Meditating on a Mandala in Class: Studying Shakespeare’s Plays with a Visual Exploration Tool for XML Texts

Abstract

In this paper we describe the Mandala Browser (mandala.humviz.org) as a born-digital resource for use in the classroom. We provide example classroom exercises for studying the plays of Shakespeare, which provide on the one hand a simple means of examining speeches within a single play (our example uses Romeo and Juliet), and on the other hand a comparison between plays (e.g. all the tragedies). Finally, we provide some further context and resources for enabling what we call digital reading: a subset of text analysis oriented toward searching, browsing and reading text, without requiring more advanced knowledge of statistics and computational methods.