Subject & Course Guides: ENGL 800: Methods, Theory and Professionalism: Web Resources

Digital Web Collections

Every year, more literature and humanities-related collections are being made available on the web thanks to grant funding and other initiatives. Look for scholarly sites and use terms such as archive or collection when using a search engine like Google in order to identify any interesting web-based resources that may be helpful in your research. Below are just a few of the wide range of accessible collections available on the web:

Documenting the American South
"Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes sixteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs" (from collection website). Site sponsored by the University Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (3rd ed)
"Our aim is to provide a comprehensive, scholarly, and critical guide to science fiction in all its forms. All entries are free online " (from website).
English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA)
"[T]he EBBA team’s priority is to archive all of the surviving ballads published during the heyday of the black-letter ornamental broadside ballad of the 17th century—currently estimated to stand at some 11,000 extant works" (from website).
EServer (formerly the English Server)
"The EServer [...] attempts to provide an alternative niche for quality work, particularly writings in the arts and humanities. Based at Iowa State University since 2003, we offer fifty online collections on such diverse topics as art, architecture, race, Internet studies, sexuality, drama, design, multimedia, and contemporary cultural studies" (from website). Some content on this site is dated, but it still provides insight into e-humanities work of the 90s and 2000s.
The First World War Poetry Digital Archive
"This multimedia online database of primary source material (manuscripts of poems, letters, diaries, etc) plus contextual information (images, audio and film material from the Imperial War Museum) is browsable and searchable, and freely available. Among the 7,000 digital images are drafts of Robert Graves's poems for Over the Brazier and Fairies and Fusiliers, drafts of Edward Thomas's war poems and diary, correspondence between Vera Brittain and Roland Leighton, the poetry drafts and letters of Isaac Rosenberg, plus the war poetry manuscripts of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. Through the digitised contemporay artefacts from the Imperial War Museum, the archive widens its remit to include archival resources focusing on the role that women played during the war, imperial troops, and and writing from the Home Front" (from archive website).
The Robin Hood Project
"The Robin Hood Project is designed to make available a database of texts, images, bibliographies, and basic information about the Robin Hood stories and other outlaw tales. The project is sponsored by the University of Rochester and prepared in The Rossell Hope Robbins Library, a medieval studies library located within Rush Rhees Library" (from project website).
The Shakespeare Quartos Archive
"The Shakespeare Quartos Archive is a digital collection of pre-1642 editions of William Shakespeare's plays. A cross-Atlantic collaboration has also produced an interactive interface for the detailed study of these geographically distant quartos, with full functionality for all thirty-two quarto copies of Hamlet held by participating institutions" (from Archive's website).
The Victorian Web
The Victorian Web is a scholarly website that includes "primary and secondary texts (including scholarly book reviews) in British Victorian economics, literature, philosophy, political and social history, science, technology, and visual arts (painting, architecture, sculpture, book design and illustration, photography, decorative arts, including ceramics, furniture, jewelry, metalwork, stained glass, and textiles, costume and various movements, such as Art Nouveau, Japonisme, and Arts and Crafts)" (from website).
The Willa Cather Archive
"The Willa Cather Archive is an ambitious endeavor to create a rich, useful, and widely-accessible site for the study of Willa Cather's life and writings. To that end, we are providing digital editions of Cather texts and scholarship free to the public as well as creating a large amount of unique, born-digital scholarly content. The Archive is a product of a collaboration between the Archives and Special Collections, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries and the University of Nebraska–Lincoln's Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, with additional support from the The University of Nebraska Press, and the Cather Project at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln" (from archive website).
Wright American Fiction, 1851-1875
This online resource from Indiana University provides access to 19th century American fiction originally listed in Lyle Wright's bibliography American Fiction 1851-1875. Includes over 2,800 works.