JSTOR teaching resources (with way more Understanding Shakespeare!)

Back in November I wrote about JSTOR becoming even more librarian- and classroom-friendly.  This morning JSTOR significantly beefed up its bardiness.

Understanding Shakespeare, the collaborative project between JSTOR Labs and the Folger Shakespeare Library increased its coverage from six to 38 plays.

This research tool facilitates discovery of scholarship. It allows students, teachers and scholars to move directly from the full text of Folger’s high quality and meticulously tagged digital editions to relevant JSTOR content archived in the database. Pick a play. Click a line. Instantly see articles on JSTOR that reference the line.

Plays are browsable by type: comedies, tragedies, histories, romances

Understanding Shakespeare is free and open to the public.  Even if you are not a subscriber, the fabulous Folger Digital Texts are free for non-commercial use and link to Understanding Shakespeare content that may be accessed for online reading through a free Register and Read account.

For those of you wondering how this works, the About page explains:

The links between the Folger play and the articles on JSTOR were created with a two-step process. First,  for each play, a candidate set of articles was selected by performing a full-text search on JSTOR for the play’s title and “shakespeare*.” Second, we performed a fuzzy-text-matching algorithm between the play and any words appearing either in block quotes or between quotation marks . . . The play-to-JSTOR article links in the Labs Shakespeare prototype are generated by matching quoted text in articles on JSTOR to text in the Folger digital text edition of the target play.

These resources will be appreciated by so many high school English teachers and students, and likely by your theater departments as well.

And that’s not all.

New to JSTOR, for your science and environmental teachers, is Global Pants in the Classroom, a companion to Global Plants Database.  Designed to help educators integrate global plants resources, it includes video introductions relating to key concepts in botany, famous botanists, as well as links to relevant content.

JSTOR’s Classroom Readings is a true time saver for finding tried and true disciplinary content.  Currently, it suggests articles that have likely been assigned to classes by other educators based on analysis of use by participating institutions from the years 2011 through 2013.  The folks at JSTOR plan to expand this content in the coming months by examining use from 2014 forward.  This is a very efficient tool for teacher librarians who help to keep their classroom teachers partners fresh.

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