Will’s World Hack is in its third day now and we are hoping to hear more from potential hacks as the weekend approaches and people can leave work behind for some hack time fun!
We held two drop-in sessions today on Google+ Hangout and as usual, they are now available for viewing on YouTube, Google+ and linked in our daily update post at:
In the first session (1pm GMT), we highlighted the addition of rules on the Prize & Rules wiki page. There is nothing new or unusual in these but they do formalise what have been discussing earlier on. In particular, we would like people to register their hack or hack idea, preferably by Sunday evening and be ready to present live at the closing session or provide a video ahead of the time. Let us know if you have any queries.
You can watch the first check in session here:
Our 5pm Check in saw Jeffrey Kerzner join us from the US. Jeff has been looking at the Shakespeare data and how it might be accessed and analysed. He would love to hear from any academics about the real academic aims, the scholarly questions they want to ask of this data. Please do take a look at this video from the session and leave us a comment here, email us (willsworldhack@gmail.com) or contact Jeff directly via his details on the wiki if you’d like to get in touch with him.
In this check in our developer Neil also discussed various improvements and updates – including improvements to the Solr search that may require some to make small tweaks to already-developed code – that are being made to the Will’s World Registry tonight ready for your further hacking delight over the weekend.
In other news a tweet and email highlighted a great new Shakespeare resource from the Folger Library which provides the text for the plays rigorously encoded with every word, every punctuation mark, every space, within a sophisticated TEI-compliant XML structure, and you can download them!
Also released today were the new Google+ “Communities” – these are groups that allow you to share updates and discussion with other participants so do join ours and start chatting!
We have also had updates from various hackers so here’s what’s happening so far:
- Jeffrey is looking for academic collaborators to work with – he’s got the coding skills so bring him the academic questions to answer!
- Richard has been looking at URLs for Shakespeare characters (LCSH has been suggested) and has been considering the best approach for this – it will fit with the Linked Data texts he is working on and he would appreciate any advice or collaborators for this work.
- Owen has been developing his ShakespearePress WordPress Plugin and has shared his code on Github: https://github.com/ostephens/shakespearepress. Owen would love to hear from potential collaborators so again do leave comments here, email us, or get directly in touch with Owen via the Participants Wiki page.
We will be supporting your hacks and working on a few of our own over the weekend so we shall see you online very soon and will provide another daily update here on the blog tomorrow.
The next check ins will be at 5pm on Saturday (8th December) and 1pm on Sunday (9th December) when the team will be available to answer your questions and you can continue to meet and work with each other.
And finally… a quick reminder of our last (but not least) prize category: Best set up for the hack. Send us picture of the environment you are working in and we will showcase the best on our Pinterest page with a prize for the very best!
