TEXT PROJECT
At one of the Association’s York lunches, in around 2004, I proposed that, to fulfil the association’s educational aims more effectively, we might launch a Sydney website, and that on it we might make his writings much more widely available. Publishers, perhaps thinking him too esoteric, would not handle what Sydney actually wrote: except for his bon mots, and the Oxford edition of his letters, little of Sydney’s work had been re-printed in the twentieth century. Only W.H. Auden’s excellent selection of 1957 – long out of print - had made Peter Plymley, the prescient essay on Female Education, or the savagery of Spring Guns and Man Traps, available in printed form; and this remains the case, nearly a quarter of the way into the twenty first century.
The proposal was accepted, and with the help of a grant from Richard Croucher’s Gemini Foundation, the website was planned, designed and launched in 2005, with the texts project as a central focus. It led to several years of lively co-operative activity by association members. Using their own collections and their computers, they scanned or transcribed key texts into Word, while others took on the finicky task of proof-reading. They produced the clearly readable texts that were launched on the website.
We did not run out of steam, but we were overtaken by technology: the international Gutenberg Project gathered way, followed by the Google Project, and others, and their momentum increased. Their heady aims – largely fulfilled - were to make the world’s great literature available to all, for free, on the worldwide web. It was not long before they had scanned Sydney’s works too. With their more sophisticated equipment, they were able rapidly to photo-scan the early editions – often the first editions – of Sydney’s, and the other writings that they gathered. And they had the world’s great libraries from which to source them.
In short, we could neither keep pace with what they were releasing, nor could we access so many of Sydney’s texts from our own resources. However, those that we did prepare remain on the website because they are often more comfortable on the eye, but scholars will need to refer to the hyperlinks that we have also gathered together on the site: those texts preserve the original pagination, which we could neither retain with the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system that we used, nor by re-typing in A4 format.
Graham Frater, April 2020
The proposal was accepted, and with the help of a grant from Richard Croucher’s Gemini Foundation, the website was planned, designed and launched in 2005, with the texts project as a central focus. It led to several years of lively co-operative activity by association members. Using their own collections and their computers, they scanned or transcribed key texts into Word, while others took on the finicky task of proof-reading. They produced the clearly readable texts that were launched on the website.
We did not run out of steam, but we were overtaken by technology: the international Gutenberg Project gathered way, followed by the Google Project, and others, and their momentum increased. Their heady aims – largely fulfilled - were to make the world’s great literature available to all, for free, on the worldwide web. It was not long before they had scanned Sydney’s works too. With their more sophisticated equipment, they were able rapidly to photo-scan the early editions – often the first editions – of Sydney’s, and the other writings that they gathered. And they had the world’s great libraries from which to source them.
In short, we could neither keep pace with what they were releasing, nor could we access so many of Sydney’s texts from our own resources. However, those that we did prepare remain on the website because they are often more comfortable on the eye, but scholars will need to refer to the hyperlinks that we have also gathered together on the site: those texts preserve the original pagination, which we could neither retain with the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system that we used, nor by re-typing in A4 format.
Graham Frater, April 2020