Work on Open Shakespeare/Milton and upgrading openshakespeare.org

[Rufus Pollock]

Hi,

Iain Emsley have been working away on Open Shakespeare/Milton related
things over the last few months and we have now completed a fair number
of major improvements with more to come in the near future. In
particular we now have implemented:

   * Major refactoring of internal code to be cleaner and simpler
   * A new cleaner and reorganized web interface
   * Search support via Xapian
   * Statistical analysis and graphing

Even more importantly Iain's work on the Milton side of things has
indicated the need for us to try to factor out a reusable core which can
then be plugged together with particular sets of texts to form
individual Open Shakespeare, Open Milton, Open etc instances (for anyone
interested most of the discussion about this has been on okfn-help, sign
up or browser at http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-help/

In the mean-time I plan to upgrade the current online Open Shakespeare
service (which runs off the web interface part of the shakespeare
package) which currently lives at:

   http://demo.openshakespeare.org/

At the same time I think it will make sense to relocate this at

   http://www.openshakespeare.org/

While moving the current blog living at that address to:

   http://blog.openshakespeare.org/

If anyone has any objections or can think of any good reasons not to do
this let me know. If I don't hear anything I'll be doing the upgrade
some time in the next couple of days.

Regards,

Rufus

_______________________________________________
okfn-discuss mailing list
okfn-discuss@...
http://lists.okfn.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss

[Rufus Pollock]

On 21/08/08 16:01, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
> Rufus Pollock wrote:
>
>> If anyone has any objections or can think of any good reasons not to
>> do this let me know. If I don't hear anything I'll be doing the
>> upgrade some time in the next couple of days.
>
> No objections here! Thanks for continuing to work on this project.

Go to hear Peter! I've now gone ahead and done the update and things now
look rather different:

   <http://www.openshakespeare.org/>

Main new features are the search facility:

   <http://www.openshakespeare.org/search/>

And the statistics section which supports showing stats by text of by
word, e.g. love and death:

   <http://www.openshakespeare.org/stats/word/love/>
   <http://www.openshakespeare.org/stats/word/death/>

Or by text e.g. Hamlet:

   <http://www.openshakespeare.org/stats/text/hamlet_gut>

There's quite a bit of polishing still to do (some examples are given
below) so if you'd like to help out please say :)

Regards,

Rufus

Prospective Improvements
========================

   * We need to finish off proof-editing the scan of the EB 11 entry for
Shakespeare:
     * <http://okfn.org/wiki/tmp/BritannicaShakespeare>

   * We need to 'mark-up' underlying texts both for display and search
indexing purposes

   * The search side of things needs:
     * pagination support for results
     * better linking to the underlying texts
     * ability to search only certain works

   * Stats side of things:
     * Index of words
     * Normalization of stats
     * Tutorial on doing stats analysis from code

_______________________________________________
okfn-discuss mailing list
okfn-discuss@...
http://lists.okfn.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss

[John Bywater-2]

Rufus Pollock wrote:

> Main new features are the search facility:
>
>    <http://www.openshakespeare.org/search/>
>
> And the statistics section which supports showing stats by text of by
> word, e.g. love and death:
>
>    <http://www.openshakespeare.org/stats/word/love/>
>    <http://www.openshakespeare.org/stats/word/death/>
>
> Or by text e.g. Hamlet:
>
>    <http://www.openshakespeare.org/stats/text/hamlet_gut>
>
> There's quite a bit of polishing still to do (some examples are given
> below) so if you'd like to help out please say :)
>  

It's very nice, isn't it! :-)  (On the Guide page, the stats section
heading is Search. I wondered: should this be Stats or Statistics or
something like that?)

Best wishes,

John.




_______________________________________________
okfn-discuss mailing list
okfn-discuss@...
http://lists.okfn.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss

[Rufus Pollock]

On 26/08/08 16:20, John Bywater wrote:
> Rufus Pollock wrote:

[snip]

>> There's quite a bit of polishing still to do (some examples are given
>> below) so if you'd like to help out please say :)
>>  
>
> It's very nice, isn't it! :-)  (On the Guide page, the stats section
> heading is Search. I wondered: should this be Stats or Statistics or
> something like that?)

Fixed :) I've also added a long spiel on the front page trying to
explain (better) what we are trying to do with Open Shakespeare like
stuff. Any suggestions on a) improvements to this b) communities who
might be interested but probably don't know about the project yet (e.g.
academics ...) would be most welcome.

Regards,

Rufus

_______________________________________________
okfn-discuss mailing list
okfn-discuss@...
http://lists.okfn.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss

[John Bywater-2]

Rufus Pollock wrote:

Fixed :) I've also added a long spiel on the front page trying to explain (better) what we are trying to do with Open Shakespeare like stuff. Any suggestions on a) improvements to this b) communities who might be interested but probably don't know about the project yet (e.g. academics ...) would be most welcome.

I know some of the English people at Oxford. In particular, Will Poole and Richard Scholar are friends from New College. Will is now a tutorial fellow at New, Richard moved to Oriel. Last year they published Thinking With Shakespeare which I was shown at A. D. Nuttall's memorial service. A. D. Nuttall was a notable Shakespeare academic. I've got a copy of their book here. It's a good read. Of course, it's available in all good college libraries. :-)

http://www.mhra.org.uk/cgi-bin/legenda/legenda.pl?catalogue=b9781904350842


Will Poole is a charming, erudite, gentleman. I'm sure he would appreciate the resource.

http://www.new.ox.ac.uk/Teaching_and_Research/Staff_Profile_Page.php?staffId=48
http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/Staff%20Page%20Profiles/Poole.htm


I'll drop him a line; I'm heading that way again in a couple of weeks.

Best wishes,

John.

Regards,

Rufus

_______________________________________________
okfn-discuss mailing list
okfn-discuss@...
http://lists.okfn.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss

[no one-5]

Hi,

One way to get to academics / researchers/ students would be to reccomend it to "gateways" for academic web resources like Infomine<http://infomine.ucr.edu/> or Intute<http://www.intute.ac.uk/> or ibiblio <http://www.ibiblio.org/> which take suggestions for new content and are pretty well used. Furthermore, ibiblio and infomine both have their data harvested by services like University of Michigan's OAIster <http://oaister.org>, so it spreads your seeds even farther. MIght as well let them do some of this work for you, snce they already have the base of users.

There are plenty more gateway sites like this out there, just a few off the top of my head.

Chad

On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 12:47 PM, Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock@...> wrote:

On 26/08/08 16:20, John Bywater wrote:
> Rufus Pollock wrote:

[snip]

>> There's quite a bit of polishing still to do (some examples are given
>> below) so if you'd like to help out please say :)
>>
>
> It's very nice, isn't it! :-)  (On the Guide page, the stats section
> heading is Search. I wondered: should this be Stats or Statistics or
> something like that?)

Fixed :) I've also added a long spiel on the front page trying to
explain (better) what we are trying to do with Open Shakespeare like
stuff. Any suggestions on a) improvements to this b) communities who
might be interested but probably don't know about the project yet (e.g.
academics ...) would be most welcome.

Regards,

Rufus

_______________________________________________
okfn-discuss mailing list
okfn-discuss@...
http://lists.okfn.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss

_______________________________________________
okfn-discuss mailing list
okfn-discuss@...
http://lists.okfn.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss

[Jonathan Gray-7]

John Bywater wrote:
> I know some of the English people at Oxford. In particular, Will Poole
> and Richard Scholar are friends from New College. Will is now a
> tutorial fellow at New, Richard moved to Oriel.

[snip]

> I'll drop him a line; I'm heading that way again in a couple of weeks.

Brilliant! It would be great if you could ping me when you've spoken to
him. I'm going to put some effort into building a little informal
advisory group for Open Shakespeare. I've already discussed this a bit
with Chris Burlinson (in carbon copy):

  http://www.emma.cam.ac.uk/teaching/fellows/display/index.cfm?fellow=202

Perhaps we could organise a time to have a quick chat about this?

Warm regards,

Jonathan

_______________________________________________
okfn-discuss mailing list
okfn-discuss@...
http://lists.okfn.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss

[John Bywater-2]

Jonathan Gray wrote:
>> I'll drop him a line; I'm heading that way again in a couple of weeks.
>
> Brilliant! It would be great if you could ping me when you've spoken
> to him.

Will do. Sent a message yesterday.

> I'm going to put some effort into building a little informal advisory
> group for Open Shakespeare. I've already discussed this a bit with
> Chris Burlinson (in carbon copy):
>
>  http://www.emma.cam.ac.uk/teaching/fellows/display/index.cfm?fellow=202
>
> Perhaps we could organise a time to have a quick chat about this?

Yes of course, pretty much any time really, but I don't know what more I
have to say. :-)

Actually, what sort of response might you be looking for?

Best wishes,

John.

>
> Warm regards,
>
> Jonathan
>
>
>


--
John Bywater, Director
Appropriate Software Foundation
Registered in England and Wales
17 Chapel Street, Hyde Cheshire
Company number: 04977110
http://appropriatesoftware.net
Telephone: [phone]



_______________________________________________
okfn-discuss mailing list
okfn-discuss@...
http://lists.okfn.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss