Help Desk

• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
• General introduction
• Search Tool
• Poems
  • Selecting a text
  • Finding a reference
  • Commentary display and contribution form
• Letters
• Concordance
• Digital Library
• Finding Aid

General introduction

The Thomas Gray Archive began as an unfunded research project at the Göttingen State and University Library in 2000. It is devoted to scholarship on Thomas Gray (1716-1771), one of the most versatile 18th-century poets. Regarded by a majority of today's literary scholars as the predominant poetic figure of the middle decades of the 18th century, reception history up to the 20th century frequently dismissed him either as an imperfect Augustan (Dr Johnson) or as a timid Romantic (Wordsworth). The Archive has been designed to address the challenges associated with understanding Gray's poetry in its historical context and with recognizing his contribution to the history of 18th-century English poetry. The creation of the electronic versions of the primary sources and secondary materials available in the Archive would not have been possible without generous permission granted by Göttingen State and University Library to the research project.

Gray's poetry poses considerable challenges even to professional readers of his texts. The need for explanatory notes had, in fact, already been expressed by Gray's contemporaries. As a result of frequent misunderstandings and misrepresentations, Gray conceded to provide notes for the edition of his collected poems in 1768, which forms the basis for the electronic texts in the Archive. Due to the complexity of both form and subject matter of Gray's texts, the volume of textual and editorial scholarship produced has been entirely out of proportion with the slim corpus of Gray's poetry. As the richness of allusions and references in the texts often makes it impossible for any one reading to be prioritised over any other, this project's principal goal and core functionality has been to stimulate discussion by providing an opportunity to scholars to add notes and queries to any part of any of the texts available in the Archive. As a starting point, extracts from traditional printed scholarly editions have been used, under fair use conditions, to provide a basis for the scholarly discussion to emerge online under a peer-review system. Over the past years the Web site has evolved from this core concept to a more fully-fledged electronic archive, which includes many of the online tools used by scholars working in the humanities today, such as a search tool, a computer-generated concordance, a digital library, as well as living secondary materials, including a criticism page, biography, chronology, glossary, bibliography, gallery, and links to related online resources.

The Archive is conceived as a structured repository of texts and materials of interest to those reading, teaching, researching, and studying Gray's life and works, and will develop long-term along with the contributions and proposals received from its users. We expect this resource to grow and change, and we invite participation from scholars and institutions around the world. Interaction via a structured platform has been and will be the essential component in the creation, development and improvement of this resource. As a living forum for students, teachers, and scholars, the Web site is designed to enable readers not only to browse and search the texts in order to locate and access variants, textual notes, and glosses, but also to contribute their own annotations or queries interactively on this site. All contributions, including those to the materials section, will be collected and peer-reviewed and will subsequently be published on this Web site. Contributors are encouraged to keep their annotations and materials alive, by periodically reviewing previously contributed information. While the commentary strives to be authoritative, it is not conceived of as definitive, instead it is intended to be suggestive of new connections and interpretative avenues for scholars. The success of the Archive will depend on readers' willingness to share resources in an open access environment for the benefit of collaborative scholarship online. Thus a communal, dynamic flow of meaning may evolve over time.

Based on open, interoperable standards and formats widely used in the digital humanities (such as METS, MODS, TEI, DALF, and EAD), the Archive strives to preserve and to make freely accessible a comprehensive corpus of high-quality, electronic primary sources and secondary materials for use in teaching, digital scholarship, and electronic publishing. In this sense, The Thomas Gray Archive, just like its analogue counterparts, is a place of reading, a place that facilitates and supports research, a place that preserves and disseminates information in the pursuit of knowledge.

Search Tool

The search tool is a simple search engine that can be used to locate one or more words or a phrase in the poems, the commentary, or the full-text of primary or secondary works, and to retrieve a result set with highlighted hits. All words entered in the text field are search terms, no stop-word list is in effect. This search engine uses an "all the words" or "AND" search by default. All search terms must be found in a text to be displayed. Also, by default, results will only contain matches that form whole words, however, the search engine does support the wildcards "?" for a single character, and "*" to represent any number (0-x) of characters. The user may also want to modify the "query options" to limit searches:

1. Find: "all the words" performs an "AND" search, i.e. all the terms must be found; "any word" performs an "OR" search, i.e. at least one term must be found; "exact phrase" looks for the terms as a phrase in the text.
2. Case: "insensitive" will find both capitals and lower-case letters, "sensitive" will only find words spelled exactly as typed in the search field.

Result sets are organized by texts in order of the number of hits. The result set page can be customised by the user to show or hide the actual results in the texts and to sort the texts by results or titles. Users may then choose to go to the texts by following the linked titles, page numbers, or, in the case of searches within the poems, go to individual results via the line numbers or, if the result is in a paratext (e.g. the front matter or the footnotes), via the letter "P".

Known limitations: No in-text boolean operators are allowed, neither are stop-words defined. Be prepared to get large result sets when searching for words like "and", "the" or "a". The grouping of search terms is also not supported by this search engine. If you have questions or problems, please do not hesitate to contact the help desk for help or more information.

Poems

• Selecting a text

  The poems and commentary can be accessed by following a link from the lists of titles and first lines, or via the concordance. Alternatively, readers may choose to search the poems for one or more words or a phrase, or may wish to approach the works via digital images from printed editions. Electronic texts will be displayed as links on the individual pages for the reader to select according to his or her interests. Once a text has been selected using one of the above ways, it will be displayed along with Gray's annotations (if available), and some basic information on the text, including a summary of existing notes and queries, the total number of editors' and readers' annotations and references available, and a line-by-line display of the commentary types in the margin. The display also contains additional information, such as a note on the text, including a declaration of editorial practices, and all printed works cited in the commentary. If the text exists in the digital library, direct links will be offered to the digitized editions. If you have questions or problems, please do not hesitate to contact the help desk for help or more information.

• Finding a reference

  From the text display, there are two basic ways of finding notes: by defining the passage of the text the reader is interested in (browsing and searching) or by searching across the entire online commentary. For the first option, the reader may choose either to browse the text by lines, simply by accessing the commentary types displayed in front of each line (if available), or to use the "Find reference" form to type in the precise text reference he or she is interested in:

  1. Browse by lines: Please select the line number for Gray's own annotations (in-text notes are linked to line numbers) or the letters in front of the line number to access the editors and contributors' commentary types: "T" for variants and textual notes, "E" for explanatory notes, or "T/E" for both types (where applicable). In this browsing mode the standard setting for comments to be retrieved is: "Find and show printed and online commentary of all types and levels near the selected line". If you need more detailed options or want to see comments for a longer passage, please use the "Find reference" form below. This "browse by lines" option is intended as a first general scanning mode.
  2. Find reference: Please enter the precise reference for the text you are interested in. The "From line no" and "To line no" fields are required fields, and the text reference should not exceed a total of 10 lines. If you want to comment on the poem as a whole, please enter "0" in the "from" and "to" line number boxes, if you want to comment on a passage longer than 10 lines, please specify the first line of that passage only. If the word number boxes are left empty, the "From word no" is equal to the first word in the line, the "To word no" is equal to the last word in the line. The settings for comments to be retrieved may be modified in the query options by sort, range, type, source, and level. The reader may also want to turn off full-text display of notes and see the references only. The "Find reference" option is best used for specifying a particular passage and for adding an annotation or for placing a query.

  The term commentary is used here in its broadest possible sense, including variants, textual notes, glosses, and queries. The reference system for locating comments for the selected text is that of line and word numbers. The second option, searching across the entire online commentary, is self-explanatory. If you have questions or problems, please do not hesitate to contact the help desk for help or more information.

• Commentary display and contribution form

  Once the text reference you have specified has been successfully located in the text, the lemma will be displayed along with all available comments based on your selection criteria. If anything went wrong, you can always return to the "Find reference" form or to the line-by-line display of the text. Comments will be displayed by type and are sorted first by "From line no", then by "From word no", and finally by year of publication or contribution. Each annotation retrieved gives precise information about its origin, whether from printed sources or online contributors. The reader has access to the bibliographic information of the print publication or may choose to contact the author if it is an online contribution. The reader may also go to the next, previous, or a user-defined line to see the comments available for that line.

  Below the commentary display, a contribution form is inserted for the reader to add an annotation to or to place a query about the selected passage. Contributors are kindly asked to specify commentary types and levels for their annotations, and must agree to submit their names and e-mail addresses and grant permission to make this information available to users via the collaborative online commentary. Any contribution posted is covered under the Open Publication License v1.0. Contributors may also provide additional information about their affiliation and about related online resources. All contributors are kindly asked to be as precise as possible when specifying the reference (line and word numbers) for their annotations. The best way to do this is to use the "Find reference" option instead of the line-by-line display. If all the required fields are filled in correctly, contributions will be saved and submitted to the editor for review. A confirmation page indicates that the contribution has been submitted successfully. After review, your contribution will appear together with your contact details as part of the existing commentary. If you have questions or problems, please do not hesitate to contact the help desk for help or more information.

Letters

The browsable calendar of Gray's correspondence provides access to detailed descriptive metadata for all known letters in the correspondence catalogue. Readers can choose from several selection criteria to explore the collection, including a basic choice between letters written by Gray and letters addressed to Gray, or a particular exchange between Gray and one of his correspondents. Letters can also be selected by date of composition^*, place of composition, or holding institution if the original survives. Once a selection has been made, a list of matching letters will be displayed consisting of six basic descriptive categories: the Archive letter id, the date(s) of composition, the place(s) of composition, the writer(s), the addressee(s), and information about where the original is held. This list can be re-sorted by selecting one of these six table headings. To view the full record for an individual letter, select the letter id number from the list. To select a different set of letters, choose any of the links (date, place, writer or addressee name, or holding institution) in the list of letters.

The full record view of a letter consists of: the Archive letter id, the names of the writer(s) and addressee(s) (shown in square brackets if supplied) and their age, the date(s) and place(s) of composition (shown in square brackets if supplied) including the date and address lines in the letter (where extant), the letter's incipit and language(s) (if extant), a brief summary of its contents, information about possible surrogates and the letter's holding institution and availability (if extant), and details of publication. The description of the letters is based on the DALF guidelines for the description and encoding of modern correspondence material, developed at the Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies at the Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature, Belgium. These guidelines are in turn based on and intended as an extension and customization of the TEI's Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange.

Please note that the Archive neither controls nor is able to mediate access to the original letters. Please check the availability category in the full record view and contact the holding institution directly. Although every effort has been made to trace the whereabouts of the letters, we cannot provide any guarantee as to their actual location, status, or availability. If you have questions or problems, please do not hesitate to contact the help desk for help or more information.

Concordance

The word list and the concordance contain every word in the texts of the complete poems of Thomas Gray as available on the poems page of the Archive. The word lists are created from a central word index once the reader has selected a letter or the corpus word occurrences list on the main page. Each word list with word occurrences is displayed in five table columns, running from top to bottom in each of the columns. Selecting a word from the list will retrieve the concordance proper for the word selected. The numbers of occurrences and texts, in which the term appears, are given first, followed by the poem titles and lines of the individual texts, in which the term is high-lighted. From there the text may be accessed directly via the poem title or the line number. Users may also choose to re-sort the concordance, or to return to the word lists.

This concordance is offered to the scholarly community as a "working" concordance, it does not claim to resolve limitations traditionally associated with computer-generated concordances. Thus, in the display just the line in which the word appears is given, which is not always sufficient to identify clearly how the word is used. Also, word entries have not been disambiguated by assigning the proper part of speech to each word. Please note that the concordance only lists words in the text of the poems, i.e. in the (numbered) poem lines, excluding all textual variants and paratextual elements, such as titles, advertisements, prefaces, section headings, notes etc. If you want to retrieve results from the latter elements, please use the search tool: a regular search with any word displayed in the concordance can be launched as one of the options in the bottom line of the concordance display. If you have questions or problems, please do not hesitate to contact the help desk for help or more information.

Digital Library

The Archive's digital library is intended to make digital versions of Gray's works and of Gray scholarship available online. The digital library contains electronic texts and digital still images of Gray's published (printed) works as well as audio-visual media. For the digitized printed works an electronic table of contents is provided as an alternative point of entry to the drop-down menu of page numbers and the traditional page-turner digital library interface. All scanned page images are scaled against the dimensions of the original to display 100% their size with 100dpi resolution. All page images in the Web delivery system are of the MIME types image/gif and image/jpeg; due to restrictions imposed by most of the contributing institutions, neither the 600dpi master image/tiff versions nor derivatives usable for print publications are available on the Web. You can use the arrow keys of the page-turner interface to go to the first, previous, next, or last page of the selected work, or you can select a page number from the drop-down menu. Alternatively, all page images can also be accessed via thumbnails organized in user-definable groups of 10-50 each. When viewing page images containing (parts of) poems, links to the electronic text and available commentary are also provided.

The audio-visual media available in the digital library have been encoded in RealMedia® streaming format, and should be playable with a variety of players. The format was adopted mainly because of the possibility of serving on-demand streaming audio and video. Please do not hesitate to contact the help desk should you encounter problems viewing or playing any of the materials in this section. Since the digital library is in the early stages of its development, it is likely to change and evolve over time. For the moment, the digital library interface, such as the page-turner mechanism and the display facility for electronic texts, have been designed based on examples of good practice from well-established digital library projects. Feedback about the usability of these features is greatly appreciated.

Finding Aid

The integrated finding aid to Thomas Gray manuscripts is intended as a standards-based and up-to-date research tool for Gray scholars. The finding aid has been situated within the Primary Texts section of the Archive, as "[i]n the hierarchical structure of collection-level information access and navigation, finding aids reside between bibliographic records and the primary source materials. Bibliographic records lead to finding aids, and finding aids lead to primary source materials." [*]. The aim is to provide a primary point of access to Gray-related archival collections in archives and manuscript repositories around the world. To this purpose, the integrated finding aid, which is arranged alphabetically by work title, lists all of Gray's identified autograph manuscripts as well as transcripts in the hands of his contemporaries and of early editors of his works. Since an up-to-date calendar of Gray's letters is already available, the focus has initially been on literary manuscripts, starting with poetry, but will eventually include Gray's prose works, personal papers, and marginalia.

Each work entry is designed to identify an item uniquely. It gives its uniform title and first line, language, date of first publication, standard editions, and a brief note on composition and first publication. Each of the manuscript entries in the finding aid provides basic bibliographic and archival information based on the EAD 2002 document type definition. Where available, the records contain links to digital surrogates of both the original manuscripts and the first printed edition of the work. All entries have been heavily interlinked to allow for easy access to e.g. source materials, electronic texts, glossary entries, and bibliographic records. As with the calendar of letters, individual categories such as the holding institution are selectable to narrow or re-focus the selection. Tooltips containing additional information are available for many of the categories displayed. This integrated finding aid builds on a number of print and online information sources, among which those listed in the bibliography have been particularly helpful and are herewith gratefully acknowledged.

Please note that the Archive neither controls nor is able to mediate access to the original manuscripts. Please consult with the repository holding the original manuscript using the contact information provided with each of the manuscript records. Although every effort has been made to trace the whereabouts of MSS, we cannot provide any guarantee as to their actual location, status, or availability. If you have questions or problems, please do not hesitate to contact the help desk for help or more information.