Folger Shakespeare Library Launches Folger Digital Texts with Twelve of Shakespeare’s Best-Known Plays

From The Los Angeles Times:

The Folger Shakespeare Library, home to the world’s largest collection of Shakespeare materials, launched the Folger Digital Texts on Thursday. It’s a set of authoritative Shakespeare plays available for free — along with the source code. Noncommercial app builders, scholars and others can use the code to build their own Shakespeare-oriented projects.

From the Folger Shakespeare Library News Release:

Folger Digital Texts offers meticulously edited, accurate texts—drawn from the Folger Editions, the leading Shakespeare texts used in American classrooms—in a beautifully readable format with the added power of in-depth, behind-the-scenes coding. The texts—including full source code—is a free, online resource for students and teachers, theatergoers, scholars, and others.

The first Folger Digital Texts include a dozen of Shakespeare’s best known plays, including Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Tempest. Throughout 2013, we will be adding to Folger Digital Texts until it includes all of Shakespeare’s plays as well as his poems.

Read, Search, and Enjoy
Users can read the plays online, download PDFs for offline reading, search for keywords within a single play or the whole corpus, and navigate by act, scene, line, or the new Folger throughline numbers. Every word, space, and piece of punctuation has its own place online

Plays are also displayed with the same page numbers as in the Folger Shakespeare Library print editions to allow the two to be easily used together in classrooms.

Download the Code
The full source code of the texts may be downloaded by researchers and developers at no cost for noncommercial use—a major time-saver for scholarly research, app development, and other projects.

The Folger Digital Texts development team includes Rebecca Niles, editor and interface architect, and Michael Poston, editor and encoding architect, with David Schalkwyk, the Folger’s director of research, managing the project.

Additional Details Here

Direct to Folger Digital Texts