Neil Fraistat
Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities
University of Maryland
Raffaele Viglianti
Research Programmer, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities
University of Maryland
Trevor Muñoz
Associate Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities
University of Maryland
Kirsten Keister
Designer, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities
University of Maryland
What does the next generation literary archive look like? We undertook to answer this question in the creation of the Shelley-Godwin Archive, which builds on linked open data principles and emerging text-encoding standards such as the Text Encoding Initiative’s Genetic Editions vocabulary. These technologies are supporting us in opening the contents of the Archive to widespread use and reuse. They will also help in subsequent phases of the project to enable a form of participatory curation that will engage students in the classroom and “citizen humanists” in transcribing, encoding, and annotating the digitized manuscripts of Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Godwin. This project results from a partnership between The Maryland Institute for Technology and the Humanities (MITH) and the New York Public Library, in cooperation with the Bodleian Library, the Huntington Library, the British Library, and the Houghton Library. We will discuss both the challenges and successes we have had so far, as well as the lessons learned. The Archive went live on Oct. 31, 2013, with the release of the Frankenstein manuscripts, and further materials will be published online in the coming year.