The Shakespeare #BardJam ends midnight BST tonight, & works-in-progress are welcome. https://itch.io/jam/bard-jam #interactivefiction #textgame

— Ash (@ggnewed) April 30, 2016

Given my previous experience developing Interactive Fiction, I figured I'd spend my Saturday building a simple game.

So, here - literally hours in the making - I present to you "The Great British Shake Off!"

Here's how we made it. Step one, hit the books!

My wife and I quickly came up with an idea. A demented game show with impossible questions - where every move is a wrong answer and is met with a Shakespearean insult.

So, as an example, are there two separate characters in two separate plays which say the same line?

It turns out that the Bard of Avon was not fond of a cliché! Trying to find duplicate lines throughout the plays was a bit of a challenge! A few years ago I released an Open Source Shakespeare MySQL dump but that didn't help much.

In the end, I just grepped through the works looking for common - and uncommon - phrases. It was pretty successful and we ended up with half a dozen interesting(ish) repeated phrases we could use.

As a host for this terrible torture, we thought the avuncular Stephen Fry would be perfect. A few years ago, my friend Documentally had taken this photo of Fry posing with a demon. With a little bit of shoddy photo editing we had some cover art!

With Liz looking through famous insults and gruesome death scenes, and me franticly trying to piece them into a semi-coherent story, it didn't take us long to complete our game. Teamwork!

So if you want to test your knowledge of Ol' Billy S - play "The Great British Shake Off!"

About A Minute is an amuse-bouche for podcast listeners. No long intro and outro. No waffling on. No adverts, competitions, arguing, or begging for iTunes reviews. You get to listen to an interesting person chat for about a minute - that's it!

Intro music "Gran Vals" performed by Brian Streckfus. Stopwatch Icon by Ilsur Aptukov from The Noun Project.

This podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

For example, in modern UK English we use the word "honour". In modern US English, it loses the "u" to become "honor". So, how was it spelt in Shakespeare's day?

I downloaded the XML representation of all the plays from the Bodleian.

To count all the occurrences of "honour" it's simply a case of running

grep -ci "honour" *.xml

. This can be repeated for "honor".

Once done, let's graph 'em :-)

There's no clear consensus! Two of the most popular plays - Midsummer and Romeo & Juliet - exclusively use "honour" - but the rest of the plays are a general mish-mash.

Spelling, back in 17th Century was... flexible to say the least! As the pages were typeset, the individuals working on them would adjust the letters on the page to fit with their own preferred method of spelling, or to make words fit on a line, or because that's what they were told to do, or because there were no more printing blocks of that letter available, or they made mistakes.

And, of course, Shakespeare didn't write much of anything down! Really, the only surviving document we are sure was written by him was his Last Will and Testament. It contains neither the word "honour" nor "honor".

I decided, in the limited time available, to create something much simpler. Because the Bodleian Library's scans of the First Folio are under a generous Creative Commons license, it's possible to share the images freely. And quite right too!

I decided to place the archive onto Twitter. This account - @1st_Folio_Scans - simply exists as a simple way to browse through the scans. The account doesn't interact - or even post updates any more. It's a static account, for you to read through at your leisure.

Bodleian First Folio

@1st_Folio_Scans

pic.x.com/wevzqnzd4t

---

Depending on how you read Twitter - through an app, the website, or API - you should be able to scroll through the scans. For example, open https://twitter.com/1st_Folio_Scans/media and click on a photo - you should see "previous" and "next" links.

Oh, if you're wondering what some of the stains are on the page, it's probably apple juice!

Bodleian First Folio

@1st_Folio_Scans

pic.x.com/ca6sntv3v8

---

We can also see which pages were most well-read.

Bodleian First Folio

@1st_Folio_Scans

pic.x.com/4fqjrzk5i1

---

So, there you go, take a read of @1st_Folio_Scans when you have a moment.

I'd like to discuss the hack our team created and how the event differed (in a positive way) from other hack days I've been to.

The Event

On arrival at the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, I was automatically assigned to a team. I think this is a great model for hackdays. To often, I find, anti-social nerds struggle to form teams - or they team up with people they came with - or non-hackers are left adrift without any technical help. The organisers had made sure that each team of four had at least one hacker, with the rest being made up of linguists, scholars, Shakespearean experts etc.

The first half of the day was a lecture! This isn't something I've experienced at a hackday before. Usually there an intro talk, someone thanks the sponsors, then everybody get cracking! Instead, we heard entertaining talks from Pip Willcox and Dr Emma Smith about the history of Shakespeare's First Folio - how it had arrived at Oxford, been lost, returned, and then digitised via crowd funding. Knowing the incredible provenance helped me feel closer to the data we would be working on.

We then had James Cummings talk us through the XML versions of the text, carefully explaining the somewhat esoteric TEI-C structure. He also gave us a huge data dump. We were given direct access to 2GB of high quality scans of the folio, a zip of all the XML they had available, and direct links to other useful bits of data. We were even encouraged to submit changes via GitHub. Much better organised than some hackdays where the advice is "just Google it."

Rather than getting lost in a vast sea of data, we were all told to work on a single play - Hamlet. Again, this was a sensible decision on the part of the organisers. I think we probably would have struggled if we were left to choose our own play.

Because of the layout of the rooms, there wasn't any real collaboration between the teams. With only a few hours in which to hack, this wasn't a serious problem, but did reduce those little sparks of creative cross-fertilisation you often get at these events.

Of particular interest to me was the gender ratio. Hackdays are usually male dominated affairs. This was decidedly the opposite with a F:M ratio of about 2:1! I don't know if the organisers did anything specific to achieve this, or whether it's a natural consequence of a "Humanities" event. Either way, it's a solid reminder to other event organisers that it can be done!

Our Hack - Too Many "To Be"s

Our team included... Sarah Ellis - the Head of Digital Development at Royal Shakespeare Company, Thomas Jo Johansen, Dr Erin Sullivan a Lecturer and Fellow at Birmingham's Shakespeare Institute, Michelle Morton also of the RSC, and me.

As with all good hacks, we went down several dead-ends before setting on something workable. Here are the ideas, in case you want to try them yourself!

• Sentiment analysis of the text. Rejected because the corpus contains the original archaic spellings - e.g. "loue" for "love".
• Multimedia collage. Can we extract tweets, videos, images, animated gifs, etc to match each line of the text? We couldn't find an automated way to do this, and our manual efforts were a bit disappointing.
• Correcting transcription errors in the text. A bit dull - but the data are on GitHub if you want to do it!
• How much time do characters stay on stage? The text has metadata to indicate stage directions, entrances, and exits - but it rarely indicates who has left. This could make for a nice animated visualisation and would also help improve the XML.
• How does this 1st Folio scan differ from others? Can we average out the scans to see what unique features each one has?

Finally, we settled on a somewhat avant-garde sound piece. We were discussing placing links in the XML pointing directly at sound or video files - for example Richard Burton's Hamlet. The problem is, most recordings are taken from the modern text. And most modern products inevitably cut some of the text.

One thing we could be sure of, is that no-one in their right mind would cut "To Be Or Not To Be".

What are the different ways of performing that famous soliloquy? Is Richard Burton's performance notably different from, say, David Tennant's? Who is the best actor for the role? How many different ways can it be interpreted? What if you played every recording to "To Be" all at once?

The result? Noise! Glorious noise! Magnificent noise!

We ripped the audio of Burton, Tennant, William Shatner, amateurs on YouTube, women singing with a ukulele, and a dozen more. We trimmed the audio in Audacity, and used HTML5's audio element to play them all simultaneously. In the browser we were able to mix them - changing the volume on the fly, fading in and out, starting and stopping the performances.

Listening to several speakers at once is incredibly disorienting. As you start picking out one or two voices, you begin to understand the wild variance with which people perform. Take a listen to Richard Burton, David Tennant, and Kenneth Brannagh performing at the same time.

Ok, that's three classically trained actors wringing every last drop of melancholy out of it. Even still, fascinating to hear how they approach it. Let's now hear it sung by Courtney Welbon and performed by Paul Scofield.

For students coming to Shakespeare for the first time, it can often feel like there is only one way to perform Shakespeare. That it's a fixed point from which there can be no deviation. Nothing could be further from the truth! We can play it as a rap, as a Greek Chorus, as a man, a woman, or any variation that pleases us.

It also calls into question our notion of "perfection". Many of the other hacks during the event were quantitative in nature - breaking down the text, extracting semantic meaning, adding metadata, analysing the work. Our is, I hope you'll agree, qualitative. Which is the "best" Hamlet? What makes the perfect performance? After listening to dozens of recording, I'm fairly confident I can tell a good performance from bad - but when they're mixed together it becomes less clear. Perhaps I like the sung "slings and arrows" and the spoken "outrageous fortune".

We can take this further. Splicing in recordings so that Burton's 1964 Hamlet is performing against Julia Stiles in 2000's film of Hamlet.

Taking It Further

Putting aside the tricky issue of copyright, everyone felt that it was a unique and interesting way to examine the works. For schools, it allows you to show that it isn't just dusty old men wandering around a stage. For actors, it's a resource to inspire you to take a performance in a different direction.

The Shakespearean HackFest was a hugely entertaining and a great success. Thanks to Kerri Russell and all the organisers for an amazing day and a fascinating set of data.

You can access the digital edition of the Bodleian's First Folio - and edit it on GitHub.

If you would like to help, the text is available on GitHub for people to correct.

Why?

I've long held a fascination with Shakespeare - hence the name of this website. At university I studied Mandarin as my minor degree. I was a clumsy student, but enjoyed the regularity and poetry of the language.

I discovered the Chinese writer Zhu Shenghao had translated many of Shakespeare's plays before his untimely death in 1944. I couldn't find any comprehensive collection online, so I gathered together what I could find and reformatted it in what I consider to be a beautiful format.

According to Chinese copyright law the rights expire fifty years after the author's death.

How?

I am indebted to Ben Griffiths's code "The Play's The Thing" which marks up Shakespeare's plays in XML, then uses Ruby to create a static site.

So, I've learned how to use PHP's domDocument to manipulate atrociously formatted HTML, discovered more than I ever wanted to know about different methods of encoding Chinese characters (UTF-8, GB2312, big5, etc) and how to convert between them, got my head around Ruby to parse XML and spit out HTML, and a whole bunch about font subsetting in order to reduce the size of the webfonts.

On the issue of fonts, I've chosen four different fonts - each for different heading or body texts. The fonts used for the titles range from 20KB-360KB. The main body font is 3.2MB. That's probably far too large. They're subsetted down to the the bare minimum number of characters needed, but I'll have to find a way to improve on that.

I showed the pages off to a couple of native Chinese speakers and they confirmed that the fonts were legible.

Why not .中国?

I had originally registered an International Domain Name ending in .中国 - sadly, the Chinese Registry rejected the name. According to the Chinese Trademark Registry there are a dozen companies who have registered "Shakespeare" as a trademark. And, unless I was prepared to pay over $500 for a trademark I was out of luck.

Hmph.

Help?

I'm sure that the translations aren't necessarily formatted in the correct way. There are also likely to be plays missing. My design ambitions exceed my skills.

If you would like to help improve this service, please pop along to the GitHub repository. There, you will be able to leave a report if something is wrong or even make the changes yourself.

Or, drop a note in the comment box below!

He claims that this is within A Winter's Tail, Act I, Scene ii - in the first folio.

So, I turned to the First Folio viewer which allows people to see scans of the first printing of The Winter's Tale - in this case, the New South Wales scan. Direct link to scan.

The "emoticon" is also present in the second folio, the third, and the fourth.

However, at some point, the smiley vanishes!

The fourth folio was printed in 1685. By 1786, the :) had dropped out - as seen in this British Library edition by John Bell. (The annotations to the 1786 edition make no mention of any changes to the particular soliloquy.) In just 100 years, some form of mutated Grammasites must have eaten up the parentheses.

Google Books is a fine resource - but, as far as I can tell, it doesn't allow one to search a particular time period.

Thanks to Imran Ghory for telling me about Copac - an electronic resource to search British academic libraries. So, by crafting a specific query, we can see all the publications within a specific timeframe.

Sadly, most of the resources are locked behind the Athens system. An academic system managed by Eduserv.

OpenAthens says it is:

Unlocking the door to knowledge

Ah, yes, the famous "Unlocking knowledge by locking away behind paywalls" strategy. We all know how well that works out...

So, the hunt is on! If you have access to these long-out-of-copyright resources, perhaps you can discover when the original smiley was exorcized and who was responsible for it?

I've recently finished reading two autobiographies. Both cover the same story. A boy - a nerd - has success in the fickle world of acting. Both stories tell of series of choices made. In one, the boy soars to great heights. In the other, the boy is bought back to Earth with a thump - seemingly never to succeed again.

The first is by Simon Pegg, the second by Wil Wheaton.

What's so hard is that both stories feel like they could have been written about me. Both make me question the choices I've made. Both leave me wondering if I am where I want to be in the world and - if not - how I get there.

Some Background

Before the Internet, before mobile, before girls, before all the things which make me who I am today - I was an actor. I trained to be an actor. I was in shows, I went to classes, I passed examinations, I did interviews on the radio, I was a happy kid following in my parents' acting footsteps.

After one summer show, my brother and I were both picked up by Hobsons International - a leading voice-over agency. We were over the moon! This was it! The chance to free ourselves from the shackles of amateur dramatics and into the big leagues!

So, every few months I would race up to a studio in London and record a voice-over. Usually for a commercial, sometimes for an audio book, the occasional training video. Nothing tremendously glamorous - but oh so exciting. Being able to skip school because I had a gig! Payment - sometimes £300 for an afternoon's work - was a fortune for a kid. I was on my way to becoming a star.

The Scottish Play

One Friday in 1996 I got the phone call that would change my life. Or so I thought. Earlier that week I'd auditioned at BBC to play a part in their upcoming adaptation of MacBeth. They said yes. THEY SAID YES! I was to start on Monday.

I don't know if you can imagine it. Only fifteen and off to play Shakespeare for the BBC. To have my name immortalised next to Ian McKellen & Judi Dench. To be working as an actor. I was dizzy.

That Monday, I made my way to the rehearsal rooms. As I walked down the escalator at Waterloo, I noticed the giant poster for the just-released film "Twin Town". I only remember, because every day I passed that poster - and every day I got to work with Rhys Ifans.

Rhys FUCKING Ifans!

We spent a few days rehearsing - fancifully I imagined that it was where they used to rehearse Doctor Who. Then we went to film in the abandoned Grand Hotel above St Pancras - where the Spice Girls had recently shot the video for Wannabe. I managed a sneaky zig-a-zig-ah on the staircase in between takes.

And then it was over. A heady week of seeing Rhys Ifans act everyone else off the screen, watching the crew complain about the actors, listening to the actors complaining about the food, wearing Alexander McQueen designed clothes and shoes. And then.... Nothing.

I have a fading VHS of the resultant show. I have an angsty teenage diary that I kept during the rehearsals and filming. I won't show you either.

The truth is, I wanted to be an actor - but I just wasn't very good. All of the happy memories that I might have had from filming are erased by a single sentence.

I happened to glance over the producer's notes after one rehearsal. It was there in black and white:

"Older boy needs work."

That killed me. I had no objective idea of how good I was as an actor. I knew that I was quick, funny, had the technique and the desire - but I was obviously lacking the ability.

I bunked off school one morning when the show was broadcast - I don't think I told my friends it was on. I watched in abject terror. The producer was right; I did need work. My diction was sloppy, my timing was off, my body language was wrong. In short, I was unconvincing.

I decided to take a break. To regroup. To find out what it was which made me such a bad actor. I don't remember if it was a conscious choice - but I never acted professionally again. My confidence was gone.

And that's the story behind my sole entry in the IMDB.

Aftermath

I didn't quit acting. I performed once or twice more at school. I did an A-Level in performing arts.

Rather than use that as the springboard onto a drama course at university, I took the safe option. I went for a fall-back career in IT.

Cannily, I chose a University with a great Drama school and pedigree - UEA.

I was active in the drama society - I was in a few plays which seemed to be roaring successes. I wooed my future wife by convincing her to audition for a role in The Royal Hunt of the Sun, in which I played Old Martin.

But, since university, I've not learned a line, recited a poem, or - to use the clichéd phrase - trodden the boards.

I, An Actor

I still consider myself an actor. When I stand in front of a MobileMonday or BarCamp crowd, I am performing. I am timing the laughs, craving the applause.

Before a big presentation at work, or a job interview, I do vocal warm ups and practice tongue twisters.

When I host an event and feel that I have no confidence, I put on a character and let that do the work for me.

If I need to convince someone of an argument in a meeting, I look them in the eye, stay engaged with their character, modulate my tone of voice, and whisper the actors' prayer: "Let them find me convincing."

I miss it. I don't want to be famous. I don't even want to be a jobbing actor any more. I just want to be on a stage - any stage.

Today is my 33rd birthday. I wonder how much longer I'll be stuck playing this particular character...

Ahem...

When I first started shkspr.mobi it was intended to be an easy way to get Shakespeare on your phone. At that time, there were no mobile formatted texts of his plays and sonnets, so I had to create them. Finding Shakespeare's works in a suitable format for conversion wasn't too hard - but it meant lots of crufty code to read text files line-by-line. Yuck.

A few years later, I stumbled across Open Source Shakespeare. The project grew out of Eric Johnson's MA thesis. It's a remarkably good idea with only one minor problem. The database it uses is Microsoft Access.

MS Access, as a database, could best be described as

deformed, crooked, old and sere, ill faced, worse bodied, shapeless everywhere, vicious, ungentle, foolish, blunt, unkind, stigmatical in making, worse in mind

(Comedy of Errors, Act IV, Scene II)

There are a few Open Source Shakespeare projects on GitHub, but they don't seem very practical.

So, naturally, I've decided to create my own version of Shakespeare's works - in MySQL :-)

This is what it looks like: You can download it from GitHub.

I've stripped out a lot of the extraneous stuff from the original version - word counts, etc. So it should be a fairly lean database which is easy to use. I'm not a database professional, so I would be grateful if you could suggest any improvements. Either using this blog's comment form or on GitHub.

There are four tables

Paragraphs

This is where the main body of text is. A typical row will look like this

• WorkID: hamlet
• ParagraphID: 639015
• ParagraphNum: 3427
• CharID: hamlet
• PlainText: Has this fellow no feeling of his business, that he sings atngrave-making?
• Act: 5
• Scene: 1

Works

This is what translates the "WorkID" into something human readable - plus some extra metadata

• WorkID: hamlet
• Title: Hamlet
• LongTitle: Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, The
• Date: 1600
• GenreType: Tragedy

Character

This is what translates the CharID into a human readable name and description

• charID: hamlet
• CharName: Hamlet
• Abbrev: Ham
• Works: Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, The
• Description: son of the former king and nephew to the present king

Chapters

This gives the setting for each Act and Scene.

• WorkID: hamlet
• ChapterID: 18893
• Act: 5
• Scene: 1
• Description: Elsinore. A churchyard.

What's Next?

The next steps for the project are fairly obvious:

1. Write some high level example code to show people how to use the database.
2. Make shkspr.mobi a showcase site which runs off the database.
3. Fix any bugs and inconsistencies that people find.

You can download the Shakespeare MySQL Database from GitHub.