Editorial Principles

We sought initially to standardise the use of texts, first on the basis of the first edition text, then on the basis of a particular publisher of modern editions of texts (e.g. Norton; Oxford). However, the demands of the digital medium rapidly undermined this. The problem we found was that texts that were freely available were often corrupt and unreliable, requiring a high level of additional cleaning. Because of the scope of texts used in the project it was extremely problematic to locate first edition texts and these would then have required full transcription before mark-up.

Since our aims in this project were focussed on visualisation and the act of turning a verbal text into a mappable form we decided to abandon standardisation. We therefore sought instead the cleanest and most reliable form of each text. Again, because of the range of writers over time we were not able to acquire clean texts from one source. See Table below.

For all electronic editions we stripped out any editorial meta-data and then marked up the clean text. Almost all of these texts are out of copyright and all are being used here for purely educational purposes and for non-profit making research. All mark-up is our own.