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[Obtaining Texts] | [Text Archives] | [Academic Research] | [The Internet] | [Commercial Sources] | [Creating It Yourself]

Obtaining Electronic Texts

Electronic Texts on the Web

The World Wide Web is ideal for obtaining texts for which otherwise you would have the hassle of remembering FTP addresses. On a Web page the texts may be gathered together into a virtual archive and the user can access them without needing to know where they might be physically located (if electronic texts can be described as being physically located anywhere)

The following are sample links to text archives. Each of these archives has further links to other resources (expect to get happily lost!)

Text Archives

• The Oxford Text Archive
  Here you can access the catalogue of texts available and obtain a selection of publically available texts.

Academic Research

• The Georgetown Catalogue of Projects in Electronic Text
  At this gopher site you can find projects catalogued up to 1993, sorted by language and discipline.
• Women Writers Project at Brown University
  This project is collecting and digitising all womens writing in English from 1330-1830.
• Project Electra
  A project which has put on-line women's writing from 1780-1830. Not yet publically available

The Internet

• The Electronic Text Centre at Virginia [local copy]
  What this centre has done is taken texts from the Oxford Text Archive and tagged them using SGML, before placing them in an archive. You can access them using a Web browser because the SGML texts are converted to HTML when you select them. The archive has texts in English (middle & modern), German, French and Latin. There is also an on-line version of the TEI Guidelines for SGML texts.
• The Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities(Princeton)
  CETH catalogs and describes available electronic texts. It aims to establish a framework for the use of high quality electronic texts. It also contains the Directory of Electronic Texts (Local copy - go to CETH for the latest edition).
• The ALEX catalogue of Electronic Texts
  This is a gopher server which contains links to 1,800 on-line texts ranging from short excerpts to whole books. The texts can be viewed by author, subject, language, date or title. There is an excellent Web interface for Alex called Alcuin at North Carolina State University. Expect to see more formal catalogues of Internet resources like this.
• The HUMBUL Gateway
  A large compilation of humanities resources which make a very useful starting point.

Commercial Sources on the World Wide Web

• Chadwyck-Healey on the World Wide Web
  Chadwyck-Healey produce a number of specialised and high quality text databases relevant to the humanities including The Poetry Full-Text Database, Editions and Adaptations of Shakespeare, English Verse Drama Database, African-American Poetry, and the Patrologia Latina Database.
• Voyager Company on the World Wide Web
  Voyager Co. produce a number of electronic books aimed primarily at the popular market. Their trendy web site reflects the style of their products.

Further sources of electronic texts and text analysis tools can be found in the relevant sections of the CTI Textual Studies Resources Guide

Creating Your Own

The CTI Centre for Textual Studies held a workshop on electronic texts in March 1995 which included a section on the World Wide Web. There is a virtual handout for this section which includes links to HTML reference pages and tools to aid the creation of Web pages

Author: Michael Fraser, CTI Textual Studies
Page created: 13th May, 1995
Last modified: 7 July 1996
Page URL: http://info.ox.ac.uk/ctitext/service/workshop/etext/