Description and Rationale

§1. This is a selective listing of what I consider to be high-quality web resources for literary studies students. Its main purpose is to facilitate more efficient and more effective use of web resources for literary studies purposes (teaching, research, and browsing). I’ve tried to avoid “introductory” sites (sites that simply give summary information of the kind that can be found easily and often more reliably in an encyclopedia entry on a given topic) and instead have tried to focus on websites that provide “value-added” content of some kind. I’ve been especially interested in gathering together reference materials, bibliographic databases, journals, and full-texts available on the internet. (I have also included a section on other web guides.)

§2. My aim has been to make this guide more explicit than most existing web guides about what specific material, of interest to literature students, is actually available on the internet. This means that I have often provided some annotation about what is to be found on a given website. It means, moreover, that instead of just listing, for example, the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Texts & Images (SCETI) at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries—which makes nearly 1400 texts and images available online—I’ve also tried to enumerate the items that I think are of particular interest for literature students (e.g. the 1699 edition of Aphra Behn’s Histories and Novels). Such enumeration is, of course, a very laborious task, and I have tended to select the works that are of most interest to me personally. This means that British literature is better represented than other literatures, and that later seventeenth- and eighteenth-century materials are better represented than other historical periods. But I intend to cast a wide net in identifying rich websites, even if I do not enumerate specific content from these websites when they are less central to my own concerns. So, for example, users of this guide will find references to both the “Cornell Historical Monographs” and the “Novels Online” (Chawton House Library), but while all 44 novels from the latter site are enumerated individually in the guide, only a selection of the 441 works in the Cornell online collection are enumerated individually (i.e., those that seem to me to be of interest to literary studies students, though I interpret this criterion fairly broadly).

§3. As discussed in the previous two paragraphs, the selectivity and specificity of contents included here are what distinguish this guide from other available web guides. Let me say a bit more about my principles of selection. As far as full-texts online go, I’ve generally avoided websites that merely provide a text scanned using OCR (optical character recognition) software (or a text typed in by hand). Such e-texts are easy enough to locate on the internet, but they are of limited use for academic purposes, since the texts in question are ambiguously reliable and often there is insufficient bibliographic information on the original source text and its relation to the electronic version. Moreover, since this guide is oriented to the needs of academics (students and professors), I have assumed that such persons will have access to major literary databases like Literature Online and so see little point in merely duplicating resources already available there. I have favored, instead, sites that provide digitized page images (photographic images) of source texts or that provide genuine scholarly editions or annotated pedagogical editions of electronic texts. I have, however, included simple OCR e-texts of works that are otherwise hard to find (e.g., literary works that are not included in a database such as Literature Online). My hesitations about unchecked OCR transcriptions do not apply to more scholarly productions; so I would not disagree with Ian Lancashire’s comments on paper texts, digitized photographic images, and electronic texts:

While both paper and electronic editions may be read, only the second can be transformed into other forms easily, such as concordances, collations, and specialized kinds of edition. If accompanied by digitized images of its source, electronic editions take on an archival role, preserving something of the original. Collections of images, in themselves, however, are not scholarship. The decisions that must be made in generating an image base need but little understanding of books, language, or literature, or of how knowledge may be increased by an computer analysis of them. The electronic edition is the basis of future work on primary texts. Drawing on palaeography and bibliography, it supplies historical scholarship with the basis for an understanding of the texts with which it deals. (http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/ret/homilies/elizhom1.html)

My preference, here, for digitized page image reproductions over unvetted OCR texts is attuned to the “archival” function of reproduced page images, while my interest in scholarly and pedagogical (electronic) editions responds to the kinds of considerations Lancashire points out.

§4. My other main principle of selection has been to select web resources that are less likely to be here today and gone tomorrow. Dead links are the bane of all web guides. My aim is to keep this guide current over time and to facilitate this I have privileged sites that have an “institutional” character. I have also excluded whole classes of potentially useful materials (e.g., syllabi and course materials in general) because their continuing availability is so unstable and often short-lived, even when their value is not in doubt. I have tended to avoid sites that are no longer being maintained but remain as “ghosts” online. Some such sites do contain rich materials, even if they are no longer being developed or updated: with a few exceptions, I have still excluded such sites, because they do not seem to me to be long for this world.

§5. I have also tended to avoid duplication, selecting only the best exemplar of a given resource for inclusion: for instance, there are scores of “glossaries” of literary terms available on the internet. But most of these are very basic; moreover, since the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, and the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms are all available online (albeit through proprietary databases), most of the individually-produced online glossaries are rendered superfluous for university-affiliated users who have access to the proprietary databases. Similarly, there might be several sites that present a given text: my aim has not been to list all the sites I can find that present, say, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, but to select what I consider to be the best site. (If two different sites about the same text offer significantly different kinds of ancillary material and functionalities, I have included both sites.) My model for this guide is something like the project of the Golden Treasury—that is, it should include nothing but the best and it should include all the best. The latter aim is, of course, an unreachable ideal, but it is, at this early stage, not even apparent as a regulative ideal for this guide, and even the first aim has not been held to strictly enough, as yet. (My continuing work on this guide will involve weeding, no less than expanding, its selections.) Nonetheless, I have been pleased to find many valuable internet resources that I was not previously aware of, and hope this guide will prove itself to be worth the time that users spend with it.

§6. My main complaint about existing web guides is that they are not user-friendly enough. They contain too many dead links. They include too many low quality websites. Their sometimes massive size and comprehensive ambitions mean that it becomes harder than it should be to find the good things that they do contain. My aim has been to make this guide something quite different from the mishmash of material that will turn up in a Google search—otherwise, what’s the point? By enumerating the relevant materials that are embedded within resource-rich websites (materials that will not show up in a Google search) and by being very selective with respect to what is included at all (thus avoiding most of what will turn up in a Google search), I aim to present the user with a resource that is fundamentally different in character and function from a general internet search.

§7. This guide emphasizes material that is freely available to all internet users. But it also includes a separate section on proprietary material that is available only to the George Mason University community. (Much of the restricted material will be available to members of other university communities via their own local networks, in any case.) Including the proprietary materials makes this guide more useful for myself and fellow members of the George Mason community, but it also gives other users a more accurate view (as my discussion of online glossaries in §5 suggests) of what the scope and value of internet resources for literary studies really is at present. The simple fact is that many of the richest online resources for literary studies—from the Oxford DNB and the OED to the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics and the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Criticism, from JSTOR and Project MUSE to the MLA International Bibliography and L’Année philologique—are only available through proprietary databases. Freely available online resources become richer with every passing year, but so do online proprietary materials: a truly useful web guide will need to address both kinds of material.

§8. Perhaps a word or two about the massive digitization projects currently underway or in the planning stages will not be amiss here.

Google Book Search (for simple search, http://books.google.com/ ; or for the advanced search page, http://books.google.com/advanced_books_search): Google has launched its project to digitize the entire holdings of several research libraries in the United States (Stanford University, Harvard University, University of Michigan) and the entire out-of-copyright holdings of other major research libraries in the US and the UK (New York Public Library, Oxford University). The project undertakes to digitize about 25 or 30 million books, perhaps 5 million of which will be in the public domain. Google will be making the full text of these works available to the public—fully searchable content and digitized page images for viewing. As for the remaining volumes, still under copyright, these works will not be available for full-text viewing; rather, they will be available for full-text searching and display of the results (“hits”) in context (this “context” varies from no display at all [when it is prohibited by copyright holders] to a few lines to about five full-page images). One can access the public domain volumes by using a date operator as part of the search query (“date:1500-1923” for US publications, “date:1500-1846” for international publications). When this project is complete, it will render large parts of this web guide unnecessary, viz. sites providing access to full-texts of literary works in the form of digitized page images since these will be readily available through the Google Book Search site (though there will still be lots of kinds of web content worth identifying and listing). But it’s not clear how far along the project is at present and equally unclear how long it will take to complete (at the rate of one million books scanned per year, it would still take 25 or 30 years to complete).

Microsoft has likewise entered into an agreement with the British Library to digitize about 100,000 public domain works from their holdings. These are expected to become available sometime in 2006. Yahoo has its own similar project—the Open Library and the Internet Archive—that will make a large number of works (on the scale of 1,000,000 books) available.

More recently, on 22 November 2005, the Library of Congress announced a planned project to create, in concert with other national libraries around the world, a “World Digital Library” that would make the full texts of rare or significant works available over the internet. This is a truly promising venture and one that will contribute directly to the kind materials I am interested in for this web guide. But it will be years (perhaps decades) before we begin to see the fruits of this endeavor.

For the time being, then, there is no “one-stop” shop for materials of interest to literary students on the internet—and web guides like this one remain a useful and necessary resource.