As I said in my introductory post last week, one of my major interests in the future of the book is looking at what kinds of possibilities digital editions of scholarly texts might open to students that can enhance their experiences studying these texts. Over the last few weeks I have been reading through a digital version of Hamlet produced by the Folger Shakespeare Library that is available only as an app for the iPad and the experience has been fascinating.
The Folger Library has created an individual app for each play (right now only Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet are completed and available) and asked several editors, actors, and other Shakespeare experts to contribute to the commentaries. Instead of having a single editorial voice providing an authoritative set of footnotes, each of several commentators has their own set of notes that you can choose to read while you're reading the text. For Hamlet, it seems as though each editor chose a theme to highlight and each has several notes throughout the play. They have also asked an actress who has played Ophelia to occasionally interject with notes about the experience of playing Ophelia and how she built a character based on the play text.The app also gives you the option to listen to the play read aloud by Shakespearean actors in a Shakespearean accent and gives you the opportunity to make your own marginalia and to share those observations with a group on a variety of social media platforms and on the app itself.
Reading the text this way challenges the constraints of a paper book by expanding the opportunities for creating, sharing, and reading marginalia in a way that I think is incredibly beneficial to a student's reading process while reading a Shakespeare text. Aside from the fact that the app is only available on the iPad (which creates all sorts of problems when trying to reach a wide user-base), I think the innovations are excellent.
I'll leave a link to the Folger website describing the app here: (http://www.folger.edu/template.cfm?cid=4716&CFID=56856051&CFTOKEN=42719310), but if anyone would like to take a look at the app in action I can bring in my iPad and share it with you.
Wow, Jeremy, that sounds amazing! Of course, my brain automatically goes to the possibilities of using such an app in the classroom - how exciting would Shakespeare become if we could make this available to high school students!
ReplyDeleteClearly, this is an example of technology used wisely - much more than simply imitating the physical structure of a book, this app gives you something a book cannot. Too bad it's limited to iPad users...
That's exactly how I feel about it Polina! I would love to assign it as a text to future classes - especially since they intend to expand the app to include videos of the play being performed live - but I'll never be able to expect all of my students to own iPads.
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