Shakespeare's World was a project to transcribe handwritten documents by Shakespeare’s contemporaries and help us understand his life and times. It is on hiatus while we process our data.
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About Shakespeare's World
Shakespeare’s World launched in December 2015 and went on hiatus in October 2019. This is a placeholder site where you can still access the project Talk pages, and find information. We'll keep updating it periodically, and may one day relaunch with improved transcription functionality.
Shakespeare's World is a collaboration between the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., Zooniverse.org, and the Oxford English Dictionary of Oxford University Press. The project invited people to transcribe manuscripts created by thousands of men and women in and around Shakespeare’s lifetime, 1564–1616. The project featured three genres of early modern manuscripts including receipt books (aka recipes), letters, and newsletters. These transcriptions have been published on the Folger's website called Luna, alongside images of the original manuscripts. These transcriptions facilitate search and discovery, and have been used by several researchers in publications including books and articles.
Another important outcome of the project was to identify words and word variants that had not yet been recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary. New words and word variants were automatically detected while volunteers transcribed, and volunteers were encouraged to search the OED when they found unusual phrases. This resulted in several important discoveries, which you can read about on our blog and on Talk. Just search for the #OED hashtag.
You can watch a silent video of the interface here.