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Scholarly Editing and Animating Text

Scholarly Editing is a strength at Newcastle. We are making available not just the works of writers, past and present, but new ways of understanding them.

We are recovering literary writers for future readers, including:

  • the Northumbrian poet Basil Bunting
  • the sixteenth-century London poet Ben Jonson and his contemporary Thomas Nashe
  • the feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft and husband William Godwin
  • the Romantic poets, Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Wordsworth
  • and the contemporary British-Irish poet, Tom Raworth

We explore the contexts in which writing is produced, and how it is produced – aloud; by hand; in noisy printing houses – and how words are transformed with different technologies.

Scholarly Editing and Animating Text students

Our work inspired the creation of Animating Text Newcastle University: a collaboration between scholarly editors based in humanities disciplines and the Digital Institute that sets out to create new ways in which readers/users can interact with texts, and to explore and test opportunities for immersive reading/writing. Highlights of the collaboration include:

  • working with environmental scientists to create interactive digital sounded books of Renaissance bees to help today’s endangered pollinators
  • creating a LAB Digital Edition Publishing Cooperative for digital editors
  • mapping the translation of early feminists in Europe
  • and exploring the value of editorial judgement in the age of AI