Annotated Midsummer

a collaborative annotation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream

Contents: Welcome |Brief History

Welcome

Welcome to the Collaborative Midsummer Digital Dramaturgy Project! This site is a collaborative project between the graduate level Dramaturgical Acts course in the Department of Theatre at the University of Idaho and the Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning, also at the University of Idaho.

The goal for our project was to translate the prototypical dramaturgy packet, created for a hypothetical production of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, into a digital space.

Questions that guided our research were:

  1. How do we understand the data we use in the field of dramaturgy?
  2. How can we use the tools of the digital humanities to advance understandings of the field of production dramaturgy and vice versa?
  3. What tools or manners of visualizing dramaturgical research might be helpful to those who work on a production of play?

As part of this research, we used the static web tool Collection Builder developed by CDIL as a jumping off point. Collection Builder is a tool for creating digital exhibits of collections and this concept of a digital repository was key for shifting our understanding of the work of a dramaturg. In essence, dramaturgs are assembling mini collections of resources as they work on a production. Visualizing these resources in a folder on a desktop or as a bibliographic list is limiting; and using the tool Collection Builder we are now able to visualize our repository of resources in variety of comparative manners: via a Timeline, a Map, and Subjects. Additionally, given that Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is in the public domain, we were also able to create a full annotation of the script for use by researchers and artists.

Brief History

The project began after Dr. Sarah Campbell received a Faculty Development Fellowship from the CDIL in fall 2020. As part of this fellowship, Sarah worked with Olivia Wikle, Evan Williamson, and Devin Becker to learn the basics of GitHub, Collection Builder, and Oral History as Data.