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The Perseus Garner: early modern resources in the digital age.

Article Excerpt
Digital humanities has long promised to change the way we teach and do research by making it faster and easier to discover relationships among texts and images in large, heterogeneous collections--so much faster and easier, its proponents say, that the very nature of inquiry will change. The power of weighted full-text search and retrieval afforded by Google and other tools lends credibility to this promise, as do the digital humanities projects that have appeared over the past decade or so. Many of these tools and texts are incunabula, and their designs and obsessions already seem quaint. Nevertheless, as experiments they deepen our understanding of what text really means and suggest how computers can assist us in the never-ending task of reading.

The Perseus Digital Library (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu) is a major project in the digital humanities (Crane et al 2001b), receiving over 9 million hits a month during the academic year. Its early focus was on materials from classical antiquity, but in recent years it has broadened its scope to include collections from a variety of periods, locations, and domains, from the history of science to Victorian London (2001a). Among these expanded resources is the Perseus Garner, a gathering of primary materials from the early modern period in England and selected secondary materials from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Perseus Garner comprises the works of Christopher Marlowe, the Globe Shakespeare and volumes from the New Variorum Shakespeare Series, Holinshed's Chronicles, Hakluyt's Voyages, the rhetorical works of Peachum and Wilson, and other primary sources, as well as several important reference works, including the glossaries of Dyce and Onions and Schmidt's Lexicon.

While some of these materials are available elsewhere in print or on-line, others are not, and one of the aims in creating the Perseus Garner was to make rare or difficult-to-obtain materials available to a wider audience. But a digital library should be more than a collection of e-prints, and Perseus's over-arching goal is to develop tools that let investigators--scholars, students, and amateurs--do the work of the humanities: acquiring new information, synthesizing that information into new knowledge, and arriving at new understandings. Not all will agree with Perseus's view of humanities work: Perseus's articulation of early-modern texts and a particular sub-set of scholarship makes a particular claim about the nature of the relationship between sources and commentary. But because computational technologies promise to support new ways of discovering relationships and asking questions in large, heterogeneous collections, the fact that these materials co-exist in an integrated digital library is more important than their mere digitization, because users can exploit the suite of tools available there: automatically generated citation links between primary sources and secondary...