Digital Editions: Rethinking How We Preserve Literary Correspondences

Burgeoning numbers of digital editions of literary correspondences are being created. This chapter will focus on two projects – Unlocking the Mary Hamilton Papers and A Museum of Relationships: the correspondence of William Hayley (AMoR) – that take contrasting approaches. After a brief survey of the broader digital scholarly edition landscape, it uses these case studies to explore whose letters are being digitised and why, and the different approaches taken and the reasons for choosing them. It looks at the knowledge scholars creating them seek to surface, the questions they want to answer, and how they are asking them, and identifies the skills and tools needed, available, and adopted to build, populate and use these editions.

Informed by theoretical and descriptive papers by scholars working on the Berlin-based https://correspsearch.net/en/home.html project, relevant articles on the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and in Variants, this chapter will explore what we gain and lose from the process and practices of creating and using digital editions. While they can democratise access to archives, permit multidimensional ways of reading, and reveal new forms of information through the digitisation process and the linking of individual letters/correspondences with related correspondences and other entities (people, places, events, artworks, texts and, even, pets), there are downsides. For instance, which contexts disappear in the absence of touch and the architectural, social and atmospheric contexts of libraries/archives? What do the emerging standards tell us about the constraints and affordances of digital media, their platforms, academic approaches to these, the biases are we introducing, and how and why we’re introducing these? And what does all of this tell us about what we value about both the literary and the digital?