Wow.
As the site says, 93 copies of 21 plays. Beautiful, high-quality page images, a generous interface, and a marked emphasis on comparison amongst the different versions of the texts. All courtesy of the British Library.
In terms of public visibility and scholarly influence this may be the single most important thing the digital humanities and digital library scholarship have done to date.
This is beeg. Very beeeg.
Posted by mgk at September 15, 2004 08:07 PMI wish it were a little bit beeger... at least on the screen of my new teeny laptop, it's hard to read the actual text, and zooming gets you a whole new window. So, some user-interface issues.
Still, wow. Wow.
Posted by: Jess at September 15, 2004 09:04 PM | Link to CommentI have to say that I haven't had a whole lot of time to look around, but on first perusal, I'm really impressed with the interface. I'm surprised by the "print" feature, quite honestly... but I think they've done an excellent job of considering navigational issues. You can jump to a page, you can "flip" through the quarto (and on broad band.. you can do it pretty quickly). I'd have to say it's the best interface for viewing manuscripts that I've seen to date, and I'd be interested in hearing from their design staff on how they decided to arrive on this kind of interface. I would imagine that they took time to do usability studies to see how people read... because this is the first interface that I've seen that really addresses how we read online.
Posted by: CJ at September 16, 2004 09:48 AM | Link to CommentI agree-- I wonder how much we'll see this design bleed over into other projects, both future and existing. It looks especially great in the new Mozilla 1.0PR, which has what may be the largest viewable browser window of all time.
Posted by: Marc at September 16, 2004 10:34 AM | Link to Comment