Since it was first mounted in 2005, the
Poetess Archive has housed a
bibliography of materials for studying popular poetry written between 1750 and 1900
in Britain and America. We call it the Poetess Archive because it contains writings
by and about 19th-century poets writing in the poetess tradition, as well as writings
by men and women who feel the need to work against that tradition. Recently, we have
transferred what were static html pages presenting that bibliography into an Oracle
database to allow multiple ways of organizing and generating bibliographic lists. The
archive includes primary materials: works by the authors producing Anglo-American
popular poetry between 1750 and 1900, and by their contemporaneous critics. But it
also includes secondary materials: later criticism of and scholarship about these
writers and their literary productions. The bibliography of secondary (critical and
scholarly) materials spans the 20th century up to our own moment. In addition to
offering bibliographic data and multiple ways of searching that data, the Poetess
Archive also presents some full texts, engravings, and pictures of the physical
aspects of collections – book boards, slipcases, etc. All are TEI-encoded and
accompanied by metadata in RDF (Resource Description Framework) for interoperability
with aggregated sites within the
NINES
network.
The Forget Me Not Hypertextual Archive, edited by Katherine D. Harris, has recently
been folded into the Poetess Archive. Dr. Harris is now editor of our literary
annuals collection. Also to be folded into the Poetess Archive is the Literary Annual
Database by Harry Hootman and Anthologies and Miscellanies by Laura Mandell and Rita
Raley. Once this work is complete, one will be able to find all the poems published
in collections by specific authors in Britain, a feat that is not even possible using
the proprietary English Poetry Database published by Chadwyck-Healey. Recently, Laura
Mandell has started working with digital artist Ira Greenberg to create a
visualization tool for the Poetess Archive (
http://unixgen.muohio.edu/~poetess/vmodel/vmodel.html).
This tool will produce new kinds of Humanities research by allowing scholars to ask
research questions about relationships among the form, themes, and physical media of
nineteenth-century British and American popular poetry. The tool will generate
multiple graphics produced with minor variations in search constraints that can be
viewed all together, juxtaposed on a page. Enabling quickly apprehensible, visible
comparisons, this tool will encourage perceiving and investigating correlations among
data that might have gone unnoticed without it.
