Open Source Shakespeare is a non-commercial

web site A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Wikip ...

allowing free access to searchable digital versions of the complete works of

William Shakespeare William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...

. The site was created using Moby Shakespeare, which is based on the 1864 Globe edition of the complete works.

History

The idea of a free online resource compiling Shakespeare's works was conceived in 2001 by Eric M. Johnson, then working as a web designer and theater reviewer for the ''

Washington Times ''The Washington Times'' is an American conservative daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C., that covers general interest topics with a particular emphasis on national politics. Its broadsheet daily edition is distributed throughout ...

'' newspaper while pursuing a

Master's degree A master's degree (from Latin ) is an academic degree awarded by universities or colleges upon completion of a course of study demonstrating mastery or a high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice.

at George Mason University. In the process of looking up the source of Shakespearian quotes online, Johnson was surprised to learn that no single web resource allowed users to freely access a comprehensive collection of William Shakespeare's writings. "The ones that were comprehensive were not free, and the free ones were not comprehensive" Johnson recalled. Johnson started to create just such a free and comprehensive digital collection as part of his graduate program, unveiled as the Open Source Shakespeare website in December 2003. The site was formally announced to the scholarly community in February 2004. According to the site's founder, about 77,000 people made use of the resource in 2005, with a further 170,000 anticipated to visit the site in 2006. The operating costs of the site were minimal; through 2006, these were paid out of pocket by the site's creator. Subsequently, a grant application was made to the

National Endowment for the Humanities The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency of the U.S. government, established by thNational Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965(), dedicated to supporting research, education, preserv ...

by Johnson and three members of the English Department of George Mason University to provide funding for the project.

Site structure

Shakespeare's works are divided on the site into three genres:

plays Play most commonly refers to: * Play (activity), an activity done for enjoyment * Play (theatre), a work of drama Play may refer also to: Computers and technology * Google Play, a digital content service * Play Framework, a Java framework * P ...

, sonnets, and

poems Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in ...

. The site also includes a concordance, search engine, and information about basic usage statistics. The site has gained functionality over time, with a "Version 2.0" released in 2005 which added the capability for users to search for

word stem In linguistics, a word stem is a part of a word responsible for its lexical meaning. The term is used with slightly different meanings depending on the morphology of the language in question. In Athabaskan linguistics, for example, a verb stem ...

s or

phonetically Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...

and to save and print search results. In the middle of 2009 a site version designed for portable devices was unveiled, called Mobile Open Source Shakespeare.

Footnotes

External links

* {{Official website, 1=http://opensourceshakespeare.org
Mobile Open Source Shakespeare
Internet properties established in 2003 William Shakespeare Free-content websites