Skip to main content
Skip to main content

It's Alive—And Digital!

October 28, 2013 English | Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities

This Halloween night, diehard fans of Frankenstein will be haunting a new scholarly Web site devoted to Mary Shelley and her family.

By Ron Charles, The Washington Post

This Halloween night, diehard fans of Frankenstein will be haunting a new scholarly Web site devoted to Mary Shelley and her family.

With a $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, scholars, librarians and computer scientists around the world have created a monster archive that for the first time will stitch together the manuscripts of Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley, who started writing “Frankenstein” when she was just 19 years old.

Online users of the new Shelley-Godwin Archive will be able to see Shelley’s manuscript of “Frankenstein” with all the traces of her literary surgery. In a statement about the new site, Neil Fraistat, director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, explains, “We encoded each stage of the composition process, tracing the revisionary evolution of primary manuscripts from rough draft to final copy.”

Fraistat and others involved in the creation of this site will speak on Halloween at 6 p.m. in the New York Public Library. This is also a rare chance to see a 1818 first edition of “Frankenstein” and related illustrations and photographs from early theatrical and film productions.  (The presentation is free, but you need reservations. E-mail elizabethdenlinger@nypl.org or call 212-930-0717.)

Read more here.