A Documentary Edition of George Herbert's English Poems

FAIN: FB-54209-09

Robert Whalen
Northern Michigan University (Marquette, MI 49855-2818)

The Digital Temple offers original- and modern-spelling transcriptions of three key artifacts, all richly encoded in TEI-XML (P5) for the purposes of data retrieval, display, and analysis; page links to high-resolution images of the artifacts; an apparatus devised in accordance with editorial best practices; and a flexible user interface offering multiple views of these materials, including parallel display. A powerful tool useful to Herbert scholars, teachers, and students of literature, The Digital Temple is also a digital humanities research project in its own right, exploring and discovering solutions to problems peculiar to digital editing. Moreover, it challenges the notion of the ideal text and the necessarily reductive process by which conventional print editions are constructed. More than an edition devoted to a single author, then, The Digital Temple would model an editorial methodology suited to Renaissance poetry in general.