Pre-Raphaelites Online

Study of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) is hampered by a few material limitations: many of the significant works are interdisciplinary "double works" that align texts with images; the artwork is dispersed across galleries and individual collections; and the PRB was made up of multiple artists and authors working in a variety of media. We propose dealing with these challenges by promoting collaboration among museum professionals and academic scholars to build upon an online platform that makes it easy to link images, timelines, maps and annotated critical editions of Pre-Raphaelite works and images. The interface and toolset will allow us to bring together curators, art historians, and literary scholars in joint creation of an open-access repository of information about the PRB and the Aesthetic movement. Participants include the most significant galleries dedicated to Pre-Raphaelite work (especially the Delaware Art Museum, the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, the Yale Center for British Art, and the Watts Gallery); libraries that hold PRB material (especially the Cadbury Research Library at the U of Birmingham and the University of Delaware Library, with its 9,500 books, letters, manuscripts, photographs, ephemera, and artworks in the Mark Samuels Lasner collection); the most respected online repository of PRB work, Jerome McGann's Rossetti Archive; and three of the most well-regarded UK centres dedicated to Victorian studies (Exeter's Centre for Victorian Studies, Birkbeck's Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, and Birmingham's Nineteenth-Century Centre) in joint creation of an online resource devoted to the PRB and its influence on the British Aesthetic movement.

We will build on an already existing infrastructure: The COVE or The Central Online Victorian Educator at http://covecollective.org, an open-access site that makes it possible for multiple people to make additions to one of four interconnected tools: a multimedia annotation tool; a timeline tool; a geospatial map tool; and a gallery-builder. Each tool is designed so that multiple individuals can work simultaneously in joint creation of a resource. Products built with the tools can also be interconnected, with interactive maps embedded in timeline elements, or gallery images associated on the same page with map elements and timeline elements, as can be seen in this prototype example linking Rossetti Archive scholarship with a map and timeline that draw from the COVE database (scroll down for the map and timeline): https://editions.covecollective.org/content/dante-gabriel-rossetti-elizabeth-eleanor-siddal-1861

COVE includes mechanisms for peer review, copy-editing and proofing of products submitted for publication. Once published, each individual element from timelines, maps and galleries is made available to future users for repurposing in new custom timelines, maps and galleries. Such portability ensures the future relevance of the material in the collection, making it available not only to scholars but also to students in the classroom or the general public. PRO: Pre-Raphaelites Online will have its own domain name (procollective.org) and site; however, it will be integrated into COVE so that it can draw from material at COVE (and vice-versa), thus maximising the versatility, usefulness and impact of the site.

COVE supplies the digital infrastructure; the museums supply the digital content; but the network members provide the expertise, intellectual curiosity, and enthusiasm to conceive of innovative ways of developing fresh research. The network events will allow participants to devise clear plans for large-scale projects--curated galleries of 3d-scanned Pre-Raphaelite jewellery, or an annotated edition of Moxon's illustrated Tennyson, for example--and develop the groundwork for the major grant bids that will support those projects through to completion.

The proposed outputs stand to make a measurable contribution to museum practices, public access to quality information on Pre-Raphaelite works, pedagogy across secondary and higher education, and scholarly methodology.

Museum practices: The network will bring together practising curators and literary scholars to address the unique demands posed by the works of the Pre-Raphaelite and their followers. From its origins, the movement insisted that text and image should be encountered jointly, yet the structure of public institutions-namely museums and universities-make genuinely interdisciplinary approaches to these works difficult. By asking curators, art historians, and literary scholars to develop digital projects that will maximise the exposure and accessibility of visual and textual objects and their analysis, the network will work towards creation of a new platform to augment brick-and-mortar exhibitions and print catalogues. These venues have the potential to reach a wide audience and to increase the visibility of lesser-known or infrequently-exhibited works that might not otherwise warrant sustained scholarly attention.

The large-scale projects that will be developed by network members as the eventual outcome of the grant will have an even larger reach: all COVE galleries and editions are open-access and can be re-deployed both within and without the platform. With expensive critical editions housed almost solely in university libraries, the greater portion of the reading public has limited access at best; most make do with versions of poems freely available on the internet, many of which lack the kind of reliable textual apparatus that make textual editions worthwhile. By making COVE's richly annotated editions available to the public, we not only enrich the quality of works that the public can access, we also can change the public's view of the editorial process. Vetted, verified information and analysis, while not solely the work of academics, can add to a reader's experience and comprehension. The integration of visual works as primary sources and in annotations, a unique aspect of COVEs editorial interface, further increases this engagement and leverages the cultural partners' extensive collections.

Pedagogy: COVE includes a classroom-facing version of its applications: instructors can upload a work standardised according to COVE standards, which serves as the base for student-led research, including textual and visual annotations, the creation of a timeline, the building of image galleries and the integration of geospatial mapping. COVE thereby facilitates students' active engagement with work, a different mode of interpretation and learning than the close reading often taught in secondary schools. Employing historicist research as well as analysis, students not only gain a deeper understanding of the text being studied, but also contribute to a collaboratively produced finished product. While the resulting timelines and annotations are not part of the COVE peer-reviewed content, they benefit from using the tools developed to facilitate the creation of scholarly research outputs. Textual editing becomes a methodology for approaching and understanding classroom texts, as opposed to a rarefied practice of university academics alone.

Academic publishing: The projects developed by the network have the potential to disrupt traditional academic publishing practices by facilitating collaborative editions of works that might otherwise be deemed too short, too long, or too expensive to produce in print. Especially appealing is the ability to mount scholarly editions of single poems, texts frequently used in secondary classrooms but which would not qualify as a tenable project in a print context. Responsive, updatable, open-access, and adaptable, COVE outputs can respond nimbly to financial and practical challenges in ways that print media cannot.