humanities projects deriving from the EEBO-TCP corpus. These plays and their associated pedagogical materials will become part of a growing suite of interoperable, freely available digital texts here at the Folger, and will contribute a model for production as well a variety of openly available data for early modern digital humanities projects elsewhere.

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