Digital carriers [RESTRICTED]

This collection contains an addition to the Jerome McGann Papers (MSS 15427) which documents the research for, creation of, and work on the Rossetti Archive, or The Complete Writings and Pictires of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a Hypermedia Archive, which is included in the Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship (NINES) project. The Rossetti Archive was an important early digital humanities project that began in 1993 and was completed in 2008. This project sought to bring together the pictorial, textual, and also contextual writing from the period of the nineteenth-century English poet and artist, Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

This addition to the Jerome McGann Papers (circa 1993–2008), the first series in the finding aid, includes written and digital formats that document the preparation, creation, and development of one of the foundational projects in the digital humanities. Initiated by University of Virginia professor Jerome McGann, in collaboration with colleagues, the Rossetti Archive sought to integrate the pictorial, textual, and contextual works of nineteenth-century English poet and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The addition includes a variety of printed and handwritten correspondence, research notes, samples of duplications (scans or photocopies) of Rossetti’s works, photographic prints, and documentation of the planning and technical aspects of the project. These materials are organized into three subseries: materials relating the McGann’s research on Dante Rossetti, materials documenting the creation and maintenance of the Rossetti Archive website, and other materials.

The first subseries includes mainly correspondence and research notes, but also scans, printouts, catalogs, and materials related to copyright and use permissions. The correspondence includes those between McGann and various repositories with Dante Rossetti related holdings, as well as, with individuals that have knowledge of, access to, or are inquiring about Rossetti materials. Many of these letters are accompanied by scans of documents annotated with research notes, notes on loose leaves of paper, photographic prints, and slide samples of Rossetti works. There are also digitized materials and born-digital files documenting McGann’s research for the project. Much of these correspondences document McGann’s work in preparing to create the archive.

The second subseries includes many of the schematics and plans for developing the Rossetti Archive, such as printed xml files, paper scans of Rossetti works labeled with file names, and inventories of digital scans of Rossetti works compiled by McGann. These are accompanied by correspondence between McGann and his collaborators in constructing the digital Archive, in which they discuss the technical aspects of creating the website and organizing the Archive’s content. There are also born-digital files in the collection that document the work of creating the Rossetti Archive. Also included in this subseries are correspondence from individuals inquiring about the Archive, and photographic prints.

The third subseries includes materials unrelated to Rossetti and the Archive. These include mainly photographic materials.