John Walsh
John Walsh, an associate professor of information and library science at the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, has received a 2019 New Frontiers of Creativity and Scholarship award for his work on the Algernon Charles Swinburne Project.
The Algernon Charles Swinburne Project is a digital scholarly edition devoted to the life and works of Victorian poet and critic Algernon Charles Swinburne. Swinburne was perhaps the most famous English poet in the second half of the 19th century and had a strong and enduring influence on English literature. In spite of Swinburne’s importance to literary history and the ongoing interest in his work, there exists no comprehensive, carefully edited collection of Swinburne’s works.
The Swinburne Project aims to address this issue by providing a modern, open-access digital scholarly edition of all of Swinburne’s writings: poetry, drama, fiction, and criticism. The current version of the Swinburne Project, edited and developed by Walsh, was released in 2012 and includes the six volumes of Swinburne’s collected Poems (1904) and his lone completed novel, Love’s Cross-Currents: A Year’s Letters (1877, 1905), along with an introduction, chronology, and other research tools.
However, the current state of the Swinburne Project is far from complete as it contains only a subset of Swinburne’s prodigious literary output. With funding from the New Frontiers program, which is administered by IU and assists in the development of innovative works of scholarship or creative activity, Walsh will work with a graduate assistant, students, and a web developer toward three goals:
1. Conduct new computationally assisted literary research on Swinburne’s sources and influences
2. Expand the available primary source content with the addition of dramatic and critical works, manuscript transcriptions, and extensive scholarly commentary
3. Perform general technical and design updates to the overall project site and document editorial, encoding, and workflow standards and practices to facilitate future work.