One of the goals of the North American Victorian Studies Association is to promote and support digital projects, as well as to aid in the publication of any superb Victorian scholarship that is finding it difficult to secure a scholarly home in the current book market. To that end, NAVSA has joined an initiative headed by Jerome McGann: NINES or Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship. This four-year initiative is being funded by Jerome McGann's $1.5 million Distinguished Achievement Award from the Mellon Foundation. The eventual goal of this initiative is to support not just digital work but Victorian scholarship generally, providing a tangible response to the crisis in humanities publishing. NINES aims to engage in the rethinking of literary and cultural studies -- in method as well as theory -- by establishing an institutionalized mechanism for new kinds of digital-based analytic and interpretive practices. NINES plans to support both born-digital and traditional academic scholarship, providing an alternative venue for the publication of important critical work, including work that is of great value to academics but of little monetary value to university presses (single-author studies, for example).
Some of the best existing digital projects in nineteenth-century British and American literature are represented on the NINES steering committee and these projects are willing to be represented in the NINES consortium, including Romantic Circles, the William Blake Archive, the Whitman Archive, the Rossetti Archive, the Swinburne Project, and Romanticism on the Net. A Tools Development Group (headed by Jerome McGann) is working under the auspices of NINES to assemble a suite of critical and editorial tools that can aid students and scholars who are involved in digital scholarship or who want to be. Finally, over the next three summers (starting in 2005) NINES will be funding about 10 individuals each year who will participate in an all-expenses paid trip to a week-long workshop at the U of Virginia's digital hub (Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, Applied Research in Patacriticism, Virginia Center for Digital History, SpecLab, and the Electronic Text Center).
By establishing an impeccable peer-review process, NINES will work to ensure that material published in the NINES environment will achieve legitimacy in the eyes of promotion committees. Three editorial boards will oversee work produced in the following areas: British Romanticism; British Victorian Studies; and Nineteenth-Century American Studies. On behalf of NAVSA and NINES, Dino F. Felluga has recently worked to establish an editorial board that will oversee the vetting and publication of new and extant work in the field of Victorian studies:
Amanda Anderson, Johns Hopkins University
Nancy Armstrong, Brown University
Susan Brown, University of Guelph, Canada
Joseph Childers, University of California, Riverside
Jay Clayton, Vanderbilt University
Michael Eberle-Sinatra, Université de Montréal
Andrew Elfenbein, University of Minnesota
Dino Felluga, Purdue University
Catherine Gallagher, University of California, Berkeley
Pamela Gilbert, University of Florida
Elaine Hadley, University of Chicago
Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, University of Nipissing
George Landow, Brown University
Michael Levenson, University of Virginia
Jerome McGann, University of Virginia
Andrew Miller, Indiana University
Leah Price, Harvard University
Linda Shires, Syracuse University
Garrett Stewart, University of Iowa
Herbert Tucker, University of Virginia
John Walsh, Indiana UniversityMichael Eberle-Sinatra, who is also a member of NAVSA's Executive Council, will deal with issues related to NINES's XML environment, aided by Susan Brown and John Walsh, all of whom have extensive experience in XML and the digitization of humanities scholarship.
For more information, have a look at the NINES web site: http://www.nines.org/. The website contains information about our planned summer workshops in electronic editing and presents guidelines for potential NINES contributors. It also lists scholars serving on our Romantic, Victorian, and Americanist editorial boards, describes exciting analytical and pedagogical tools under construction, and offers a reading list and full description of the NINES project.
We invite conversation and participation, and hope you will join us in our grassroots effort to shape humanities publication and computer-assisted scholarship. If you have a project that you think might fit into NINES, or that you would like to submit as a project for the Virginia summer workshops, feel free to e-mail me at either felluga@purdue.edu or victorian@nines.org. Keep in mind that Jerome McGann's seminar at this year's NAVSA conference will be dedicated to the NINES initiative.
