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"FRANKENSTEIN" DISCOVERS NEW LIFE IN DIGITAL ARCHIVE

by Liam Farrell, Terp Magazine 

It was a story conceived in one of the most primal ways possible, inspired amidst rainy nights, vivid dreams and shared ghost stories. By this fall, technology will allow people around the world to see how Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” grew from a teenager’s vision on the shores of Lake Geneva to a centerpiece of 19th-century British literature.

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) is a partner with the Bodleian Library at Oxford, England, and the New York Public Library in creating the digital Shelley-Godwin Archive, which has received a $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. When completed, it will have images of major works and correspondence from Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and other writers in their circle.

Documents encompassing “Frankenstein” will be available in time for Halloween. With a longstanding debate surrounding how much of the story was written by Mary or husband Percy, students and scholars will be able to see original notebook pages in her handwriting and revisions he made.

“This allows people to understand the life of a literary work,” says Neil Fraistat, an English professor, director of MITH and Shelley scholar leading the project at Maryland.

Broader goals are to get students involved in curating online material by looking for transcription mistakes, encoding source material online and getting a critical appreciation for the documents. Then, people around the world can view original manuscripts and transcriptions side-by-side while annotating and sharing their own findings. “This is ultimately about the public and making them part of the humanities,” Fraistat says. “It allows us not just to project out what we do but to bring the public in to what we do.”

Perhaps the inspiration for the next great monster tale won’t come sitting around a campfire but in front of a computer screen

See the archive at shelleygodwinarchive.org.