Existing Web Resources - Western Literature Online

Links to some of the well-known thematic collections, with links to a few Russian literature projects by profs/researchers in North America/Europe (and the neat project to digitally reunite the Mandel'stam archive).

I. Multimedia/Hypermedia archives:

The Walt Whitman Archive: http://www.whitmanarchive.org/
The Walt Whitman Archive is an electronic research and teaching tool that sets out to make Whitman's vast work, for the first time, easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers.

Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture: http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/

The Decameron Web: http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/index.php
This XML electronic edition of Boccaccio's Decameron and other works, and the accompanying hypermedia archive of contextual materials, are conceived as an encyclopedic gateway into late Medieval life and culture.

William Blake Archive: http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/
A hypermedia archive sponsored by the Library of Congress and supported by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Rochester, and the Scholarly Editions and Translations Division of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

World of Dante: http://www.worldofdante.org/
A multi-media research tool intended to facilitate the study of the Divine Comedy through a wide range of offerings. These include an encoded Italian text which allows for structured searches and analyses, an English translation, interactive maps, diagrams, music, a database, timeline and gallery of illustrations. Many of these features allow users to engage the poem dynamically through the integrated components of this site.

Rosetti Archive: http://www.rossettiarchive.org/
A hypermedia archive containing the complete writings and pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dickinson Electronic Archives: http://www.emilydickinson.org/
A website devoted to the study of Emily Dickinson, her writing practices, writings directly influencing her work, and critical and creative writings generated by her work.

II. Sites dedicated to more than one author/work:

Modern American Poetry (MAPS) http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/
The Modern American Poetry Site is a comprehensive learning environment and scholarly forum for the study of modern and contemporary American poetry. Started as a multimedia companion to the Anthology of Modern American Poetry(Oxford University Press, 2000), MAPS has grown over the past decade to more than 30,000 pages of biographies, critical essays, syllabi and images relating to 161 poets.

First World War Digital Archive: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/
The First World War Poetry Digital Archive is an online repository of over 7000 items of text, images, audio, and video for teaching, learning, and research. The heart of the archive consists of collections of highly valued primary material from major poets of the period, including Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves, Vera Brittain, and Edward Thomas. This is supplemented by a comprehensive range of multimedia artefacts from the Imperial War Museum, a separate archive of over 6,500 items contributed by the general public, and a set of specially developed educational resources. These educational resources include an exciting new exhibition in the three-dimensional virtual world Second Life.

III. Some neat scholarly resources integrating several thematic collections/electronic archives/ for teaching, publishing & research:

Romantic Circles: http://www.rc.umd.edu/
a refereed scholarly Website devoted to the study of Romantic-period literature and culture. It is the collaborative product of an ever-expanding community of editors, contributors, and users around the world, overseen by a distinguished Advisory Board.

NINES: http://www.nines.org/
NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) is a scholarly organization devoted to forging links between the material archive of the nineteenth century and the digital research environment of the twenty-first. Our activities are driven by three primary goals:
• to serve as a peer-reviewing body for digital work in the long 19th-century (1770-1920), British and American;
• to support scholars’ priorities and best practices in the creation of digital research materials;
• to develop software tools for new and traditional forms of research and critical analysis.

The Classroom Electric: http://www.classroomelectric.org/intro.html
The Classroom Electric is a constellation of web sites on Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and nineteenth-century American culture. Here users can explore images of original manuscripts, rare photographs, notebooks, scrapbooks, letters, and maps in sites informed by cutting-edge scholarship. While each site works as a stand-alone case study useful to students and teachers, the sites also link to each other, to other resources, and to the Dickinson Electronic Archives and the Walt Whitman Archive.

IV. Thematic collections dealing with Russian lit (created by North American scholars):

Kevin Moss' companion to Master & Margarita: http://cr.middlebury.edu/Bulgakov/PUBLIC_HTML/

Samizdat archive: http://samizdat.library.utoronto.ca/
Soviet Samizdat Periodicals is a database of information about editions of classic Soviet samizdat, 1956-1986. The Database includes approximately 300 titles, representing all known types of samizdat periodical editions from this late Soviet era, including human rights bulletins, poetry anthologies, rock zines, religious and national editions. The Database is fully searchable. Researchers will find detailed bibliographic and archival information. The site also includes information about samizdat and dissidence for the general public. The website is intended to provide a forum for continuing discussion about this outstanding phenomenon of recent history

Early 20th c. Russian Drama (Andrew Wachtel, Northwestern)
http://max.mmlc.northwestern.edu/~mdenner/Drama/index.html

Soviet Archives Exhibit (LOC): http://www.ibiblio.org/expo/soviet.exhibit/soviet.archive.html

V. Project for the digital reunification of the Mandelstam materials from various places:

The Reunited Digital Archive of Ossip Mandelstam:
http://www.mandelstam-world.org/archive.php?lan=en&archive=2

Prepared by:

Natalia Ermolaev
Candidate, Master of Library and Information Science
School of Information and Communication
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, NJ