Folger Digital Texts Now Online (and Other March Announcements)

This month has already seen a number of news items of potential interest to EMOB readers including Gale-Cengage’s announcement that will it offer STEM e-books from Springer and Elsevier (a potentially potent nexus of publishing forces in the subscription database world) as part of its Gale Virtual Reference Library (GVRL) and that it is launching a Proprietary Monograph Publishing Program; free access in March to Orlando: Women’s Writing Online that Anna announced here a few days ago; and a note from Dr. Ian Christie-Miller about digital imaging resources he has been developing and the interest it has received in the UK.

Just this week the Folger announced that all 38 of its digital texts of Shakespeare’s plays are now available, free of charge, online. As the homepage’s title Timeless Texts, Cutting-Edge Code suggests, a key feature of these texts is the robust coding that one can freely download. Besides the meticulously executed TEI-compliant XML structure of these plays, the texts are also attractively designed for reading as this opening of All’s Well That Ends Well illustrates. This page also displays the useful digital paratexts accompanying each work. Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine offer a brief Textual Introduction to the site.

We would like to hear from others about how they are using this new resource–both in terms of its texts and the source code.

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Folger Digital Texts: Shakespeare’s Plays, Cutting-Edge Code: A Powerful Research Tool for Scholars

The Folger is delighted to announce the launch of Folger Digital Texts. These are reliable, expertly edited, and free digital Shakespeare texts for use by researchers. Starting from the Folger Editions of Shakespeare’s works edited by Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine, Folger Digital Texts uses XML to create a highly articulate indexing system. Researchers can read the plays online, download PDFs for offline reading, search a play or the whole corpus, navigate by act, scene, line, or the new Folger Throughline Numbers. In short, every word, space, and piece of punctuation has its own place online. Twelve plays are currently available, and the remainder of the works and poems will be released throughout 2013.

The XML-coded files are offered as a free download for noncommercial use by scholars and can be used as the groundwork for digital Shakespeare research projects, app development, and other projects.

The Folger Shakespeare Library editions, published by Simon and Schuster, remain available in print and as ebooks and include essays, glosses, notes, and illustrations from the materials in the Folger collections.

The Folger Digital Texts team includes Rebecca Niles, editor and interface architect, and Michael Poston, editor and encoding architect. They welcome your feedback at folgertexts (at) folger.edu.

If you click here, you will be taken directly to Folger Digital Texts.