understanding shakespeare: what we've learned (so far) - rsa 2016

UNDERSTANDING SHAKESPEARE:WHAT WE’VE LEARNED(SO FAR)

1 April, 2016

Alex Humphreys, JSTOR Labs@abhumphreys

RSA 2016 Panel: Folger Digital Agendas II – Scholarly Conversations and Collaborations

JSTOR is a not-for-profit digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources.

Ithaka S+R is a not-for-profit research and consulting service that helps academic, cultural, and publishing communities thrive in the digital environment.

Portico is a not-for-profit preservation service for digital publications, including electronic journals, books, and historical collections.

ITHAKA is a not-for-profit organization that helps the academic community use digital technologies to preserve the

scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways.

JSTOR Labs works with partner publishers, libraries and labs to create tools for researchers, teachers and students that are immediately useful – and a little bit magical.

PARTNERSHIP WITH FOLGER

• Open, collaborative partnership with Folger Shakespeare Library

• They had:- Shakespeare Quarterly- Folger Digital Texts- Scholars and students

• We had:- Full run of SQ- 2,000 more journals- A new Labs team

• Flash Build - September, 2014: - From ideation to working site- One week at the Folger in DC

labs.jstor.org/shakespeare

Understanding Shakespeare…

“...is the most exciting project in digital Shakespeare in many years, and takes a major step forward in creating a ‘living variorum’ for Shakespeare studies on the web.”

-Peter DonaldsonFord International Professor in the Humanities,

MIT

MATCHMAKERALGORITHM

1. Identify candidate set of articles from JSTOR

2. Extract quotations - quotations, not allusions - text within quotes or block-quotes

3. Run fuzzy text matching of quotations against primary text

4. Calibrate to minimize false positives and negatives - quotation length - % confidence

Usage vs. Scholarship

100% = 26,233

100% = 441,032

OPEN & PUBLIC API

labs.jstor.org/developers

Play Data(from Folger Digital

Text)

genre, play, act, scene, line, speaker, speaker_gender, on_stage

Scholarship Data(from articles on

JSTOR)

title, authors, journal, pubdate, article_type, keyterms

Quotations!play_text, match_text, similarity, match_size

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

• Apply Matchmaker to other texts - Understanding the US Constitution App - Understanding Dante - and more!

• Matchmaker API- Run Matchmaker on any text you can upload or point to - Incorporate Matchmaker links into other sites - Apply Matchmaker to other corpora

• What do you suggest?

THANK YOUAlex HumphreysDirector, JSTOR LabsITHAKA

http://labs.jstor.org@abhumphreysalex.humphreys@ithaka.org

APPENDIX(OPEN IN CASE OF NO INTERNET CONNECTION)