King's Digital Lab

Shakespeare Holdings in the Royal Collection SHARC

A vibrant historical painting of a regal figure on a white horse, surrounded by a lively crowd offering flowers and cheering in celebration.
The Entry of Bolingbroke Princess Victoria (1840 1901)

Focusing on the Shakespeare-related holdings in the Royal Collection and Royal Archives the project assesses what they tell us, individually and collectively, about the relationship between the cultural afterlife of Shakespeare’s works and the royal family from 1714 (the accession of George I) to the present. KDL built a customized Autharch backend for creating and storing object records. This repository underpins the frontend which showcases the metadata together with images provided by the Royal Collection, and it also provides for exporting the object metadata as EAD3 XML.

Focusing on the Shakespeare-related holdings in the Royal Collection and Royal Archives, the project assessed what they tell us, individually and collectively, about the relationship between the cultural afterlife of Shakespeare’s works and the royal family from 1714 (the accession of George I) to the present. Because data collection had already been going on before the start of the project, the first imperative for KDL was to work with the researchers to design a standards-based data model which would account for the detailed metadata the researchers were gathering and also represent the structure of possible associations that could hold between an object and Shakespeare both as an iconic author figure and as an individual. Based on that data model, KDL built a customized backend for creating, editing and storing object records. Data collected earlier in spreadsheet format was converted and imported into this backend framework, and subsequently the researchers entered data directly into it. The backend data framework underpins the frontend which showcases the metadata together with images provided by the Royal Collection, and it also provides for exporting the object metadata as EAD3 XML. The frontend website was designed to offer users multiple ways of exploring the object dataset and trace the many connections among the objects as well as the many people associated with creating, giving and acquiring them. The combination of the visual design and the finding aids, together with a section of the site telling the stories of two groups of objects, move the site away from being just a window into a database and help the user see the overall collection in terms of the political and ideological context which the project team wanted to bring out.

Team