2013 Symposium, “Romantic Manuscripts in a Digital World”

The Keats-Shelley Association of America & the Fordham University New York City Romanticism Group will hold a symposium on

Saturday, May 4, 2013

9:15 AM to 1:30

South Lounge, 2nd floor

Fordham University, Lincoln Center

Columbus (9th) Avenue at 60th Street

Jerome McGann has recently and persuasively argued that we are now in the midst of a globalized turn from a “Textual Condition” to a “Digital Condition” in which our entire inherited cultural archive is being digitized and will require re-editing “within a network of digital storage, access, and dissemination.” And nowhere is that shift more evident than in the changing forms of textual editions themselves, and especially in the many digital archives that began emerging in the 1990s, including McGann’s own Rossetti Archive, the Blake Archive, and the Whitman Archive.  If the initial motive of the electronic archives of the 1990s was to unite disparate collections and create widespread access to them, new possibilities have emerged that are enabling archives to become “computable” as data and to encourage user curating and exploration: from the correction of transcription to the enrichment of metadata, to individual and/or collaborative tagging and annotation, to community bibliography, to the application of tools for analysis and visualization, to the creation of on-the-fly editions and exhibits. Such archives can ultimately take the form of a commons through which various discourse networks related to these texts intersect and become visible, from the academic to the citizen humanist, to the curious or the playful. Electronic archives, in other words, now have the capacity to bring research on Romantic-era manuscripts beyond the realm of the scholar, as such, into the classroom and out to the public.  This symposium seeks to highlight and explore the new capacities of electronic archives across three different genres, with their attendant sets of issues, possibilities, practicalities, and maybe problems, led by the foremost scholars in the field.