The Romantic Period Poetry Archive—or RPPA [Listen] for short—is an open access digital platform for global Romantic-period poetry. RPPA conceptualizes Romanticism as a global, deeply interconnected phenomenon, as a period in international literary history. RPPA aggregates both peer- and computationally-created contextualizations that situate the poetry of the Romantic period in its in global, transnational contexts. The main purpose of RPPA is the creation of a database of contextuality that manifests itself in an expandable, re-usable and open knowledge base.
The highly contextualized and interlinked poetic texts from any national literature are what we refer to as ‘global texts’. Texts that carry the family resemblance of Romantic poetry on a global scale. ‘Global texts’ are represented as highly contextualized and therefore reconfigured entities that betray their interconnectedness in space and time. This temporal and spatial expansion historizises texts as ‘global texts’, i.e. contexts embed texts in multi-dimensional spaces and connect texts more broadly via shared contexts. Contexts thus overlay the original text with texts from different dimensions, which results in a network, or graph.
Contexts establish a performative dialogue with a text in the sense that it results in meaning that only exists through their encounter. Contexts therefore always remain anchored, concrete, and purposeful: they perform transformative work in the text and vice versa. The promise of RPPA is to arrive at an understanding of the functions of the transformative potential, in other words an interpretation, of these encounters. To this end, RPPA facilitates the collaborative, ontologically-underpinned, and open-ended annotation of the texts in RPPA.
RPPA is currently in open beta and is accepting contributions from authenticated users. Please feel free to connect to RPPA to start contributing contexts for texts wherever you see the button (all contributions are attributed and citable as mirco-publications). We encourage contributions, big or small, on any aspect of the texts' poetic, semantic, formal, historical, national or cultural dimensions, including but not limited to their material legacies, reception and interpretation, translations, circulation, and afterlives — in fact, you can start your journey (almost) anywhere in the world!
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