Open Shakespeare

Does an ‘open’ scan of a shakespeare folio exist?

We’d really like to have some nice images of a shakespeare first folio (if possible from Hamlet) for use in the Open Shakespeare project. However all the scanned copies we’ve managed to find seem to be under full ‘all rights reserved’ copyright.

For example there’s an online version from the Schoenberg Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image at the University of Pennsylvania. But checking the printable version one finds the following:

©2003 Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image

University of Pennsylvania Library.

And this isn’t exceptional. There’s a list of available online folios on:

http://ise.uvic.ca/Library/facsimile/overview/book.html

All of the copies listed are closed (copyrighted with no open license) — with most not allowing for any types of use without permission (the only exception being the State Library of New South Wales which allows for “educational, non-profit, purposes”).

It’s a rather unfortunate situation and it would be great to know if there is a scan of a shakespeare first folio out there which truly is open.

2 comments October 15th, 2006

v0.3 of Open Shakespeare Released

A new version (0.3) of open shakespeare is out. Get it via the code page:

http://www.openshakespeare.org/code/

Changelog

1. Can now view mutiple texts side by side (ticket:15). See it in action at:

   http://demo.openshakespeare.org/view?name=othello_gut_f+othello_gut

2. Now include moby/bosak versions of shakespeare as well as gutenberg (ticket:10) (though more work remains to be done to process these versions to plaintext and html)

3. Fix bug whereby we were missing some of the available gutenberg texts (ticket:18)

4. Install the shakespeare python package (ticket:16)

5. Move to py.test from unittest

6. New project website at http://www.openshakespeare.org/

Outstanding Issues

1. Several of the source texts (all of them Gutenberg folios) seem to break the viewer due to kid (the templating system) complaining about about ‘not well-formed (invalid token) xml’. Any help in tracking this down would be greatly appreciated.

About Open Shakespeare

A full open set of Shakespeare’s works along with anciallary material, a variety of tools and a python API.

For more information see the about page: http://www.openshakespeare.org/about/

Mailing list: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss/

Add comment October 4th, 2006