Shepherd's Pie

ShouldExist

"...ShouldExist seeks to find answers to the good questions. What's wrong with our world? How can we make it better? Who would know best how to do this? Who is working on something similar? What do they have to say? What next?

ShouldExist.org is a non-profit website, founded on the belief that individuals are more successful when we work together through open standards, modularity and decentralized control...."


Created by Eric Hanson, ShouldExist is an open dialog where you can introduce your ideas to the wild, thereby making them non-elligable for a patent. Ideas already on the site range from "Green Hotels" to a public war crimes database

I recently submitted by idea for "Hypertext Shakespeare."
In case it doesn't make it to the site...

"Shakespeare great works (and eventually all "The Classics") released on the internet/cd-rom featuring the full text complete with loads of definitions and references. Understanding Shakespeare can be quite difficult when you aren't familiar with the specific events or mythologies he may be refering to. Students are often giving anandated and altered versions of the texts to aid their understanding. The hypertext format is undeniably more organic than footnoting systems. The question of whether or not these stories are still relevent to western society can be bettered addressed when we have a collected and natural system for reading them.

Based the model provided by Wikipedia/everything2 the works can be easily read in their nonalterted traditional state. However if a reader chooses to select a word or passage... a dictionary, or encyclopedia, or multiple literary analysis appears. The material selected would be asembled by a broad panal of experts, and represent multiple views on the passage and works at hand. Essentially, everything that is already avaible in a public library. This would just be a system that makes is compact and at our fingertips in a format that we are becoming more and more comfortable with.
The model could be extended to all classics, and perhaps even The Bible."

posted by JRS @ 9:48 PM