Hello All,
I am sorry for the delay in posting for so long this summer however all of the delay can be attributed to my newest project, Shakesbook. Shakesbook is a website that I designed which focuses on social relationships in Early Modern England, particularly on relationships to do with the London theatres and playwrights. (It is available at http://www.shakesbook.org/ ) There were several reasons that I wished to create this website:
~One, I wished to continue working on academic visualizations after my experiences running Docuscope and JMP with Prof. Michael Witmore and after programming executable JAR files in Java. Creating the visualizations was so much a part of the work I was doing with Docuscope that I did not truly notice my passion for it until I was building it from the ground up in Java.
~Secondly, I wanted to continue in the same thread as the Digital Humanities so learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript seemed like a natural progression for me.
~I also noticed that many projects, particularly digital projects, across universities were aiming for similar or related goals but were using twice the amount of resources necessary to get there compared to if they worked together. I wanted Shakesbook to be a platform for collaboration from different academic sources yet retain the depth and breadth of each individual component. To that end, the website’s main feature is a Simile Timeline which uses open source code to continue its development. In addition, I hope to be in contact with academic databases and archives to begin building and incorporating new data and features into the website.
During the construction of the website, my main goals were those above, but I also gained further ideas and standards to include in Shakesbook including:
~a website and platform that was accessible to academics, students, and the general populace yet maintained a rigorous professionalism in its sourcing and data
~a built-in sense of an ongoing and growing project, rather than a static or terminal task
~a functional scripting environment that works with the open source code as much as it works without it
~the standards set by the W3 consortium in website design in addition to a layout that facilitates access without relying on assumptions of a standard internet connection speed
The result of all of this is the current version of Shakesbook, although I hope to be continuously creating, expanding, and updating as time goes on.
Since Shakesbook is a new website, any feedback would be appreciated, either here in comments or by contacting me through either WordPress or the link at the bottom of Shakesbook.
All Is True 