[okfn-discuss] Proposed project on Milton

[Iain Emsley]

Apologies for the slightly random email whilst I was trying to  
unsubscribe my Yahoo account.

I'd like to propose a project using similar tools to the Open  
Shakespeare project but on Milton (as it is his 400th borthday on  
December 9th).

I've been experimenting with building a concordance which I hope to  
put onto my development site fairly soon (it's very rough and ready  
Perl and needs some glamourising). I'm also looking at creating notes,  
such as the characters and their relationships, on the site and  
providing RDFa versions in the HTML for RDF aware tools and also  
trying to link back to resources (where these are possible by the ts &  
cs)

Whilst this is currently web-based, I am envisaging a SOAP interface  
and a downloadable client (or details of users want to create their  
own in different languages). However I'm open to suggestion.

However where I would like to go with this is to try and develop some  
tools to allow users to track linguistic and literary changes with a  
wider range of open texts from Project Gutenberg (though elsewhere if  
they can be sourced openly), so for example you might want to track  
political expression from Hobbes to Paine, or to track the changing  
meaning of words or sound shifts in Early Modern English.

I'm curious as to how you can open up literature (something a  
colleague and I were discussing in the corridor) and language and use  
the Open Data and the Internet to do this.

Would this be of interest at all?

Iain

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Iain Emsley

Blog: www.yatterings.com
Mobile: 07942 259725