To do full justice to Romanticism as a periodic category [...], one must de facto be a comparatist —Ben Hutchinson1

Introduction

The Romantic Period Poetry Archive, or RPPA [Listen] for short, is a new open access digital platform of global Romantic-period poetry. Global here in the sense of Felicity Nussbaum's definition of the "Global 18th century", namely as a spatially and conceptually expanded paradigm in which dialogue and exchange rather than influence and reception are the dominant categories.2 RPPA comprises a full-text poetry database and an open scholarship platform. It embraces both traditional modes of scholarly research and output, such as the creation of scholarly editions, and digital modes of research and publication, such as computationally-augmented analysis, visualizations, network analysis, knowledge modelling, and more.

Approach

Comparative in nature, RPPA conceptualizes Romanticism as a global, deeply interconnected phenomenon. It embraces a Romantic Weltliteratur by bringing well- and lesser-known poets, their poems and contexts from all parts of the world into conversation, and thus encourages the telling of bigger stories. This “zooming out” not only brings texts, authors, languages, and cultures into conversation, but also highlights the (frequently non-linear) modes of transmission, circulation, and reception of literature (understood here in global terms as the expressions of a culture in a variety of forms). These matters will be considered alongside the conversations the texts enter into with each other, directly, or much more frequently, indirectly.

Scope

RPPA participates in movements that aim to address issues of scale in academic Romanticism by expanding the Romantic literary canon. Unrestrained by the limitations of traditional print publications, RPPA comprises various literary and non-literary genres of Romanticism from all nations throughout the long Romantic century.3 As a networked effort, RPPA links the literary practices, interrelations, and contexts of Romantic-period poetry. It connects these nodes reflexively as well as to various internal and external contexts.

Despite every effort to include the most relevant figures of the Romantic period, a disclaimer needs to be issued regarding the inclusion or omission of poets. While "Romantic" itself is a notoriously "elastic" label (Michael Ferber's term) that includes "pre"-, "early"-, "proto"-, "high"-, "late"-, and "post"-Romantic incarnations, the scholarship that underlies much of the selection process is largely Western/Northern-centric and may have been superseeded within national contexts. In such cases, the editor would be grateful for any corrections and suggestions for additions and improvements.

Features

  • RPPA will assemble an extensive and open-ended archive of TEI/XML-encoded full-text poems (both original and in translation) and their contexts;
  • RPPA is transdisciplinary and intermedial, transcending literature, and embracing wider cultural production;
  • RPPA considers Romanticism in global, transnational contexts and foregrounds its multi-lingualism and -culturalism;
  • RPPA adopts a positive conceptualization of translation as the “closest” form of reading, one that many Romantics considered a vital part of their literary labours;
  • RPPA facilitates and supports comparison as a method by providing tools that situate Romantic-period poetry in its international and interdisciplinary contexts;
  • RPPA fosters collaboration and participation to turn obstacles to the study of global Romantic-period poetry (such as “distant” reading and, unavoidably, limited contextual knowledge) into opportunities for learning;
  • RPPA encourages new research into global Romantic-period poetry and showcases ways to integrate RPPA into the curriculum;
  • RPPA incorporates digital humanities approaches as a form of comparative literary study.

Implementation

RPPA employs digital methods from the multilingual Digital Humanities and the Semantic Web.

Multilingual DH

A combination of ML/AI- and NLP-approaches is our starting point for the detection of formal poetic features and points of contact more generally (shared poetic genres and devices, semantic features such as motifs, themes, plots, topics, characters, and types of intertextuality) within and across literatures. Designed as a collaborative and open-ended effort from the start, it is however through inviting input from and seeking collaboration with domain experts from various traditions, and by encouraging participation from the wider scholarly community that RPPA hopes to address some of the main challenges of "distant reading".

Semantic Web

RPPA is built on the Semantic Web, it embraces formal ontological modelling (RDF) and Linked Open Data (LOD) standards and methodologies. RPPA is powered by an ontologically underpinned, ever-expanding knowledge base, hosted on the PRISMS Open Scholarship platform, drawing on a number of domain-specific ontologies (CIDOC-CRM, OntoPoetry, and INTRO), which comprise an integrated framework. This shared framework provides a unified mechanism for the cross-linguistic representation of the poems while maintaining the ability to describe them adequately within their historical, cultural and poetic traditions. It also facilitates the semantic modelling of contextuality/intertextuality on a granular level.

Publications/Presentations

Timeline

RPPA is an independently-funded research project. It was in public alpha development from late 2020-2025. It is currently in open beta, i.e. ready for use as feedback is gathered to improve functionality and usability. As with other projects conceived as long-term archival endeavours, all research outputs of the project will be preserved and made accessible indefinitely. RPPA is designed to be a networked effort: expressions of interest to connect with and participate in the project are welcome at any time. Regular updates about new resources or functionality will be posted on our social media channels.

Future Plans

Throughout the open beta phase and beyond, we will be adding more poems to RPPA. Any suggestions for additions are welcome and appreciated. We are currently working on a number of areas, including:

  • visualization options for poetic networks and clusters;
  • spatio-temporal tools to highlight historical and geographical components of the network;
  • network analytical measures to relate national literary traditions within the global literary landscape;
  • enhanced filtering and search capabilities in the maps and networks views;
  • user-defined context-sharing features;
  • external/intermedial contextualization options;
  • full-text/linguistic search to supplement graph search;
  • expermental application of the RPPA graph in support of Graph RAG LLM-applications.

Outcome

The expected outcome of this project is a fuller understanding, appreciation, and engagement with the poetry of the global Romantic period. As a project, RPPA prioritizes the idea of “wholeness” of an archival approach over analytical accounts of established narratives. Wholeness not in the sense of one grand or better narrative or history, but rather in acknowledging, collecting, and aggregating many individual stories in one bigger space. A space for the exploration of new contexts and the construction of new global texts4 that cast a fresh light on the seemingly familiar. This project provides that space.

Licensing

RPPA is licensed under Creative Commons Licence.

Wherever possible, the master source files of the digital editions (XML texts, high-res images, etc.) are available for download and openly licensed for re-use. Download links are available for the original TEI/XML files. Facsimile images are available for download for the editions created for publication in RPPA. If in any doubt, please contact the collections maintainers with any queries about the terms of their licenses and available options for re-use.

Citation Guide

If you use RPPA in your research, please use below example (MLA) or adapt it to match your favourite citation format:

“Romantic Period Poetry Archive (RPPA).” Romanticperiodpoetry.org, 2020-, www.romanticperiodpoetry.org

Use and privacy policy

RPPA is open access. All materials are made available under the license terms indicated above.

We use two external services which will store some small pieces of information on your computer in the form of cookies. We use Shareaholic to connect our Website to a number of Social Networking services and also to provide access to sharing, printing, and e-mail options. And we use Google Analytics to provide us with a measure of the usage and impact of our site, and to inform any collaboration and outreach activities. We only submit anonymized IP addresses to Google Analytics. We consider these cookies essential to the provision of the service requested by the user.

1 Hutchinson, Ben. Comparative Literature: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: OUP, 2018. 22.
2 Felicity A. Nussbaum's concept of "critical global studies" was first introduced in her edited collection The Global Eighteenth Century, Baltimore and London: JHUP, 2003, 1. This research focuses on Romanticism as a period in international literary history, i.e. a global artistic phenomenon.
3 The "Romantic century" was first proposed for the study of British Romanticism by William Galperin and Susan Wolfson in their NASSR 1996 conference paper "'Romanticism' in Crisis: The Romantic Century". For the global context of this project, the qualifier long has been added.
4 The construct of a source text with all of its contexts was termed "global text" by Angelika Corbineau-Hoffmann in her book Kontextualität, Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2017, 242.