Ancient Plays for the Modern World: Building an Electronic Resource

Ellen Kratzer Author

04/04/2021 Added

12 Plays

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Our three-person team is a part of an ongoing project to build an interactive e-book that would continue a series started by the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at Oxford University. Our e-book is on Antigone and this video shows the progress we have made this year.

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[00:00:15.153]The Antigone e-book is part of an ongoing collaboration with Oxford University
[00:00:18.663]focused on building electronic resources for modern performance of classical plays
[00:00:24.016]UNL joined the project in 2018
[00:00:26.276]and students were tasked with choosing an ancient play which has significant modern implications
[00:00:31.067]Sophocles' Antigone was chosen as the perfect candidate.
[00:00:34.417]The ancient play bears several themes of conflict still prevalent today.
[00:00:38.160]such as intrafamilial fighting
[00:00:40.259]the laws of man versus the morals of god
[00:00:41.517]the gender hierarchy and more
[00:00:45.845]Throughout the last few years we have
[00:00:47.398]gathered the necessary materials for
[00:00:48.825]building the e-book.
[00:00:50.061]We began by researching modern performances
[00:00:52.450]of Antigone.
[00:00:53.368]From Victorian times to the present day.
[00:00:55.107]And then filtering these based on the sociopolitical
[00:00:57.480]implication of the time and place they were performed
[00:01:00.981]For example, a performance of Antigone in
[00:01:03.422]World War II with a double meaning
[00:01:04.746]based on which party is watching takes
[00:01:06.453]precedence over, say, a public radio broadcast performed
[00:01:09.753]with the intent to simply entertain.
[00:01:11.251]To find these, we utilized Oxford's
[00:01:13.506]Archive of the Performances of Greek and Roman Drama
[00:01:16.327]or the APGRD for short.
[00:01:18.293]Using their online resource proved difficult as there was no access to any images
[00:01:22.521]So in the summer of 2019, a group of
[00:01:24.904]five students travelled to Oxford to sift through
[00:01:27.454]the APGRD's physical archive
[00:01:29.244]and gather images of relevant performances.
[00:01:32.362]Once all the data was gathered
[00:01:33.979]we began building the e-book using Apple's
[00:01:36.006]iBooks Author, leading
[00:01:37.515]us to our resent stage of development.
[00:01:40.308]Our goals for this year was to have a rough draft
[00:01:43.151]for most of the e-book written up.
[00:01:44.710]Due to circumstances this year
[00:01:46.643]such as scheduling, catching COVID
[00:01:48.266]and having to switch programs,
[00:01:49.715]we weren't quite able to reach the end
[00:01:51.437]of our goal.
[00:01:52.263]We were able, however, to create a part
[00:01:54.452]of one chapter that contains all of
[00:01:56.633]the APGRD data for that chapter
[00:01:58.826]as well as get close to finishing another.
[00:02:02.199]This year, we ran into several roadblocks
[00:02:04.354]that we were not anticipating
[00:02:05.899]and had to do a lot of problem-solving.
[00:02:08.300]While we were not able to reach our
[00:02:10.815]original goal of having a working
[00:02:12.370]first draft of the e-book,
[00:02:13.744]we learned a lot about creative
[00:02:15.646]problem-solving and persistence.
[00:02:18.705]At the beginning of this last summer
[00:02:19.933]we found out that the program we were
[00:02:21.717]building the e-book in,
[00:02:22.874]iBooks Author, was discontinued
[00:02:24.417]by Apple. In order to secure
[00:02:26.392]the future of the e-book from any permanent
[00:02:27.886]loss of files, we had to spend a lot of our
[00:02:30.062]time in the summer just trying
[00:02:31.635]to find a path forward and a new program
[00:02:33.467]to build in.
[00:02:34.398]It took us most of the summer to talk this
[00:02:36.343]through and it wasn't until the beginning
[00:02:37.522]of the Fall semester that we finally
[00:02:39.021]settled into using Adobe InDesign to
[00:02:40.790]replace iBooks Author.
[00:02:42.613]This means the much of this academic year
[00:02:44.258]has been a time for us to learn a new
[00:02:46.561]program.
[00:02:48.643]Something that has changed a lot for us
[00:02:51.261]between iBooks Author and InDesign
[00:02:53.083]is the amount of time and work it takes
[00:02:55.066]to create the same sort of page.
[00:02:56.736]Something that we've run into is how slow it is to do the same thing that
[00:03:00.754]would only take us a few hours
[00:03:02.129]in iBooks Author.
[00:03:03.446]A lot of our time and work this school year has gone into
[00:03:06.972]the tedious and time- consuming
[00:03:08.381]animation in InDesign.
[00:03:09.851]While the finished pages are good
[00:03:12.409]in some ways, even better than iBooks
[00:03:15.622]it has taken so much time to put together
[00:03:18.291]one page.
[00:03:21.356]This is another thing that we have been
[00:03:23.456]working to problem-solve.
[00:03:25.418]Recently, we came up with the idea
[00:03:27.351]to use Google Slides to set up our pages
[00:03:29.407]mock them up, and do some of the
[00:03:31.101]animation that Google Slides allows.
[00:03:33.438]Then, once we have a full draft of the
[00:03:36.143]e-book in this mock-up state
[00:03:38.031]we will use that mock-up to build out the real version in InDesign.
[00:03:41.928]This gives us a way to revise our writing
[00:03:44.397]but especially our imagery and
[00:03:46.391]our design before we do any of the
[00:03:50.587]actual animation in InDesign.
[00:03:52.576]One thing that we've found very hard to do
[00:03:55.455]with InDesign is to redo or revise once
[00:03:59.253]the animation is set.
[00:04:02.306]And so what we're hoping is that this
[00:04:04.518]work-around with Google Slides will
[00:04:06.979]end up being very helpful in the long run
[00:04:09.683]to the project an give next year's
[00:04:11.603]researchers a strong and efficient base
[00:04:13.691]from which to work.

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Ancient Plays for the Modern World: Building an Electronic Resource

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