About the Archive
The Romantic Period Poetry Archive—or RPPA 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 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.
‘Global Texts’
The highly contextualized and interlinked poetic texts from any national literature are what we call ‘global texts’. Texts that carry the family resemblance of Romantic poetry on a global scale, represented as highly contextualized entities that betray their interconnectedness in space and time. This temporal and spatial expansion historicizes texts as ‘global texts’: contexts embed texts in multi-dimensional spaces and connect them more broadly via shared contexts, resulting in a network, or graph.
Contextuality
Contexts establish a performative dialogue with a text, resulting in meaning that only exists through their encounter. They 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 its texts.
Community
RPPA is in open beta and accepting contributions. Please feel free to connect to RPPA to start contributing contexts: all contributions are attributed and citable as micro-publications. We welcome contributions on any aspect of the texts’ poetic, semantic, formal, historical, national, or cultural dimensions, including material legacies, reception, translation, circulation, and afterlives.
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