Research
Shakespeare’s World launched on December 8, 2015, and went on hiatus on October 4, 2019. 2016 marked the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, and was a great time to try to widen access not only to the study of his works, but to the world in which he lived. Shakespeare's World invited volunteers to explore what it was like to live, work, or raise a family in early modern England. The project featured three genres of material over four years: letters, ‘receipt’ (recipe) books, and newsletters--early handwritten news sheets.
The project was a collaboration between the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., Zooniverse.org at Oxford University, and the Oxford English Dictionary of Oxford University Press. The project invited people to transcribe manuscripts created by thousands of men and women who were alive in and around Shakespeare’s lifetime, 1564–1616. The goals of the project were to transcribe early modern manuscripts in order to facilitate the discovery of texts in the Folger digitized collections; to create a body of early modern transcriptions that could be used for humanities research at scale; and to identify new words and word variants not represented in the OED. The project has succeeded in its goals, and the data is being used by various researchers. Nearly 6,000 pages are available on Luna, the Folger's website. Check out our Shakespeare's World blog for more information about how the data has been used. If you'd like to use the data, please email ShakespearesWorld[at]gmail.com.