After researching several Shakespeare performance archives, I landed upon Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Global Shakespeare Archive. It was the best out of the pages I looked at. The overall design is clean and professional, which helps the site’s credibility and attracts more viewers. The archive implements design choices with attention and purpose, which is something that our class needs to be aware of when we create our own Shakespeare archive.
I would categorize the genre of this website as both a performance archive and a university webpage. It was created to house videos of Shakespeare performances from all over the globe. The intended audiences for the site are students, faculty, and researchers associated with MIT. This is shown through the archive’s overall design to serve an educational purpose. There are many resources listed for students under the “education” tab in the menu bar on the home page, such as essays, interviews, and a glossary. Other purposes of the site are for research and to help collect donations for the program (viewers of the site are led to donate through the “give” button in the top right corner). The archive is run by MIT’s literature department and was most likely written by a mix of professors and students in the department as well as other employees of the university. The context of the website is both global and historical. The archive does a good job of incorporating both aspects through the vast number of performances shown. They range in date, location, and style and therefore show viewers many different ways Shakespeare can be performed. There are many things this archive does well in its design and structure. Twenty videos of performances are highlighted on the home page. There are two tabs, featured and recent, to give viewers more ways to browse through the videos. There is a menu bar at the top which consists of six tabs, including “about,” “videos,” and “news.” This makes it easy to find what one is looking for on the site. The “videos” tab drops down to reveal several more options of ways the archived videos are categorized. It is organized well and easy to navigate. There are thumbnails for each video displayed, as well as the director and year of the performance. All of these elements work together to create a successful website that is easy to navigate. Although the archive is designed well overall, there are a few things that do not work well. The biggest area in need of improvement is the “education” tab. The way the essay section is organized creates a look that is jumbled and overwhelming. It is not easy to navigate, and the posts are too close together. The most recent essay is from almost a year ago, so they also need to work on keeping it more up to date. The same applies for the interviews tab. The most recent interview is from 2015. The glossary is formatted in a way in which most of the page is blank, which is not an effective use of the space. If these few areas were worked on, the site would look more cohesive and become even more efficient. MIT’s Global Shakespeare Archive is a good example of an effective performance archive. Some elements utilized on the site could be useful in creating our own archive. Their design and layout are aesthetically pleasing. The way their videos are presented is well thought out and could be implemented in a similar way on our site. The tabs at the top are also helpful to viewers trying to navigate the site. We could employ tabs in a similar way to help achieve the same goal of an organized archive. MIT’s page is a good one to look at before figuring out how we are going to design our own website.
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November 2019
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