WORK
The Rossetti Archive
McGann's pioneering digital scholarly edition of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's complete works — one of the earliest and most influential digital humanities projects, embodying the social-text framework in archival practice.
The Rossetti Archive, which McGann began developing at the University of Virginia in the early 1990s and completed in 2008, is a comprehensive digital edition of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's writings, paintings, and designs. More than a conventional scholarly edition transferred to digital form, the archive was designed from the outset to embody McGann's social-text theory by presenting Rossetti's works in their multiple material instantiations — manuscript drafts, proof sheets, first editions, subsequent editions, translations — rather than collapsing them into a single authoritative version. The project became one of the foundational demonstrations of what digital humanities could accomplish and provided a practical test case for the theoretical claims McGann had been developing in print.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The Rossetti Archive emerged at a specific historical moment — the early 1990s — when the World Wide Web made possible new forms of scholarly editing that the print medium could not support. A print edition must choose one version of a text