Post by Crissie Johnson, UA Press

On September 13 Jennifer Drouin from the English Department discussed her ongoing Shakespeare au/in Quebec project in a presentation entitled “Challenges associated with CSS and XML in a Foreign Language DH Drupal project.” The goal of the project is to create a bilingual anthology of Québécois adaptations of Shakespeare written during the Quiet Revolution with cross-references to the Shakespearean works they draw from. This is an ongoing project created in the Drupal Content Management System, which was also used to create the new English Department website. Jen hopes to include critical content (both original and pulled from her forthcoming book, Shakespeare in Québec: Nation, Gender, and Adaptation), reflowable copies of approximately thirty plays, and links to the Shakespearean plays made available through the Internet Shakespeare Editions.

The site is in its early stages, and CSS created in InDesign has been created. Currently, Jenn is working on selecting a set of TEI tags for marking up the Québécois plays in XML. She is looking at the established manuscript and theatrical tag lists edited by Roma; however, it was suggested that she could still use one of the XSLTs provided by TEI rather than having to create everything from scratch. There was some question about whether in the interest of expediency the text of the plays to be studied should be uploaded as PDFs or more simplistic coding to make them quickly available as completely marking up the plays with cross reference will be a time-consuming task. The goal is for the Québécois plays to link to the Shakespearean text using the hover features as is done in the OED for cross-references. Jenn has found a plugin that allows for the direct import of XML, which she hopes will streamline this process.