Professor creates Bard e-books

IU English professor Ellen MacKay is creating e-books for iPads that allow students to interact with William Shakespeare in a whole new way.

MacKay is part of an academic collaboration that creates iPad applications for some of the playwright’s most-known plays. Luminary Digital Media oversees the collaboration and organizes content from universities such as Notre Dame and Harvard.

MacKay recently contributed “The Tempest” to the application, and will direct transcription of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” during the 2012-13 academic year.

“As director of the Luminary edition of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ I consider what kinds of materials will be most attractive on the iPad platform and what sorts of scrolling, pointing, clicking and annotating technologies are most suited to the users of the app,” MacKay said.

Each text is accompanied by commentaries from leading Shakespeare scholars and also includes a full-length audio performance of the play by the Actors From the London Stage company. The user can customize and annotate the text, as well as click direct links to illustrations, podcasts, teaching materials and videos from the Folger Shakespeare Library.

While MacKay said the move to digitize scholarly books makes academic writing exponentially more accessible and research much more efficient, there will always be material books.

“They are a form of preservation that far exceeds what we can do digitally,” she said. “Works we wish to keep for posterity will always need a hard copy.”

However, MacKay does not think the big question is which technology wins out in the marketplace, but which of the two options serves a person best under a particular circumstance.

In addition to “The Tempest” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Othello,” “Romeo and Juliet” and “Macbeth” are each being developed this summer.

“The idea is to make available first the works that are most taught in the public school and college curriculum, and to go from there,” MacKay said.

MacKay said she doesn’t think these apps will completely replace traditional readings but hopes they will become a viable option for professors and teachers who are adopting the iPad in the classroom.

“What they do really well is absorb and display the collective thoughts of students, so that close reading becomes a kind of social reading, and debates about meaning, allusion and implication that can really catch fire,” she said. “It is also ideal for a wider public that wants to understand Shakespeare better but can’t study him in an academic setting.”

Elliott Visconsi, professor of English at Notre Dame who founded Luminary, is willing to open up the application platform to other literary forms and periods. MacKay said many works call for richly annotated, richly edited editions with clickable links to all kinds of contextual resources.

“I would love to see Tony Kushner’s astonishing play ‘Angels in America’ fully annotated and linked to a map of Manhattan districts and landmarks that it references,” she said. “Famously opaque works from James Joyce and Gertrude Stein might work well in this format, so would Old or Middle English texts that need abundant glossing and benefit from rich discussion.”

MacKay said the Shakespeare play she would love to create an app for is “The Merchant of Venice” because “it is so politically complex and so theatrically brilliant.”