Week 4 - The Shelley-Godwin Archive

The Maryland Institute for Technology (MIT) in the Humanities aims to provide online digital manuscripts by the extraordinarily gifted Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Partnering with the New York Public Library, Bodleian Libraries University of Oxford, Harvard University Library, The Huntington Library, the British Library and the Houghton Library gives MIT access to over 90% of the authors' relevant works.

As a lover of all things Mary W. Shelley I found this particular project to be wonderful as it seeks to reveal these rich, literary manuscripts to the light of the world wide web. The project goes into further detail and explains how manuscripts will be archived using TEI's new module. The methods this project discusses yearn for an authentic reading experience where the text, author revisions, interventions and results will all be recorded and portrayed clearly on the website. The project cites HTML use and not XML. When I conducted further research on the technical aspects of this venture, and came across a website that discussed some of the bugs in the project and problems people had with HTML and SVG when attempting to access the archive.

The official TEI Projects website offers a detailed description of the infrastructure used for the Shelly-Godwin Archive project. TEI's Genetic Editions vocabulary and Shared Canvas Data Model are implemented, enabling the public to have the opportunity to lend their voices in the annotation of the manuscripts. This is a fantastic way to integrate scholars, students, avid readers, ambitious coders into the collaborative process of archiving, curating and annotating the manuscripts. The open access nature of the Shelley-Godwin project is refreshing and the transparency of the work is refreshing to see.

More information about the Shelley-Godwin Archive can be found on their official website.

~ Fareh