Week 4: The Bodleian First Folio

In keeping with Shakespeare and thinking about the Folger Digital Text project, I came across The Bodleian First Folio: A digital facsimile of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, Bodleian Arch. G c.7. The project was developed from a public campaign in 2012, the Sprint for Shakespeare, which raised £20,000 in less than six months “conserve, digitize and publish online the Bodleian’s First Folio.” The project was also supported by a group of four donors who made the digital edition and a website for its publication possible. The digital facsimile was launched for Shakepeare’s 449^th birthday, April 23, 2013.

Users have a variety of options for exploring the Bodleian First Folio. If you are dying to see what the physical object looks like, but don’t have the opportunity to make the trip to Oxford then you are in luck! By clicking on ‘High-res images’ you can read the book page by page. You have the option to turn the pages yourself or play them on a loop. Here we are given the same page-flipping effect like we saw with Apple’s iBooks during our first class, but in this context the tool is very effective. When the pages turn you can see the content appear as it would on both sides. No strange blank pages here! (Unless of course, the page itself is actually blank). You have the option of one-page or two-page view, to zoom in and out, to drag a scroll bar across the book’s content, or you can choose which section you would like to see by using the small menu at the top left of the page.

On the main page, you can also select ‘Text & Image,’ which allows you to view the digitized page while reading the digital text separated by left column and right column. Options also include reading only the digital text or the XML. Furthermore, users have the option of downloading images PDF, high-res JPEG images, text PDFs, XML and/or XML PDFs.

The project text is encoded in TEI XML, TEI P5 conformant as stated on the ‘About’ page. While the XML is available for public view and download, there is no further information provided about the process of encoding or the decisions associated with it. This project has, however, been part of a broader discussion by David De Roure, Director of the Oxford e-Research Centre at the University of Oxford, about social machines of scholarly collaboration. He has presented sessions at various conferences and workshops discussing the notion of the scholarly social machine on the web as one “in which people do the creative work and the machine does the administration” (De Roure, 2014). This, he argues, has potential for looking at an object as more than the sum of its parts using human and machine collaborators. These social machines will impact where the Bodleian First Folio will go next in research and society.

Thinking about McGann’s article, I feel that some of the questions he asks about artistic works should be asked before using this digital project or any other like it: how these electronic tools help us to better understand works of imagination? Can these improve our understanding and learning? And how can we manipulate these tools to meet our needs and desires? (McGann, 2002, p. 63).

While I am not a Shakespeare scholar or well-versed in his life and works, I appreciate what this digital tool offers to the reader, to the public as a whole. It provides a variety of methods or platforms for exploring the text beyond its material presence. Having a historical artifact such as this available freely online is proof of the advantage we can make of digital technologies for both scholarship and recreation.

References

Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. "The Bodleian First Folio". Accessed February 1, 2016. http://firstfolio.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/.

De Roure, David. "Scholarly Social Machines." Presentation, Oxford, UK, 2014.

McGann, Jerome. "Visible and Invisible Books: Hermetic Images in Dimensional Space." Literary and Linguistic Computing 17.1 (2002): 61-75.