Stories and Topics

(Redirected from Topics and Stories)

As Miranda develops, we are integrating curated content and multimedia-driven narratives as means of navigating Miranda and the Folger's collections. These are our Stories and Topics sites.

Both sets of sites are built in a WordPress multi-site environment that has been customized for this purpose by our partner Sites by Coop. The template is modular, composed of modules for a variety of formats of text blocks and media elements. With the multi-site capabilities, we can make it easier for Folger staff to share knowledge in a technically sustainable and efficient manner, and to ensure we can maintain these sites over time.

Stories

Stories feature multi-page narratives that offer a thematic tour of subjects related to the Folger's collection and sometimes with the collections of other cultural institutions. Stories sites can either stand alone or complement physical exhibitions presented on the Folger's campus.

Stories sites produced during the Mellon grant period include:

  • Churchill's Shakespeare, a prototype site based on the fall 2018 Folger exhibition of the same name
  • Rumors of Royalty, which tells the story of the 1688 Glorious Revolution with printed material from the Folger collection and the letters of Francesco Terriesi from the Medici Archive Project
  • Macbeth on Stage [forthcoming], a collection of features about Macbeth in performance, with contributions from the Folger, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the AusStage database
  • The Dering Manuscript [forthcoming], a longform essay by John Jowett, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Birmingham and Deputy Director of the Shakespeare Institute, about the Dering manuscript, the earliest manuscript of Shakespeare's plays
  • Shakespeare in Bengal [forthcoming], a feature on Shakespeare performance and texts in Bengal, with material from the Folger and Jadavpur University

Topics

Topics briefly introduce readers to an area of the collection and to items which can spur a user on their quest for information. We begin with an initial set of short Topic pages on popular Shakespeare plays. We plan to expand the Topic pages beyond Shakespeare's works and into different aspects of the Folger's holdings, common reference questions, and more.

Featured Results

Featured Results promote certain Folger content pages to the top of broad search results. Searches for "midsummer" or "midsummer shakespeare," for example, will lead to a first-ranked Featured Result that leads users to the Topic page for Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream. We aim to expand Featured Results to orient online visitors to information that may be interesting to them.

WordPress Plugin

We have built a Miranda WordPress plugin using the IIIF-produced Universal Viewer. Once it is installed on WordPress-powered sites, the plugin allows Wordpress site managers to insert digital images from Miranda along with their descriptive metadata using a simple shortcode and the alphanumeric Miranda ID. We have installed the plugin on Stories and Topics sites, and will release it to the public as the project concludes. See the plugin in action on Rumors of Royalty.