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Literature and the Digital Humanities

Literary Digital Projects

 

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African American Women Writers of the 19th Century
Part of the Digital Schomburg collection, African American Women Writers of the 19th Century is a digital collection of published works by 19th-century black women writers and provides access to the thought, perspectives and creative abilities of black women as captured in books and pamphlets published prior to 1920.

Alciato at Glasgow
An older DH project that provides a fully searchable and comparable collection of 22 Latin and vernacular editions of the famous Renaissance emblems of Andrea Alciato, from 1531-1621

The American Verse Project at the University of Michigan
Includes works by lesser-known authors such as John Hay and Lydia Sigourney.

Anglo-Norman Dictionary
A digitized, revised version of the Anglo-Norman Dictionary with full search facilities, and linked to an extensive database of related texts.

At the Circulating Library (Indiana University-Purdue University)
At the Circulating Library (ATCL) is a biographical database and bibliography of nineteenth century British fiction (1837-1901), created by Troy J. Bassett, assistant professor of English and Linguistics at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne.

Atelier Ideas and Research
"AIR – Atelier Idee & Ricerca is an association of young researchers, by young researchers and for young researchers in social sciences & humanities. Its aims are, first, to provide useful information and material to the community; second, to share the academic research and knowledge with the wider community."

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library: Digital Collections (Yale University)
The Beinecke Digital Collections database includes hundreds of thousands of digital reproductions of historical materials in its holdings. High resolution JPEG images of photographs, textual documents, illuminated manuscripts, maps, works of art, and books can be downloaded from the collections for educational purposes.

Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads Collection
This resource is maintained by the Bodleian Libraries and features the Bodleian's digital collections of over 30,000 ballads from many many noted collections. Materials are from the 16th -20th centuries. Users can make digitized copies of sheets and ballads for research and educational use.

The Browning Letters
"Wellesley College has partnered with Baylor University to provide scholars and romantics alike with unprecedented, free access to digitized manuscripts of the letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning. The virtual collection includes the 573 courtship letters between the eminent Victorian poets, which are housed in the Margaret Clapp Libary’s Special Collections at Wellesley.

The Carlyle Letters Online
The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle can be accessed at this site created by Duke University Press. Browse thousands of their collected letters by date, by recipient, by subject, and by volume. 

Center for Editing Lives and Letters
Program dedicated to various projects on English correspondence 1500-1800, including, e.g., Thomas Bodley’s diplomatic correspondence, Francis Bacon’s letters, and the Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe

The Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive
This project at the University of Central Florida supported by the NEH is an electronic archive of the works of Charles Brockden Brown, an accomplished literary figure of the early republic.

Chaucer Bibliography Online
"This bibliography reproduces in searchable form the annotated Chaucer Bibliography published annually in Studies in the Age of Chaucer (1979-present), with corrections and additions."

Database of Middle English Romance
The Database of Middle English Romance makes available in digitized form more than eighty verse romances (metrical and alliterative), composed between c.1225 and c.1500, often in multiple manuscript versions and, later, in early modern prints.

DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks
DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks allows scholars and students to search every playbook produced in England, Scotland, and Ireland from the beginning of printing through 1660. It offers a wealth of information about the original playbooks, their title-pages, advertising features, bibliographic details, and theatrical backgrounds.

Dickens Journals Online
Dickens Journals Online makes available complete online editions of Dickens's weekly magazines, Household Words and All the Year Round. In their day, these were phenomenally popular journals, which not only carried installments of such well known novels as Great Expectations, Hard Times, North and South, and The Woman in White, but also poetry, investigative journalism, travel writing, popular science, history, and political comment. Transcripts of pages are fully searchable and users can download a limited number of facsimiles on a weekly basis.

Dictionaries of the Scots Language
The online dictionary is produced by Scottish Language Dictionaries (SLD)which is Scotland’s independent lexicographical body for the Scots language.

Digital Donne: The Online Variorum
Comprehensive editorial project compiling digital and facsimile copies all of John Donne’s works, including the first editions of Donne’s published poems, their manuscript sources, and his prose works

Digital Index of Medieval English Verse
"A standard port-of-call when studying late-medieval English poetry". Prof. Andrew Richmond.

Digital Mitford: The Mary Russell Mitford Archive
Digital Mitford, a project of the Digital Milford Society aims to produce the first comprehensive scholarly edition of the works and letters of Mary Russell Mitford.

Digital Sciptorium
​Digital Scriptorium is a growing consortium of American libraries and museums committed to free online access to their collections of pre-modern manuscripts

Digital Thoreau
Digital Thoreau is a collaborative project of the State University of New York at Geneseo, The Thoreau Society, and The Walden Woods Project. Readers have access to the fluid text edition of Walden and can explore the life of Thoreau scholar, Walter Harding.

Documenting the American South: Beginnings to 1920
Sponsored by the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, this site is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture.

Eighteenth-Century Book Tracker
Eighteenth-Century Book Tracker indexes links to freely-available digital facsimiles of eighteenth-century texts available at sites like Google Books and the Internet Archive and connects those links to more complete bibliographic descriptions than are commonly available at those sites. 

18th Century Connect
A product of the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, & Culture at Texas A&M University, 18th Century Connect is a search portal (access via plain-text searching to open access and proprietary and digital archives including EEBO and ECCO, even if their institutions are unable to afford those resources;) a peer-reviewing organization, and an online community. It now includes the Eighteenth Century Poetry Archive as well.

Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive
The Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive is a peer-reviewed, award winning, digital archive and research project devoted to the poetry of the long eighteenth century. Can browse works by titles, first lines, themes, or genres and authors by names, dates of birth, or gender.

English Broadside Ballad Archive
With support from the NEH, this site From the University of California, Santa Barbara, makes broadside ballads of the seventeenth century fully accessible as texts, art, music, and cultural records.

Faulkner at Virginia: An Audio Archive
Here you can access essays, news articles, photographs, and other materials to provide background on William Faulkner and the times and place, There are also audio sessions with audiences when he was Writer-in_Residence at UVA in 1957 and 1958. You will also be able to listen to Faulkner’s comments on one of his works or on writing or on the Civil Rights movement of that time.

Folger Digital Texts
You can read Shakespeare's plays, sonnets, and poems, and download them in PDF format. Researchers can read the plays online, download PDFs for reading or research, search a play or the whole corpus, navigate by act, scene, and line, and also get to know about Shakespeare's world and his language.

Geoffrey Chaucer's Website
This site offers glossed Middle English texts and translations of works relevant to Chaucer's, as well as selections from the works of his contemporaries, critical articles , graphics, and information on life in the Middle Ages. 

The Grinnell Beowulf
Students and faculty of  Grinnell College, have collaborated to produce this digital, fully searchable, translated edition of Beowulf in poetic modern English.

The Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project
Preserves and digitizes the trove of documents pertaining to the early English tehatre, including Philip Henslowe’s famous stage diary

The Holinshed Project
Online searchable and comparable versions of the 1577 and 1587 editions of Holinshed’s ‘Chronicles,’ the sources of many of Shakepseare’s history plays

Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is an internet library of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more. It was created so anyone, including people with disabilities, can access the resources.

Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts Digital Edition
The Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts Digital Edition gathers together some 1100 pages of fiction written in Jane Austen’s own hand. Users can access, read, and compare high quality images of original manuscripts whose material forms are scattered around the world in libraries and private collections. The manuscripts trace Jane Austen’s development as a writer from childhood to her death.

The John Milton Reading Room
The John Milton Reading Room is a collaborative project of Professor Thomas H. Luxon of Dartmouth College and his students.  It contains all Milton's poetry in English, Latin, Latin and Greek, and prose selections and includes introductions and annotations.

Lexicons of Early Modern English 
A historical database of monolingual, bilingual, and polyglot dictionaries from the Tudor, Stuart, Caroline, Commonwealth, and Restoration Periods

A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English
This is a revised, digital edition of the Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English freely accessible to all.

London Lives 1690 to 1800
An archive of crime, poverty, and social policy in early modern London

Lost Plays Database
This database contains lost plays in England between the period 1570-1642. Plays can be browsed by title, author, year, theater company, or venue; each play's page summarizes the surviving documentation of its existence.

Map of Early Modern London (MoEML)
Recently updated, and a longstanding DH project, based originally on the 1561 Agas map of London and now containing multiple encyclopedia, descriptive, and historical interfaces.

Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus
The Metaphor Map of English is a project from the University of Glasgow. It shows "the metaphorical links which have been identified between different areas of meaning. These links can be from the Anglo-Saxon period right up to the present day so the map covers 1300 years of the English language. This allows us the opportunity to track metaphorical ways of thinking and expressing ourselves over more than a millenium."

Mark Twain Project Online
MTPO is hosted at the University of California Berkeley, and offers digital, annotated editions of everything Mark Twain ever wrote. Contains accurate and exhaustive notes.

Medieval Digital Resources
This is an excellent database of peer-reviewed digital materials for the study of the middle ages. includes images, bibliographies, reference works, pedagogical tools, translations, editions, music, websites and more.  

Melville Electronic Library
The Herman Melville Electronic Library (MEL) at Hofstra University is a digital archive of all scholarly editions of all versions of the works of Herman Melville. Users can track Melville’s revisions in writings in manuscript and the revisions made by him and editors in his print editions. This work in progress will be a center for Melville studies, research, and pedagogy when completed.

Middle English Compendium
The Middle English Compendium has been designed to offer easy access to and interconnectivity between three major Middle English electronic resources: an electronic version of the Middle English Dictionary, a HyperBibliography of Middle English prose and verse, based on the MED bibliographies, and a Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse, as well as links to an associated network of electronic resources.

The Middle English Texts Series
The Middle English Texts Series from Western Michigan University focus on Middle English literature adjacent to such major authors as Chaucer or Malory. The editions include glosses of difficult words and short introductions on the history of the work, its merits, points of topical interest and brief bibliographies.

Milton Revealed
Milton Revealed is a collaborative project from UC Berkeley to collect audio-visual materials related to John Milton and his work, to re-examine his relation to theatricality, and to develop teaching approaches to Milton that use performance across a variety of media.

The Mind is a Metaphor
This is a collection of eighteenth-century metaphors of mind which serves as the basis for a study of metaphors and root-images of the novelists, poets, dramatists, essayists, philosophers, belle-lettrists, preachers, and pamphleteers of the long eighteenth century. The database was created by Brad Pasanek.

Modernist Journals Project
The Modernist Journals Project digitizes English-language literary magazines from the 1890s to the 1920s. It is a research adn teaching resource on the rise of modernism in the English speaking world.

The New Chaucer Society
The purpose of the New Chaucer Society is to provide a forum for teachers and scholars of Geoffrey Chaucer and his age. It includes a variety of new and digital resources related to the study of Chaucer.

New York Public Library Digital Collections
Contains over 600,000 digitized items from the collections of the New York Public Library. This site is a living database with new materials added every day, featuring prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, streaming video, and more.

NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship)
NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) is a scholarly organization devoted to "arranging, comparing, transforming, discussing, commenting on, and collecting texts and images" of the nineteenth century.

Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales
The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales (OACCT) is a volume of introductory chapters for first-time, university-level readers of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. The chapters have been created and edited by professional scholars of Chaucer, and all material is released open access and free of charge for classroom, scholarly, and personal use.

Oxford Cultures of Knowledge
A record of the network of Republic of Letters, 1550-1750, including the database Early Modern Letters Online

Patrons and Performances (REED)
Explores touring professional companies and performers in England outside London before 1642

Perseus Project 
The Perseus Project is a digital library project of Tufts University and the original purpose was to collect materials for the study of ancient Greece. It has now expanded its scope and collects materials that cover Greco-Roman classics and the Renaissance.

Princeton Prosody Archive
The Princeton Prosody Archive is a full-text searchable database of thousands of digitized books in English published between 1570 and 1923. The Archive collects historical documents and highlights discourses about the study of language, the study of poetry, and where and how these intersect and diverge.

Radical Scatters: Emily Dickinson's Late Fragments and Related Texts, 1870-1886
Radical Scatters contains eighty-two documents carrying over a hundred fragmentary texts composed by Emily Dickinson during the final decades of her life. In addition to the core texts, archival materials include fifty-three poems, letters, and other writings by Dickinson with direct links to the fragments.

Research Library (ASLE)
The Association of the Study of Literature and the Environment supports teaching and learning in the fields of environmental literature offers some of the finest online eco-critical resources. 

Romantic Circles (University of Maryland)
"Romantic Circles is a refereed scholarly Website devoted to the study of Romantic-period literature and culture."

Rossetti Archive
"The Rossetti Archive provides access to all of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's pictorial and textual works and to a large contextual corpus of materials, most drawn from the period when DGR's work first appeared and established its reputation (approximately 1848-1920), but some stretching back to the 14th-century sources of his Italian translations."

Shakespeare Documented
Shakespeare Documented is a project of the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Bodleian Library, the British Library, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and the National Archives. It is the largest and most authoritative collection of primary-source materials documenting the life of William Shakespeare in four sections - Shakespeare the playwright; Shakespeare the poet; Family, legal and property records, and 17th century legacies. 

Shakespeare's Staging
University of California, Berkeley's Shakespeare's Staging site explores the history of Shakespeare performance through images, videos, essays and bibliographies. It is a valuable resource for teachers and students of Shakespeare as well as for performers and directors of the plays.

The Shelley-Godwin Archive
The Shelley-Godwin Archive contains the digitized manuscripts of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft. It was the result of a partnership between the New York Public Library and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, in cooperation with Oxford’s Bodleian Library, and includes key contributions from the Huntington Library, the British Library, and the Houghton Library.

Six Degrees of Francis Bacon
One of the most interesting DH projects of the past decade, visually mapping the social networks and webs of individuals and groups in the 16th and 17th century

Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript (WikiBooks)
Verse miscellany compiled by the women of Anne Boleyn’s court, containing the manuscripts of Sir Thomas Wyatt

Songs of the Victorians & Augmented Notes
Songs of the Victorians is an archive of parlor and art song settings of Victorian poems, and also a scholarly tool to facilitate interdisciplinary music and poetry scholarship. it was designed and developed by Joanna Swafford with support of Scholar's Lab Fellowship from UVA.

Text Creation Partnership (TCP)
This is a consortium of university and college libraries who have come together to create electronic editions of early printed books in three large historical text collections: Early English Books Online, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, and Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans. Texts in the TCP subsets have been enhanced by additional textual mark-up to enable searching options more sophisticated than what is possible in the original databases.

The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online
An early DH project compiling four searchable editions of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563, 1570, 1576, 1583)

Verse Miscellanies Online
A searchable critical edition of seven printed verse miscellanies published in the 16th and 17th century, including Tottel’s Miscellany 

The Victorian Web
The Victorian Web presents its images and documents, including entire books of the Victorian era. "It includes Primary and secondary texts (including scholarly book reviews) in British Victorian economics, literature, philosophy, political and social history, science, technology, and visual arts (painting, architecture, sculpture, book design and illustration, photography, decorative arts, including ceramics, furniture, jewelry, metalwork, stained glass, and textiles, costume and various movements such as Art Nouveau, Japonisme, and Arts and Crafts)."

Victorian Women Writers Project (Indiana University)
The Victorian Women Writers Project began in 1995 at Indiana University and is primarily concerned with the exposure of lesser-known British women writers of the 19th century. The collection contains poetry, novels, children's books, political pamphlets, religious tracts, histories, and more.  Provides highly accurate transcriptions of literary works of British women writers of the late 19th century.

Visualizing English Print
This project, a joint venture of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, University of Strathclyde and the Folger Shakespeare Library scales textual analysis and visualization to increasingly large corpora, beginning with the early modern period. It strives to make early modern texts accessible for computational analysis. It designs tools to support the workflow of of humanist scholars.

The Walt Whitman Archive
The Walt Whitman Archive endeavors to make Whitman's vast work freely and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers. Drawing on the resources of libraries and collections from around the world, the Whitman Archive is the most comprehensive record of works by and about Whitman—and continues to grow.

The William Blake Archive
"A free site on the World Wide Web since 1996, the Blake Archive was conceived as an international public resource that would provide unified access to major works of visual and literary art that are highly disparate, widely dispersed, and more and more often severely restricted as a result of their value, rarity, and extreme fragility. A growing number of contributors have given the Archive permission to include thousands of Blake's images and texts without fees."

Who Speaks for the Negro?
"Who Speaks for the Negro? is a digital archive of materials related to the book of the same name published by Robert Penn Warren in 1965. The archive consists of digitized versions of the original reel-to-reel recordings that Warren compiled for each of his interviewees as well as print materials related to the project. All of the print materials appear on the website in two versions: an image of the original document which is not searchable and a re-transcribed document which is searchable. These interviews were conducted with leading figures in both literature and the Civil Rights movement, including James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Clarie Collins Harvey, Malcolm X, Ralph Ellison, and many, many others."

Women Writers Online
"Women Writers Online is a full-text collection of early women’s writing in English, published by the Women Writers Project at Northeastern University. It includes full transcriptions of texts published between 1526 and 1850, focusing on materials that are rare or inaccessible." Need subscription to access resources.

Women's Travel Diaries (Duke University)
This site contains diaries that were written by British and American women who documented their travels to places around the globe, including India, the West Indies, countries in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, as well as around the United States.

World Shakespeare Bibliography Online
Catalogs all available Shakespeare criticism and performances but is not open access.

The Yellow Nineties Online
"The Yellow Nineties Online is an open-access electronic resource for the study of avant-garde aesthetic periodicals of the British fin de siècle. Searchable facsimile editions allow users to analyze physical features as well as content, and the editors write a critical introduction for each volume to situate it in its moment of production and reception. Contextual study of these magazines is enhanced by a searchable archive of 1890s reviews and advertisements, as well as by peer-reviewed biographies of contributors and associates written by international experts in the field."