Entry Date:
August 8, 1996

The MIT Shakespeare Project (Shakespeare Electronic Archive)

Principal Investigator Peter Donaldson

Co-investigators Belinda Yung , Andrew McKinney

Project Start Date June 1993

Project End Date
 December 2015


Since 1992, The MIT Shakespeare Project has been constructing electronic environments for teaching and research based on digital copies of primary documents in all media, including texts, high resolution page images of early editions, digital collections of art, illustration and stage photographs, and film and video adaptations.

A collaborative venture between the MIT Literature Department and MIT's Center for Educational Computing Initiatives (CECI), the project aims to use emerging technologies to:

CREATE exemplary digital collections in all media by building alliances with libraries, publishers, and theatrical companies.

DESIGN systems of access in which all materials are linked to the lines of text to which they are relevant and which are easily used at all levels -- from advanced scholars to university and high school students and the general "reader."

DELIVER a variety of archival resources to users through special collections available at research libraries and participating universities, publications on CDROM, other distributable media, and the World Wide Web.

Because of the technical and institutional challenges involved in such a task, the project is also intended as a testbed for the problems and challenges involved in creating multimedia archives of global scale.