The Folger Shakespeare Library in TextGrid

The Folger Shakespeare Library is a remarkable resource for multiple disciplines, with 42 of Shakespeare's works encoded in TEI. It can be found on the website of the Folger Library and is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. The corpus has previously been integrated into other platforms, such as DraCor. It is now also available through the TextGrid Repository, opening up new possibilities for this resource.

Integration in TextGrid Repository

The Data Domain Collection within the Text+ consortium decided to publish the Folger Shakespeare Library in the TextGrid Repository (TGR). The aim was to allow users to benefit from the TGR features (filtering, searching, reading, archiving, corpus recomposition, integration with other tools, access via Python library, etc.) with this collection.

In contrast to integrating the collection into the DraCor platform, we have decided to publish the original corpus, with more metadata and emendation information, rather than the TEI-simple version of the corpus DraCor used as a base to add metadata, e.g. the tei:particDesc in addition to the cast list. While DraCor contains only the plays, TGR contains these and Shakespeare's poetry works, such as the sonnets or the allegories.

Metadata Curation

For publication in TGR, several metadata fields have been enriched, such as the identification of the author and works through Wikidata and GND authority files, the annotation of the genre and subgenre (sonnet, allegory, comedy, tragedy, history play, Roman play, problem play, etc.) using GND-specific genres. This curatorial work on the metadata was made possible thanks to the collaboration of the FID Anglo-American Culture.

Project-specific XSLT-Transformation

The transformation of the files from TEI to HTML for reading purposes is done by two XSLT stylesheets (one for the plays, one for the poetry) from the original project. In TGR projects, projects can choose whether to transform their TEI files using a standard XSLT stylesheet (proviced by the TEI Consortium) or using their own. This project takes advantage of this to an extent not previously explored, creating its own table of contents, using images for decoration, or presenting different aspects of the annotation. In general, the presentation of the HTML version of the texts is very different from other projects in TGR, showing the potential this has for other editorial projects.

Image handling

The original XSLTs provided by the Folger Library has been extended to correct the references to images. They now rewrite all file references to TextGrid objects identified by URI. In this way no edits to the TEI files has been necessary, besides adding a processing instruction pointing to the corresponding stylesheet since poems and drama are using separate ones.