Harry Ransom CenterThe University of Texas at Austin

Welcome to the Collaborative Rubáiyát A web exhibition accompanying The Persian Sensation: The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám in the West at the Harry Ransom Center

The Collaborative Rubáiyát is an online version of Edward FitzGerald's five editions of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. We've designed this online tool to help you experience the poem as fully as possible and share your observations with other readers. You can read, analyze, and comment on the text of the poem. You can also read and respond to other users' comments. The exhibition's curators, Michelle Kaiserlian and Molly Schwartzburg, have added their own set of comments to The Collaborative Rubáiyát to illuminate connections between the physical exhibition items and the poem as a whole.

Collaborative online annotation offers a new kind of reading experience: instead of making notes in the margin of a book, readers can now share their reactions instantaneously and build a body of commentary about a text together. Anyone with an Internet connection can join in the ongoing conversation about the poem. The Collaborative Rubáiyát is accessible in the gallery and online, and will remain as a permanent feature on the Ransom Center website, available to students of all levels, scholars, and community members around the world.

The links below provide instructions and more information about the application and the text.

1. Getting started
2. Tutorial video
3. About the edition
4. Comment policy for users

The Collaborative Rubáiyát is powered by eComma, which stands for “eCommentary Machine.” The eComma open source web application is a flexible text management system that allows its users to annotate texts at the word level and to share their annotations with others. eComma was designed by a team of graduate students and faculty members of the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin. The project has received a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and IT Grants from the University's Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services.

This eComma installation was produced by the following people:

1. Travis Brown, eComma Lead Developer and University of Texas graduate student
2. Katharine Beutner, Ransom Center Public Services Intern, eComma Project Assistant Director, and University of Texas graduate student
3. Molly Schwartzburg, Curator of British and American Literature and exhibition co-curator
4. Daniel Zmud, Ransom Center Web Services Director
5. Barbara Carr, Ransom Center Technology Services Director