William Shakespeare'sMacbeth
Edited by A.R. Braunmuller
Sealed Collectible CD-Rom Rare OOP from originalVoyager Production Release
Multi Media CD-Rom Software
Produced in the Mid-1990s by the Original Voyager Company
One of the best developers of multimedia CD-ROMsthat ever existed, Voyager Company, released dozens of high-quality educationalCD-ROMs between 1993 and 2000 before being bought out by Learn Technologies,which then quietly went out of business sometime in 2002. This is one of theirinteractive CD-Roms for PC/Windows or MAC.
Voyager's Macbeth
Format:Macintosh/Windows CD-ROM
SRP: $39.95
Curriculum:Literature; Performing Arts
This CD-ROM really hasa lot to offer. It is of an equally high standard as an academic edition of theplay, and combines text and multimedia options (audio and video) to goodeffect.
Voyager's Macbeth is aCD-ROM edition of the play; based on the recently published Cambridge edition(edited by one of the CD-ROM's co-authors,Professor A. R. Braunmuller)with a complete audio performance of the entire play by the Royal ShakespeareCompany, directed byTrevor Nunn, and starringIan McKellanasMacbeth, and Judi Dench as Lady Macbeth. Readers can simply read the play, orjust listen, or listen and read; the pages will turn automatically! Andclicking on any line of the play takes the reader to that place in the audioperformance. There are notes and glosses (1,500 of them), explanatory essays(over 25,000 words worth), video clips from other performances of key scencesso you can compare different performances of the same scene, maps, charts,images -- just about everything anyone could want. Readers can make all sortsof notes of their own, and export them with the parts of the play andcommentary that they go with, to use in a word processor.
FEATURES
- A new edition of the play, containing over 1,500 annotations and a 24,000-word commentary
- A full audio reading ofMacbethby the Royal Shakespeare Company
- A gallery of QuickTime video clips from other performances ofMacbeth, including those by Orson Welles, Roman Polanski, and Akira Kurosawa(Throne of Blood)
- Extensive searching and note-taking capabilities
- New essays of the history and language of the play, and Jacobean theater
- A complete index of each character's role in the play
- Detailed scholarly tools, including a concordance and a textual analysis
- The Macbeth Karaoke, which allows you to choose a role, and act scenes from the play with professional actors
Technical requirements for Voyager's CD-Roms
Windows: 486SX-33 or higher processor; 640 x 480, 256 color display; 8 MB RAM MPC2-compatible CD-ROM drive and sound card with speakers or headphones; Microsoft Windows 3.1 (TM); MS-DOS 5.0 or higher.
Macintosh: Any Macintosh (25-MHz 68030 processor or better); System 7 or higher; 5,000K of available RAM; 13" color monitor; double-speed CD-ROM drive.
The Voyager collection of CD-ROMs represents an era that is fading into oblivion.Due to a lack of computer systems still capable of executing this software, Voyager products that are still available in the original sealed packaging have significant historical value for collectors only.
The following discussion of CD-ROM technology and its preservation is found inThe International Journal of Digital Curation;Volume 7, Issue 2 | 2012:
Virtual CD-ROM Collections
Although the Voyager CD-ROMs have substantial historical significance, they, and most other published CD-ROMs, are destined to have a dwindling user base whose expertise in the systems required to use them is in sharp decline. The physical machines required to execute them have already disappeared from most educational institutions and even the operating systems are increasingly hard to find; at Indiana University, which once had many hundreds of “classic macs”, only one person within our University IT Services had distribution disks of the corresponding operating system software. The physical copies of these CD-ROMs are disappearing from library shelves. In seeking examples for this paper we made extensive use of interlibrary loan and we found that many cataloged copies of Voyager CD-ROMs are either missing or damaged.
The long-term probability for individual libraries providing physical access to the Voyager and other published CD-ROMs is nearly nil. The user base is dwindling, the existing hardware and softwaresupport disappearing, and the physical media degrading. While we believe these materials have substantial historical significance, their ultimate survival depends upon spreading the preservation burden across many institutions through a virtual collection that enables networked access for a sparsely distributed base of patrons using modern work-stations.
