Overview
The Algernon Charles Swinburne Project edits and publishes high-quality texts of
the wide range of literary and critical works by Victorian poet, critic, and
novelist Algernon Charles Swinburne, an important and influential Victorian
cultural figure. These texts constitute the
Project’s textual and
documentary core, around which is built a supporting scholarly apparatus,
including an
introduction to Swinburne’s
life and works, a
chronology, and growing body of annotations and
commentary on individual works.
Peer Review
The Swinburne Project was peer reviewed in 2012 by NINES. The
NINES Web site describes the goals of the organization:
NINES (
Networked
Infrastructure of
Nineteenth-Century
Electronic
Scholarship) is a scholarly organization
devoted to forging links between the material archive of the
nineteenth century and the digital research environment of the
twenty-first. Our activities are driven by three primary goals:
- to serve as a peer-reviewing body for digital work in the long
19th-century (1770-1920), British and American;
- to support scholars’ priorities and best practices in the
creation of digital research materials;
- to develop software tools for new and traditional forms of
research and critical analysis.
NINES provides a detailed explanation of their
peer
review processes and standards, that begins with an explanation of the
motivation for providing this peer review framework to the digital humanities
community:
Digital humanities projects have long lacked a framework for peer
review and thus have often had difficulty establishing their
credibility as true scholarship. NINES exists in part to address
this situation by instituting a robust system of review by some of
the most
respected scholars in the field of nineteenth-century
studies, British and American.
NINES provides peer-review of digital
resources and archives created by scholars in nineteenth-century
studies. Our
Editorial Boards locate reviewers to evaluate both the
intellectual content and the technical structure of each project
submitted for inclusion in NINES.
For more information about the NINES review process see their full
Peer Review document.
People
John A. Walsh,
Editor and Project Director, is Associate Professor of Library and
Information Science, Adjunct Associate Professor of English and Director of the
HathiTrust Research Center and Associate Professor of
Information and Library Science in the
Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University. His research applies computational methods to the study of
literary and historical documents. Walsh is an editor of digital scholarly editions,
including: the
Petrarchive, the
Algernon Charles Swinburne Project, and the
Chymistry of Isaac Newton. He developed
Comic Book Markup Language (CBML) for scholarly encoding of comics and graphic novels, and
TEI Boilerplate, for publishing documents encoded according to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)
Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange. He is the founding Technical Editor and a current General Editor of
Digital Humanities Quarterly, an open-access online journal published by the
Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. Walsh’s research interests include: computational literary studies; textual studies
and bibliography; text technologies; book history; 19th-century British literature,
poetry and poetics; and comic books.
Over the years, many graduate students and assistants have contributed to the
project, assisting with encoding, proof-reading, documentation, and other tasks:
- Audre Azuolas
- Jason Evans Groth
- Ryan Lee
- Elizabeth Munson
- Brian Norberg
- Adam Ploshay
- Alan Rhoda
- Xingxing Yao
- Alice Wei
A number of individuals from the Indiana University Libraries have
contributed their advice and expertise to early versions of the project, including:
- Michelle Dalmau
- Kara Pulliam
- Will Cowan
- Mike Durbin
- Jon Dunn
- David Jiao
- Jenn Riley
- Brian Wheeler
- Randall Floyd
A Note on the Texts
There is no reliable scholarly edition of Swinburne complete works or complete
poems. The present edition of
The Swinburne Project aims to fill
that void. Edmund Gosse and the bibliographer and forger Thomas J. Wise edited
the
Bonchurch Edition of
The Complete Works of
Algernon Charles Swinburne (London: Heinemann, 1924-27) in twenty
volumes, but their edition is considered unreliable,
“misleading in arrangement and omissions and … often corrupt” (Hyder xi).
Wise’s
Bibliography, published separately and as volume
twenty of the “Bonchurch Edition,” is an important and useful source of
information on Swinburne’s published works, though marred by the inclusion of
spurious pamphlets forged by Wise himself. In the absence of subsequent
authoritative editions, one turns to documents that Swinburne himself saw
through the press.
Published Poems
Swinburne himself saw this collected edition through the press. The 1904
Poems is a reliable text and is the standard text that
has typically been cited in Swinburne scholarship (although we hope that
future scholarship will cite texts from
The Swinburne
Project).
The Swinburne Project edition corrects
errors in the source texts as they are identified. These errors and
corrections are recorded in the TEI/XML encoding. For instance, the 1904
text of
A Ballad
of Death reads
Her curled air had the wave of
sea-water for
Her curled hair had the wave of sea-water. See
the encoding that records this error and the supplied correction:
<l n="36" xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/Examples"> Her curled
<choice>
<sic>air</sic>
<corr>hair</corr>
</choice>
had the wave of sea-water
</l>
Love’s Cross-Currents
Swinburne’s single published novel,
Love’s Cross Currents, was
originally serialized as
A Year’s Letters, under the
pseudonym
Mrs. Horace Manners, in
The
Tatler from August 25th to December 29th, 1877. The text here is
based on the 1905 edition, which appeared as
Love’s Cross-Currents: A
Year’s Letters, under Swinburne’s name, published by Chatto
& Windus.
Standards and Methodologies
The Encoded Text
TEI/XML
The technological, methodological, and performative foundation of the
The Swinburne Project is the encoded text. The
standard technology for authoring encoded texts is the eXtensible Markup
Language, or XML, which was introduced in 1998. XML is built upon an
existing standard for encoded texts, the Standard Generalized Markup
Language, or SGML, which was adopted as a standard by the International
Standards Organization in 1986. SGML itself was built upon a prior
technology, IBM’s Generalized Markup Language (GML), developed in the
1960s by Charles Goldfarb, Edward Mosher, and Raymond Lorie.
XML is a syntax for encoded texts. The syntax supports an unlimited
number of targeted XML schemas or vocabularies. The XML vocabulary used
by
The Swinburne Project is the
Text Encoding Initiative P5: Guidelines for Electronic Text
Encoding and Interchange. The
TEI
Guidelines are a mature conceptual model for digital
representation of a vast array of documents: inscriptions and papyri;
illuminated manuscripts; authorial holograph manuscripts;
correspondence; printed books of prose, verse, and drama; critical
editions; born-digital documents; and more. The
TEI
Guidelines:
make recommendations about suitable ways of representing
those features of textual resources which need to be identified
explicitly in order to facilitate processing by computer
programs. In particular, they specify a set of markers (or tags)
ich may be inserted in the electronic representation of the
text, in order to mark the text structure and other features of
interest.
The
TEI Guidelines are widely used in the digital
humanities and academic library communities and are maintained by the
TEI Consortium, an
international body whose membership includes universities; libraries and
other cultural heritage institutions; scholarly projects; and individual
scholars, librarians, and technologists. The
TEI
Guidelines are implemented as a set of modules, including
modules for general categories of documents, such as prose, drama,
verse, and dictionaries. The
Guidelines also provide
additional modules that address more specific textual features and
metadata requirements, such as names and dates, manuscript description,
linking, textual criticism, and so on. And in the most recent version,
the
Guidelines provide special XML elements and
attributes for linking transcriptions to facsimile page images. From
these many available modules, one selects a subset that meets the needs
of a particular document, project, collection, or analytical
approach.
The Swinburne Project uses the following TEI modules:
- tei
- core (Elements common to all TEI documents)
- header (The TEI Header)
- textstructure (Default text structure)
- figures (Tables, formulæ, and figures)
- namesdates (Names and dates)
- linking (Linking, segmentation and alignment)
- transcr (Transcription of primary sources)
- msdescription (Manuscript Description)
- analysis (Simple analytic mechanisms)
- drama (Performance texts)
- verse (Verse structures)
- tagdocs (Documentation of TEI modules)
- dictionaries (Dictionaries)
The TEI ODD file, which defines the TEI configuration/customization, and
the resulting Relax NG schema are available for
download.
Dedication
For my beautiful Michelle,
and
our little ones—
Patrick, Olivia, Mia,
and baby Jude.
If love were what the rose is,
And I were like the leaf,
Our lives would grow together
In sad or singing weather,
Blown fields or flowerful closes,
Green pleasure or grey grief;
If love were what the rose is,
And I were like the leaf.
If I were what the words are,
And love were like the tune,
With double sound and single
Delight our lips would mingle,
With kisses glad as birds are
That get sweet rain at noon;
If I were what the words are,
And love were like the tune.