Pope Manuscripts Online
Pope’s manuscripts are objects of great beauty, but of even greater scholarly significance. Pope Manuscripts Online (PMO) will bring together, in an online, public-facing website, selections of Pope’s manuscripts for the first time.
Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was one of the most successful and prolific poets writing in English in the first half of the eighteenth century. Adjusting for inflation, he was the most financially successful author in the history of writing in English until J. K. Rowling, and his poetry remains a mainstay of literature courses on the period. Neither that profitability nor that influence were accidental phenomena, however: they were Pope’s main goals, and he worked tirelessly to achieve them. And he did this, in part, by revising his texts over and over with meticulous care.
Those manuscripts are where we can see the deliberacy, canniness, and collaborativity of Pope’s revisions. Seen together, these manuscripts will together afford a longitudinal view of Pope’s achievements never before possible. Pope’s manuscripts have been collected and thoroughly dispersed across libraries and private collections in the US and UK over the past 250 years. Their very desirability as artifacts has made a collective study of them nigh-on impossible. The goal of the project is not only to remediate a material corpus on a screen but to reunite that corpus from both sides of the Atlantic.
In the pilot stage of PMO, scholars will be able to view three sets of manuscripts (from 1717, 1725, and 1730) and browse them by selected metadata categories. This will be a first step towards a holistic view of the compositional practice of one of the most important and original poets ever to have written in English.
This viewer mockup shows a possible layout for the user to view a manuscript page. Text in red on the right-hand pane represents metadata categories that users can click to see more manuscript pages that share that description.
Users will be able to find manuscripts by shelfmark or by the works they contain, and will be able to compare two images in the same frame using the Mirador viewer.
If users prefer to browse the manuscripts by information about the manuscript — metadata like whose handwriting is on the page, when it was written, which scholars have written on that manuscript, and so on — then they can submit that request. PMO will return a set of images of manuscript pages that correspond to the user’s request.
So what could those metadata categories be? What might users want to browse by? This draft schema describes the relational database serving PMO.