A multilingual and open source plateform
The PuppetPlays programme aims at the creation of an open source platform, built with the human–computer interaction (HCI) design company, Intactile Design and hosted by the TGIR ("Très Grande infrastructure de Recherche") Huma-Num.
The programme plans to collect a large selection of published and unpublished plays written in Western Europe (United Kingdom, France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands) from 1600 to the present. Around 2,000 plays will be analysed and then documented into a database specifying various metadata such as the author, date, genre, the list of characters, the editions (or the place of conservation of the manuscripts), and the staging, with a brief summary of the dramatic action.
Three hundred of these plays, identified as particularly representative and difficult to access, will be published on the digital anthology which, together with the database, will be accessible on the Internet platform of PuppetPlays.
The database and anthology can be searched via keywords, an interactive map of Europe, and via a timeline, in order to facilitate access to these resources for all types of users: academics and students from different disciplines, artists and art students, teachers, cultural stakeholders and mediators, as well as the general public interested in the field.
Following the example of the New York Public Library (which invited users to participate, through a dedicated software, in the transcription of thousands of letters exchanged between soldiers and their families during the American Civil War), PuppetPlays plans to bring together communities of users by offering to help with online collaborative transcription (crowd-sourcing) of handwritten documents.
The web-platform will also host a dictionary of authors, thematic issues and other pedagogical tools, video-excerpts and iconography, audio-recordings of performances, as well as all the academic productions of the programme (including a monograph, two doctoral dissertations, the proceedings of two international conferences, and articles).
The platform will be available in French, English, German and Italian. Various resources will also be uploaded in their original tongue.
