Mine isn’t the only new blog in town. If you are interested in 19th-century scholarship, particularly as it is practiced and disseminated online, you should subscribe to Andy Stauffer’s The Hoarding. Andy has recently taken over the directorship of NINES from Jerry McGann. NINES is a scholarly collective and software project I worked on for several years, and I remain on its executive council — so it’s near and dear to my heart. (And if you’re here from the library world, you might be interested to know that it, in the form of Collex, provided the seed for Project Blacklight, an open-source catalog interface now being implemented by UVA Library and Stanford, among others.)
I’m thrilled at Andy’s return to Alderman Library, where we both worked as graduate students on the Rossetti Archive, and happy that he and Brad Pasanek, also new in our English Department, are bringing fresh energy to text-based digital humanities at UVA. The Scholars’ Lab has been working closely with Andy and Brad, and also with Alison Booth and Chip Tucker on their projects (a database of collective biographies of women, and a Web-based application for teaching prosody, respectively). All of this work, coupled with an exciting, soon-to-be-made announcement of a new director for our treasured Rare Book School, means that UVA English, home of Bowers and Studies in Bibliography, is about to get very interesting to digital humanists again.
So it seems like perfect timing — besides being a centenary year for ACS — to revive a long-neglected project of mine: a scholarly edition of Algernon Charles Swinburne’s vexed volume of Poems and Ballads, 1866. In other words, I’m going to stop hoarding one of my most darling treasures, and plaster up my work in progress here.