Tim Fulford
Professor of England, De Montfort University
"Hunting, Gathering and Conserving: Letter Editing’s Sad Glamour"
I’ll reflect on twenty-five years of editing Romantic-period letters, online and on paper. From the largest slate xylophone in the world, to the hairy legs of Peter Langford, editing letters turns out to bring both unexpected delights and close encounters of the distinctly odd kind. Archives offer surgical sterility (the Morgan), home-crocheted ponchos (the Folger), or large slabs of chocolate cake and buckets of rain (Keswick Museum). Letters inundate one’s hard drive and stuff up one’s filing cabinet, yet there’s always a holy grail – an epistolary treasure that’s rumored to have been lying in an attic but can never quite be found. It's all about longevity—both of the author whose intimate life you’re preserving for posterity (or at least for fellow obsessives) and your own: what if you die before you’re finished? What if that b—d you’ve been editing for decades has the last laugh and outlives you? And the edition? There’s a certain terror in print: maybe that slightly speculative annotation you’re writing will turn out to be wrong? It’ll be there on paper for good—or rather bad. The digital edition is for Coleridge’s wedding-guest: sadder and wiser, it’s so much easier to re-do that nonsense you wrote. But what if your website goes phut and those thousands of explications, ranging from the profound to the true identity of the Bassenthwaite toad, vanish into the ether?
Hilary Havens
Associate Professor and Director of the Digital Humanities Interdisciplinary Program, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Keynote: "Crowdsourcing Transcription through Zooniverse and the Maria Edgeworth Letters Project"
The Maria Edgeworth Letters Project (MELP) is an open-access digital archive with the goal of publishing the Anglo-Irish Regency author Maria Edgeworth’s complete correspondence. Edgeworth was a prolific letter-writer: there are an estimated 10,000 extant Edgeworth letters in archives, institutions, and private collections worldwide. There are several challenges involved in dealing with a correspondence of this size, and one of them is generating the manpower to transcribe the letters. Enter Zooniverse: “the world’s largest and most popular platform for people-powered research,” a crowdsourcing platform that enables millions of volunteers to participate in research projects. MELP was one of the earliest projects to use Zooniverse’s “transcription task” in 2021, which enables volunteers to collectively transcribe digital surrogates of historic texts. Over the span of several months in 2022, 860 volunteers transcribed 744 letters, or roughly 3000 manuscript pages, by Edgeworth and her circle in MELP’s first stage on the Zooniverse platform. In this presentation, I will describe this process and discuss how Zooniverse can be used for digital edition building, as well as the necessary subsequent steps, including transcription reconciliation, identification of controlled authorities, and text encoding.
Brent Kinser
Professor, English, Western Caroling University
Editor of The Carlyle Letters Online
"'Paradoxes are always dangerous things': The Past and Future of the Carlyles and their Letters"
In articulating the relationship between art and life, Oscar Wilde proclaimed in “The Decay of Lying” (1891) that “paradoxes are always dangerous.” The public manifestation of private correspondence certainly weaves together life and art in magnificent ways, but the paradoxes associated with reading other people’s mail, even with the passage of time, does seem a bit dangerous, voyeuristic maybe. Still, a century ago, professor Charles Richard Sanders of Duke University began to collect and locate the correspondence of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, the first a highly influential essayist, historian, and biographer; the second, one of the greatest letter-writers of her age. In 1970, Duke University Press published the first four volumes of their Collected Letters and set in motion a publishing project that would not be completed until 2023. With the publication of volume 50 in print, the story of the Duke-Edinburgh Edition has reached a happy conclusion. But the story of The Carlyle Letters Online, first conceived in 2000 and still ongoing, offers lessons in persistence, luck, collaboration, failure, and success as related by a digital humanist (now there’s a dangerous paradox) fascinated by the Carlyles, whose lives are so wonderfully reflected in the art of their letter-writing.
Leon Litvack
Reader, School of Arts, English and Languages, Queens College, Belfast
Principal Editor, Dickens Letters Project
Keynote: "Once Lost, Now Found: The Charles Dickens Letters Project"
From the time of the famous author’s death in 1870, the published letters of Dickens have proved of incalculable value, offering insight into virtually every area of his life, both public and private. His incessant communication, with everyone from members of the Royal Household to young women, seduced, abandoned, and forced to sell their bodies in the streets of London, attest to the range of people he came across, in Britain and Ireland, Continental Europe, the United States and Canada, and beyond. The majority of these (over 14,000) were collected in the ‘Pilgrim’ Edition, published by Oxford University Press between 1965 and 2002. Since then, an additional thousand or so have been found and published by the Charles Dickens Letters Project: the digital successor to the print edition.
This address will focus on the origins and perceived need for an online (as opposed to print) resource, and will describe the added functionality it offers — particularly for those unfamiliar with the authoritative printed edition, which primarily appeals to an academic readership. It will consider how the digital resource offers the ability to update the content frequently, and to add additional functionality as necessary (drawn either from the experiences of users, or from programmers who engage in data manupulation, to produce letters-related apps, games, or website enhancements). The address will analyse the Project’s social media presence, which ensures constant contact with users, who are offered resourceful insights into the content of the datase. Consideration will also be given to newsworthy developments which originate with the Project (particularly publicising new letter finds and forgeries to the media), and how the Project’s analysis of these items benefits not only the arts and culture sectors, but also the national economy.
