Case Study: Shelley-Godwin Archive

Neil Fraistat, MITH, University of Maryland

I’m here because of a project I direct called the Shelley-Godwin Archive, which consists of the digitized manuscripts of Percy and Mary Shelley, and Mary Shelley’s parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. We received a grant from the NEH to start the project up and the project partners are the New York Public Library, the Bodleian Library, the British Library, the Huntington Library, and Harvard’s Houghton Library. Among them, we have 90% of all the known manuscripts. At this point in the project we actually have all of that digitized. We started off with the idea that we were doing this mostly as a form of access. Once we started going and saw what we had and what might be done, we started to think about this as a participatory archive. We are very concerned and interested to get the material we have curated both into the classroom and outside to the public. We have manuscript images, sometimes we have transcriptions that have been fully checked, sometimes we have no transcriptions, sometimes we have complete markup in TEI, sometimes we don’t. So the kind of capacities we were looking for included transcription, text markup, annotation.

Regarding the challenges or problems we face, there is nothing out-of-the-box to use. You have to do your own research to figure out what the affordances are of each of the kinds of tools out there and what they might allow you to do. This isn’t easy work, and it’s not easy work getting those things to do what you want to do.

We originally started just thinking about the technical problems and how data would come and pass through, and what we learned was that maybe an even larger problem was community design. We are interested in the people who participate actually feeling they are learning and that they are contributing to a larger site about learning, so community design becomes really important. It is not so easy to find best practices for developing and enriching communities like the ones we want to create.

We are midway in thinking through these issues and our discussions here will be really useful in helping us think about the best way to go forward.

This presentation was a part of the workshop Engaging the Public: Best Practices for Crowdsourcing Across the Disciplines. See the full report here.