The Folger Digital Folio of Renaissance Drama for the 21st Century (F21) is an ambitious project. Its ultimate goal is creation of interoperable digital editions of some 500 plays by William Shakespeare’s contemporaries written or performed between 1576 and 1642. At least 350 of these plays are part of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s collection. The richness of this collection — and the possibilities these works have for teaching both Renaissance drama and the techniques of digital transcription — make it an ideal home for such a project.

Nearly 400 of the in-scope plays have been digitally transcribed as part of the Text Creation Partnership (TCP). Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this project is that we intend to have undergraduates from a number of partner institutions correct and upgrade — on the basis of comparison with page images — the textual encoding and transcriptions. The project pilots a model of large-scale crowd-sourcing with undergraduates that might be scaled up and repeated in other humanities projects, while also promoting a new mode of scholarship at liberal arts institutions and producing the high-quality interoperable collection of plays required for new modes of machine-assisted scholarship. “Interoperable” here means that these editions can be used as the basis for automated, algorithm-driven, corpus-based queries and comparisons that make generalizations across the full collection of texts. The F21 Project aims to provide a powerful, sharable digital version of early modern drama to researchers — so that other forms of critical analysis can be undertaken on this corpus — while allowing undergraduates to claim some pride of ownership in the creation of individual editions.