The Shelley-Godwin Archive provides the digitized manuscripts of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, aiming to unite online for the first time the widely dispersed handwritten legacy of this uniquely gifted family of writers, and thereby document their works, life, and thought, including the development of many outstanding pieces of English literature and political philosophy.
The result of a partnership between the New York Public Library and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, in cooperation with Oxford’s Bodleian Library, the S-GA also includes key contributions from the Huntington Library, the British Library, and the Houghton Library. In total, these partner libraries contain over 90% of all known relevant manuscripts.
As we expand the holdings of the S-GA, we are providing open and centralized access for the widely distributed manuscripts, making them viewable as pages both in the order in which they appear in the manuscript and in the linear sequence in which they appear in the work. Over time, we hope to present all known manuscripts for any given work of our four authors.
The innovative technical architecture of the S-GA builds on open standards and the principles of the linked data movement, and has been designed to support user curation in subsequent phases of the project. Rather than serving only as a point of access, the S-GA will thus function ultimately as a work-site for scholars, students, and the general public, whose contributions in the form of transcriptions, corrections, annotations, and TEI encoding will create a commons through which various discourse networks related to its texts intersect and interact. The more immediate goal for the S-GA’s current phase, however, is to provide access to page images under open licenses with fully encoded transcriptions for as many of these manuscripts as possible.
For more information on the project and for a full list of participants and sponsors visit the project website.