The ghost in the machine

Teaching Hamlet on the web

Peter Donaldson, Head of the Literature Faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and several of his colleagues will be visiting the University this week for a three-day workshop organised by the University's new Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities. The focus of the workshop (funded by the Cambridge-MIT Institute) will be the use of multimedia technologies for teaching and research in literature and drama.

Peter and his team have developed the successful Hamlet on the Ramparts website, a teaching resource used by universities and school which integrates electronic texts of three major modern editions, page images of the first three printed editions of the play, artwork, photographs, and movie clips. Cambridge's English Faculty will be testing it out with undergraduate students, for whom Hamlet is a core text.

This week's workshop is the third meeting in a collaboration which aims to push these technologies further, by introducing different types of literary material and international distance-learning models.

An international team of editors working on the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, an AHRB-funded project based in Cambridge and Leeds, is beginning to develop a multimedia project relating to the writings of Ben Jonson. The workshop will discuss other possible collaborations in film and nineteenth-century literature.

Alongside the teaching technology, the MIT team have developed more advanced research tools including a video-annotation package for collaborative research on Shakespeare on film."The workshop will allow literary scholars in the two universities to collaborate more fully, and explore a potential model for global, collaborative research," explains Eugene Giddens, a lecturer in the Faculty of English.

The project will also provide opportunities to assess the role of existing and emerging technologies for supporting collaboration at a distance that will have wider application as business-to-business communications needs become more complex.

"This is exactly the kind of innovative collaboration with exciting potential benefits for both teaching and research, which CRASSH is designed to foster," said Ian Donaldson, Director of CRASSH.

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