English Language and Literature

This project will update, analyse and re-present three important collections of children's playground songs and rhymes: the Opie Collection of Children's Games and Songs, and selections from collections at the National Centre for English Cultural Tradition (NATCECT) and the Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture (LAVC).

Research Questions and Problems
Can a comprehensive audio-visual archive of performance information encourage further research into performance in English Departments and support teaching in Drama and Theatre Studies Departments?

Can oral history interviews with designers add significantly to the study of performance?

Can access to a large database of digital images based around a design theme encourage greater emphasis on the visual elements of performance for scholars and students of Shakespeare?

The project has transcribed and published the more than 10,000 letters to and from William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877), best known as the inventor of photography but also an MP, a landowner, an inventor, a scientist, a mathematician and a pioneering scholar of Assyrian cuneiform. The major group of letters was published in 2003. AHRB funding then ended and the University of Glasgow was unable to commit further resources to the project. In 2004, the project website was migrated to DeMontfort University, Leicester. A grant from the British Academy created a remote editing facility.

The Jonathan Swift Archive makes available a searchable, digitized collection of texts of Swift’s prose from a great variety of early editions. The texts collected in the archive are documentary transcriptions of Swift's writings as they appear in their original printed editions. The aim has been to include first editions, and, wherever there has been authorial correction, emendation, revision, or alteration to the text in subsequent lifetime editions, to add transcriptions of these later witnesses.