MISSION
The primary goal of the Web of Mind is to produce highly accurate and highly interactive
digital editions of marginalized texts. The beta-model currently under construction focuses on
texts related to the Perkin Warbeck Conspiracy, and, among those, specifically Mary Shelley’s
historical novel, The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, A Romance. The e-texts as planned will be
available in “plain” transcriptions reflecting the original printing, as well as in annotated
transcriptions reflecting student generated and designed annotations, links, and, contextual
apparatuses (e.g., time lines, genealogies, definitions). Where possible, images of the texts will
also be provided. In addition, an interactive feature will allow the text to be manipulated to
facilitate investigations of how extra textual features control or impede meaning making.
The transcriptions will be encoded using the Standard Generalized Markup Language
(SGML). The works, selected through a collaborative process involving Student Investigators and
Project Directors acting as an Advisory Board, will include novels, ballads, histories, essays,
political pamphlets, and volumes of poetry and verse drama. Considerable attention will be given
to the accuracy and completeness of the texts, and to accurate bibliographical descriptions of
them. The Advisory Board will include considerations of copyright in their recommendation of
texts or Web features. The goal of the project would be to avoid copyright issues by
concentrating on first editions of eighteenth and nineteenth century texts. Where necessary, the
proper permissions would be secured prior to development of that particular textual node or
module.
Texts will be encoded according to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines,
possibly using the TEILite.DTD. We will include with each text a header describing fully the
source text, the editorial decisions, and the resulting computer file. The texts will be made freely
available through the World Wide Web.
Scholarly Rationale
For the beta-model, we have chosen to utilize hypermedia to disseminate and investigate
a web of texts related to the historical figure of Perkin Warbeck. The core text of the proposed
web is Mary Shelley’s rich historical novel which is ideally suited for this digital format for
several inter-related reasons.
First, Perkin Warbeck is a book made from and about other books. It reserves certain of
its meanings for a specially initiated audience able to recognize the ways in which its eclectic
blend of the political, the temporal, and the poetical explores the limits of historical and fictional
constructions of truth. Her novel invokes works of historiography proper (Bacon, Hall, &
Holinshed) and of popular fiction (Scott, Godwin). Equally important, it constructs the popular
consciousness within which these opposing literary species dwell. As a sign of its literary hyperconsciousness, Perkin Warbeck is a text defined by rivalries inside rivalries inside rivalries, and
in such a way makes silent homage to one of the authors and texts that appears throughout the
Mary Shelley canon, Cervantes and his most famous book, Don Quixote. In such a way, Shelley’s
novel encourages a special kind of reading activity uniquely suited to a web environment: one
open to not only the critical implications of its explicitly referenced predecessors and antagonists,
but also to those implied in its recycling of the unspoken models governing the structural and
thematic development of the modern historical novel.
As a second but allied point, the novel belongs to a class of anti-establishment narratives
that have appeared with regularity ever since Thomas Gainsford’s 1618 text, True and Wonderful
History of Perkin Warbeck and that have historically coincided with periods of socio-political
insurrection. In 1825 and in the wake of the Peterloo Massacre, the Cato Street Conspiracy, and
George IV’s public sex scandals, the Warbeck Conspiracy resurfaced in half a dozen books
published between 1829 and 1832. By centering the Web upon Shelley’s novel, the richest and
most complex of the nineteenth-century Warbeck tales, we will also have recourse to the variety
of texts with which her novel is in dialogue. These texts range chronologically from Gainsford’s
seventeenth century text through Josephine Tey’s twentieth century iteration, The Daughter of
Time, and generically from authoritative histories to popular romances, providing yet another
avenue for intertextual exploration and discovery of the mechanisms institutionalizing certain
narratives and marginalizing others.
Third, the parallel position of Perkin Warbeck (a controversial historical figure triumphed
by some as a hero and declaimed by others as a fraud) and of Mary Shelley (a controversial
woman writer recognized by some as a genius and by others as merely a satellite of geniuses)
would encourage a particularized understanding of how interpretive subjectivity informs both the
cultural production and suppression of texts and narratives. Related to this last point is yet a
fourth recommendation for such an archive, and that is the fact of the great unevenness that
demarcates Mary Shelley’s presence on the Web and in the classroom.
A survey of current hypertextual editions of Mary Shelley texts quickly uncovers the lack
of authoritative editions of her works after The Last Man. Steven Jones’s elegant hypertextual
edition of The Last Man set the standard by which all other Mary Shelley archives will
necessarily be measured. It also brought important attention to Shelley as more than a one book
author. The PWP would continue the work of Jones and of the Romantic Circles archivists (1) by
providing a collaborative yet countering voice to existing digital projects and archives, and, more
pressingly, acting as a specific contrast to a recently announced plan by Pickering (currently the
sole print publisher of Mary Shelley’s collected novels) to offer subscription based access to
digital editions of their print products; (2) maintaining affordability of design and accessibility by
the general public; (3) contributing to the dissemination of information about advanced
technology in the humanities to up and coming generations of scholars; and (4) exploiting the
dynamic, organic nature of hypermedia environments to explode artificial and specious categories
and thus encourage an understanding of how such categories institutionalize some narratives and
subordinate others.
Methods
The initial transcription and editing process of the core text is currently underway.
Students enrolled in upper-level English courses are currently engaged in an initial electronic
editing process designed in collaboration between the English Department and the University’s
Teaching in Learning Center. This process is designed to be (1) a learning process for students in
the humanities and (2) a recursive process. Therefore, the initial stage involves work to be
completed by upper level undergraduate and graduate students over the course of several
semesters. Approval will be solicited from Radford University’s research review board to utilize
student journals, small group observations, and interviews under an informed consent process to
collect data that will be intended to (1) inform the project team as to the needs of the overall
project, (2) inform the general process of student-based collaborative research and text
digitization, and (3) discern from the data possible future instructional strategies related to
collaborative learning in a hyper-text environment. Graduate students will be utilized expressly
for the purpose of line-by-line editing and assisting in the collection, interpretation, and
dissemination of data collected during the process.
In addition to advice on how to best implement student participation as planned for the
project, the English department and the TLC seek information regarding (1) encoding of the texts
to conform to appropriate standards and (2) developing or modifying existing tools for student
annotations and manipulation of the text by student investigators