Abstract
The Shakespeare user—meaning anyone who has an affinity for Shakespeare, and a desire to understand his works and the four centuries of artistic expression they have inspired—ought to be at the center of Shakespeare studies. The field should be focused outward, concerned with bringing the largest possible number of people into the universe of committed Shakespeare lovers. To illustrate the benefits of this strategy, this chapter describes the author’s personal experience in building the website Open Source Shakespeare (OSS) as thesis project while in graduate school. The comprehensive openness of OSS—from the database, to the functionality it provides users, to the freely available descriptive essay, documentation, and source code—has made the site more useful and therefore more successful. The chapter concludes with a description of OSS’s audience and how they engage with the site, gleaned from online analytics services.
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Johnson, E.M. (2017). Opening Shakespeare from the Margins. In: Fazel, V., Geddes, L. (eds) The Shakespeare User. Reproducing Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61015-3_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61015-3_10
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Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-61014-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-61015-3
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