Romantic Poetry, Technical Breakthrough and the Changing Editorial Role: The Charles Harpur Critical Archive

• Paul Eggert
• Desmond Schmidt

This report provides (1) a short history of the Charles Harpur Critical Archive (CHCA), which has been in preparation since 2009. Harpur was a predominantly newspaper poet in colonial New South Wales. Writing from the 1830s to the 1860s, he was unable to publish in book form because of the undeveloped state of the local literary publishing scene. Approximately 2700 versions of his 700 poems in newspaper and in manuscript form have been recovered. (2) A summary of the technical approach, a new one for special-purpose digital archives, is provided. The principal innovation is the use of a Multi-Version Document (MVD) file format. Because it is not dependent on conventional XML encoding, overlap is no longer a problem and automatic collation of versions, and of layers of revision in individual manuscripts, has become possible. Synchronous scrolling of facsimile image and transcription has also been achieved, lessen ing the need for detailed encoding of document elements and physical features. (3) The report then reflects on the theoretical implications of the concepts and methods used for the CHCA and on the changing role of the editor.