Inspired by the idea of a digital exhibition, the APGRD has produced two free interactive multimedia ebooks on the performance histories of Euripides' Medea and Aeschylus' Agamemnon:
Funded by an AHRC Follow-On Funding award, the ebooks are full of digitised photographic, audio, and video archival material as well as bespoke interviews and performances from scholars and theatre practitioners. They are designed to appeal to a wide variety of readers from across the globe - in schools, universities, in the creative industries, and the wider public.
Choose your own path
Each book consists of six thematic chapters, which can be read in any order. Hyperlinks are woven throughout the books, allowing readers to choose their own path through related content. Most of the digitised material is interactive, allowing the reader to decide when to skim over content and when to take a deeper dive. Comprehensive glossaries and pop-over boxes provide further information on historical contexts and biographies as well as explanations of specialised terms.
An APGRD album on Flickr gives a look behind-the-scenes of building the ebooks, as well as examples of finished pages.
Medea and Agamemnon
The first APGRD ebook, Medea, a performance history (published in 2016), was written and curated by Fiona Macintosh and Claire Kenward, and built by Tom Wrobel.
Agamemnon, a performance history was released in three instalments, with a full version published in 2023. It was written and curated by Fiona Macintosh and Claire Kenward, and built by Claire Kenward.
Both books are available to download for free, thanks to the funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/M008762/1).
The ebook toolkit
The project also produced an ebook Creation Toolkit to enable others to create their own interactive/multimedia ebooks. The Toolkit is freely available under a creative commons licence:
Interactive offshoots
Our ebooks and toolkit have directly inspired three external projects, each of which consulted or worked directly with members of our ebook team.
Queering the Past(s). Under the lead of Nancy Rabinowitz, and with the support of The Classical Association, a team of teachers and scholars developed an interactive online resource, Queering the Past(s), addressing an important gap in school education on LGBTQ+ subjects, using information from antiquity to help students gain confidence in addressing modern critical (and contentious) issues.
Manual of Roman Everyday Writing. The LatinNow project, hosted by Oxford's CSAD (Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents), produced two bespoke online ebooks: Alex Mullen and Alan Bowman's Manual of Roman Everyday Writing, Vol. 1 Scripts and Texts, and Anna Willi's Manual of Roman Everyday Writing, Vol. 2 Writing Equipment.
Sophocles' Antigone, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. In 2019, students from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln enrolled on a project to produce an ebook on the performance history of Sophocles' Antigone. The students, under the direction of Mike Lippman, attended a series of online tutorials by the APGRD team (on copyright issues, design considerations, and technical concerns) before taking up a week-long residence to research the APGRD collections. The aim was to provide the students with a range of professional extracurricular skills beyond the normal remit of their studies.
People
- Fiona Macintosh
- Claire Kenward
- Tom Wrobel
- with illustrations by Thom Cuschieri