The Rossetti Archive

In the AI Story

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 as authoritative and relegate alternatives to textual apparatus. A digital edition can present multiple versions simultaneously, allow readers to compare them, and preserve the social-text reality that McGann's theory insisted on.

Rossetti was particularly well-suited to this treatment because he was simultaneously a poet and a painter, and his works crossed media in ways that print editions had always struggled to accommodate. The archive included digital reproductions of his paintings alongside his poems, manuscript pages showing his revisions, correspondence with his publishers, reviews, and the material evidence of how his works were received in their historical moment.

The project's methodological innovations have been widely influential. It demonstrated that digital scholarly editions could exceed their print predecessors not only in scope but in the theoretical accuracy of their representation of textual history. Subsequent projects in digital humanities have adopted elements of the Rossetti Archive's approach, including its emphasis on presenting multiple versions, its attention to material and visual features, and its use of the digital medium to embody rather than merely represent theoretical claims about textuality.

The project also served as the practical foundation for McGann's subsequent theoretical work on digital textuality, including Radiant Textuality (2001), which argued that digital representation offered new possibilities for thinking about what texts are and how they mean. The archive was not merely an application of existing theory; it was an occasion for theoretical development, forcing McGann to articulate what the digital medium made possible that print had not.

Origin

McGann began developing the archive in the early 1990s at the University of Virginia, where he held a professorship and had access to the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH). The project was completed in 2008 after nearly two decades of work by McGann and collaborators.

Key Ideas

Digital embodiment of social-text theory. The archive presents multiple versions of Rossetti's works rather than collapsing them into a single authoritative text.

Cross-media integration. Paintings, poems, manuscripts, and correspondence are presented together, reflecting Rossetti's work across media.

Foundational digital humanities project. The archive was one of the earliest and most influential demonstrations of what digital scholarly editing could accomplish.

Material and visual emphasis. The digital medium allowed for reproduction of visual and material features that print editions could not accommodate.

Theory-generating practice. The work on the archive drove McGann's subsequent theoretical writing on digital textuality.