Towards the end of January the Open Humanities Working Group hosted a one-day sprint to work on its
Open Literature platform for sharing and annotating public domain works of literature. The event was hosted at the
Centre for Creative Collaboration in King’s Cross, London, and was attended by coders and non-coders alike. The day began with Rufus Pollock giving a brief introduction to the project, its rationale, its history and a plan for the day. Here’s a video of the intro (recorded on a phone camera):
After that, the group divided into two teams: one of developers and the other of text-finders and editors. Throughout the day, the developers (pic below) worked on integrating part of the functionality into WordPress to display the marked up text. As an extension of this, they also began work on the annotation store so that we can show the existing annotations from the
Open Shakespeare project. This is still an ongoing project and news will be posted to the Open Humanities group as more is done on it.

In parallel, the other group (below) was busy finding texts, converting them to the correct format and uploading them to the WordPress site.
Project Gutenberg was an invaluable source of public domain literature, although each text took roughly 10 minutes to prepare for the platform. Instructions for preparing texts will be added to the site in due course, alongside a general workflow for how the platform should operate. By the end of the day, the complete works of Shakespeare were uploaded to the database, in addition to texts from a few other authors. The next stage is to write summaries for each of the texts and to ensure that all display correctly in the viewer.

Overall it was a great way to re-start the Open Literature project and there has been an encouraging resurgence of activity since – so thanks to everyone who attended! For updates on the project you can sign up to the Open Humanities mailing list in the box at the top right of this page.