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.
(What is NINES?)
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.
(Peer Review)
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

The core of The Swinburne Project consists of digital representations of Swinburne’s works. Around this core are assembled multiple paratextual layers that explore various documentary and literary dimensions of the texts. The digital representations of Swinburne’s works have been prepared according to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange.
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

The text of Swinburne’s published poems are based on the six-volume Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne (London: Chatto & Windus, 1904), which gathers all the individual collections of poetry from Poems and Ballads, First Series (1866) through A Channel Passage and Other Poems (1904). Also included in the six-volume Poems are the lyrical dramas Atalanta in Calydon (1865) and Erechtheus (1876) and the long Arthurian narratives Tristram of Lyonesse (1882) and The Tale of Balen (1896).
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.

Web Application

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.

Works Cited

Hyder, Clyde K. Preface. Algernon Swinburne: The Critical Heritage. Ed. Clyde K. Hyder. London: Routledge, 1970.