CTI Textual Studies  L i t e r a t u r e |
CTI Textual Studies L i t e r a t u r e |
I am interested in
resources for American and English literature and culture.
The American Verse Project, carried out by the Humanities Text Initiative based at the University of Michigan, is an online, searchable archive of pre-1920 American poetry (mainly 19th century material, though the corpus is still growing). All texts are marked up in SGML using TEI guidelines, and can be accessed as html or sgml encoded files. For individual scholarly use, there is no cost, though institutions have to abide to licensing rules and may be charged. The site can be accessed at: http://www.hti.umich.edu/english/amverse/.
Accessible Archives has a collection of primary source media (primarily 19th century periodicals) available and searchable online. This is a subscription service, though a limited set of documents can be searched for free. Charges for individuals are US$59.95/year plus tax; for institutions costs vary with size. For more information, consult their web page at: http://204.170.102.11/welcome.htm.
Voyager produce an excellent collection of innovative CD-ROMs; their content tends to include substantial core material surrounded by contextual text, film, images and sound. Two examples may be of interest:
- Understanding McLuhan, which provides full text of McLuhan's key works, together with critical material, details of his theories, his speeches and so on.
- American Poetry: The 19th Century combines texts with audio for a wide range of verse. These are accompanied by biographies of poets, timelines and other contextual information.
More information on Voyager is available at http://www.voyagerco.com/.
Chadwyck-Healey are leaders in the field with their collection of text databases. As well as releasing many products on CD, their Literature Online (LION) service makes available all of their literature-based material over the Internet. You may want to access several of their databases, though this can be very expensive. Costs range from several hundred pounds for on-line access to, for example, the African-American Poets CD-ROM. For the individual such prices are obviously prohibitive; however, LION may be of interest to some HEIs at institutional level, perhaps through library services. In addition to the databases, Chadwyck-Healey provide links to online material created by others through their Web Resources section. Information about the LION service is available at http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk/.
Neil Rhodes reports on how he has integrated LION into an honours course at St Andrews University in the latest Computers and Text: http://info.ox.ac.uk/ctitext/publish/comtxt/ct16-17/rhodes.html.
A wide range of newspapers are now available over the Internet. NISS (National Information Services and Systems) have links to online resources at: http://www.niss.ac.uk/news/index.html.
You may also wish to refer to the list of references for Film, Media and Performing Arts, as many resources overlap.
(SP, FC)
HTML Authors: Sarah Porter, Frances Condron
Document created: 12 May 1997
Document last modified:30 March 1999The URL of this document is http://info.ox.ac.uk/ctitext/enquiry/lit01.html