0.26 Underpinnings of the social edition  (Page 17/32)

Without the restrictions of print, an electronic edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets could be both responsive to the evolution of the field, updating itself periodically to incorporate new research, and more flexible in the ways in which it allows users to navigate and explore this accumulated knowledge. Incorporating the research already undertaken toward an edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, we sought to create a prototype knowledgebase of critical materials reflecting the scholarly engagement with Shakespeare’s Sonnets from 1972 to the present day.

The first step required the acquirement of materials to add to the knowledgebase. A master list of materials was compiled through consultation with existing electronic bibliographies (such as the MLA International Bibliography and the World Shakespeare Bibliography ) and standard print resources (such as the Year’s Work in English Studies ). Criteria were established to dictate which materials were to be included in the knowledgebase. To limit the scope of the experiment, materials published before 1972 (and thus considered already in Hayashi’s bibliography) were excluded. It was also decided to exclude works pertaining to translations of the Sonnets, performances of the Sonnets, and non-academic discussions of the Sonnets. Monograph-length discussions of the Sonnets were also excluded on the basis that they were too unwieldy for the purposes of an experiment.

The next step was to gather the materials itemized on the master list. Although a large number of these materials were available in electronic form, and therefore much easier to collect, the various academic and commercial publishers and publication amalgamator service providers delivered the materials in different file formats. A workable standard would be required, and it was decided that regularizing all of the data into Rich Text format would preserve text formatting and relative location, and allow for any illustrations included to be embedded. Articles available only in image formats were fed through an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) application and saved in Rich Text format.

Materials unavailable in electronic form were collected, photocopied, and scanned as grayscale TIFF images. A resolution of 400 dpi was agreed upon as maintaining a balance between image clarity and file size. As a batch, the scanned images were enhanced with a negative brightness and a slightly high contrast in order to throw the type characters into relief against the page background. In addition to being stored in this format, the images were then processed through an OCR application and saved in Rich Text format.

The next step will involve applying a light common encoding structure on all of the Rich Text files and importing them into REKn. The resulting knowledgebase will be responsive to full-text electronic searches, allowing the user to uncover swiftly, for example, all references to a particular sonnet. License agreements and copyright restrictions will not allow us to make access to the knowledgebase public. However, we will be exploring a number of possible output formats that could be shared with the larger research community. Possibilities might include the use of the Sonnet knowledgebase to generate indices, concordances, or even an exhaustive annotated bibliography. For example, a dynamic index could be developed to query the full-text database and return results in the form of bibliographical citations. Since many users will come from institutions with online access to some or most of the journals, and with library access to others, these indices will serve as a valuable resource for further research.