Voltaire? Shakespeare? There's an app for them

In November last year the number of applications available to Apple users passed the one million mark. Two of those apps are exciting new ideas pioneered by humanities academics: Shakespeare's Sonnets and Candide.

Shakespeare's Sonnets is an app containing texts of Shakespeare's sonnets, commentary and annotations by experts, and audio and video performances of the sonnets.

The text of the sonnets is taken from Oxford University’s Katherine Duncan-Jones' edition of 'Shakespeare's Sonnets'. She and another Oxford English academic, Professor Henry Woudhuysen, contribute to a series of video commentaries on the texts.

'The app complements old technology and gives you something rather different,' says Professor Woudhuysen, who is Rector of Lincoln College. 'It allows the user to read the Sonnets, consult explanatory notes on them, see and hear them performed, and listen to experts talking about them.'

But Professor Woudhuysen insists the process is not all that different from that of editing a book. 'As with a book, the app depends on the quality of what you put in,' he explains.

The same textual decisions have to be taken about what you include in the electronic text of an app, so it is crucial that experts in the field are involved in app development. For example, the quarto and Folio versions of Lear are different, but if you were to include both, as well as multiple other versions which might exist, the app would become confusing and lose its appeal.'

The Voltaire Foundation has also played a part in setting up an app, joining forces with Orange and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France to produce a digitally enhanced version of Voltaire's Candide.

The app allows the user to read a new critical version of the text alongside the original, handwritten manuscript.

'The values of Voltaire are today’s values, and the comedy of this text is timeless,' says Professor Nicholas Cronk, director of the Voltaire Foundation. 'Our new app is an accessible and joyful invitation to read a masterpiece of world literature.'

Professor Cronk hopes the app will be used as an educational tools for schools. He says: 'We have developed a feature called 'the garden' which allows teachers to create their own notebook and invite students to contribute. The books appear in the garden as knowledge trees, which grow as the reader enriches them.'