Welcome!
This text is the beta version of a participatory critical edition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass. By “beta version,” we mean “text in progress.” During the spring and summer of 2020, we’ll be composing and publishing additional supplemental content to accompany the novel.
At present, the primary texts that appear in this edition reflect what Lewis Carroll _____
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- Each chapter also includes an annotation layer that you can use to take private notes or reflect on the text in public with other readers.
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- We live in an exciting time for the digital humanities, and for those of you who enjoy viewing your text using digital analysis tools to see which words pop up the most frequently, we’ve included a Voyant Visualizer word cloud and link in an annotation attached to each chapter heading. (Here’s an example of a Voyant annotation link. Note that the annotation may take a few moments to load on your screen.)
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- This book also includes supplemental essays and interactive elements by students and scholars that reflect on print culture of the nineteenth century and the present day. Some of these essays are already published, while some will be published during the course of the year.
Why circulate this project as a beta version?
First and most importantly, we envision this work as a living text.
We welcome contributions to this project in the form of footnotes, essays, and more. Whether you’re a student, professor, scholar, print culture enthusiast, or some combination of all of these, you have something to offer this project. While this text will continue to grow over time, this beta run is a uniquely active point in this project’s development, so to take part now is to play a pivotal role in what this edition will become.
Second, this project is an openly-available, downloadable, and citeable resource tied to specific nineteenth-century editions of Carroll’s texts.
[bridge/clarify.]
A large proportion of Victorian literature is in the public domain, meaning that it’s free to reproduce, recirculate, and adapt it. In some ways, this evens the playing field for students and scholars who don’t have a large disposable income to discuss primary texts with others who have a great deal of access to archives and databases.
But literary studies also prizes close-reading skills, and to carefully analyze a text with Victorian readers in mind typically requires us to know which version of the text we’re looking at. This can be difficult in the digital age. (I can certainly remember moments when I confidently raised my hand to make a point in a graduate seminar only to realize that the online transcription I was working with varied significantly from the version of the text my professor had required!)
While public domain curation sites like Project Gutenberg are excellent tools, not every text in their collection comes with a publication date, and there’s no easy way to determine how closely any given text matches a nineteenth-century publication. For instance, ______
In contrast, this edition includes direct links not only to the original serial scans we drew ____ to generate this text, but also includes edition comparison footnotes. If you identify a line that differs from what your peers see in their editions of the novel, you’ve found a cool Victorian variation to think with!
Invitation
You’re welcome to join us and to track new additions to this project at the 19th-Century Open Pedagogy Project’s Twitter account (@OPP19C)
