About the Project
Transforming Robert Tannahill began in spring 2013 as a term project for the Creighton University course "Introduction to Documentary Editing." This is a small section course taught by Dr. Greg Zacharias, Creighton Professor of English, Director of the Center for Henry James Studies, and Co-General Editor of the Complete Letters of Henry James. The course focuses on the theory and practice of scholarly editing, beginning with seminar discussion sections and concluding with a major course project in which students create their own editorial rationale and edit miniature editions.
The inspiration for this edition grew from the editor's connection with the Laboring Class Poets Online project as a researcher and database designer. Laboring Class Poets Online (LCPO) is a database of over 2,000 British working class poets who published from 1700-1900. The project began as a print edition three decades ago and is currently migrating to an online edition for ease of access. Dr. Bridget Keegan, the Eighteenth Century Editor for the LCPO project as well as a Creighton Professor of English and the current Dean of Arts and Sciences, suggested Robert Tannahill as an appropriate focus for the project.
I was extremely impressed by Tannahill's body of work, particularly poems that integrated elements of nature alongside poetic techniques. After listening to new recordings of Tannahill's songs directed by Dr. Fred Freeman, I was convinced that Tannahill was the appropriate poet to study. I determined to create a searchable, digital edition of Tannahill's nature poems and songs, integrating multimedia where appropriate, in order to deliver Tannahill's work in a largely unaltered form. This original iteration of the project included 25 poems and songs from Tannahill's first edition of his collected works, The soldier's return; a Scottish interlude in two acts: with other poems and songs, chiefly in the Scottish dialect. These poems and songs were selected thematically to fit my focus on Tannahill's use of pastoral and nature imagery in his work.
In spring 2014, I expanded the project to include all of Tannahill's poems and songs from his first edition. The project also became much more focused on truly transforming Tannahill's work through the application of digital humanities tools and methods to his texts, rather than simply reproducing them.
Finally, during summer 2014, I traveled to the University of Glasgow and worked with their special collections department to add many of Tannahill's holograph letters to Transforming Robert Tannahill. I created new transcriptions of Tannahill's correspondence directly from the manuscript versions of his letters and took photographs of the pieces to display alongside this text. I also searched for any other Tannahill material available, eventually finding a sonnet of Tannahill's that had never been previously included in any collection of his work.
Future goals for this project include:
Transforming Robert Tannahill has been supported by an undergraduate summer research grant from the Creighton College of Arts and Sciences and the Honors program, as well as the Creighton Center for Undergraduate Research and Study (CURAS).
The inspiration for this edition grew from the editor's connection with the Laboring Class Poets Online project as a researcher and database designer. Laboring Class Poets Online (LCPO) is a database of over 2,000 British working class poets who published from 1700-1900. The project began as a print edition three decades ago and is currently migrating to an online edition for ease of access. Dr. Bridget Keegan, the Eighteenth Century Editor for the LCPO project as well as a Creighton Professor of English and the current Dean of Arts and Sciences, suggested Robert Tannahill as an appropriate focus for the project.
I was extremely impressed by Tannahill's body of work, particularly poems that integrated elements of nature alongside poetic techniques. After listening to new recordings of Tannahill's songs directed by Dr. Fred Freeman, I was convinced that Tannahill was the appropriate poet to study. I determined to create a searchable, digital edition of Tannahill's nature poems and songs, integrating multimedia where appropriate, in order to deliver Tannahill's work in a largely unaltered form. This original iteration of the project included 25 poems and songs from Tannahill's first edition of his collected works, The soldier's return; a Scottish interlude in two acts: with other poems and songs, chiefly in the Scottish dialect. These poems and songs were selected thematically to fit my focus on Tannahill's use of pastoral and nature imagery in his work.
In spring 2014, I expanded the project to include all of Tannahill's poems and songs from his first edition. The project also became much more focused on truly transforming Tannahill's work through the application of digital humanities tools and methods to his texts, rather than simply reproducing them.
Finally, during summer 2014, I traveled to the University of Glasgow and worked with their special collections department to add many of Tannahill's holograph letters to Transforming Robert Tannahill. I created new transcriptions of Tannahill's correspondence directly from the manuscript versions of his letters and took photographs of the pieces to display alongside this text. I also searched for any other Tannahill material available, eventually finding a sonnet of Tannahill's that had never been previously included in any collection of his work.
Future goals for this project include:
- Developing a custom DTD (document type definition) to extend the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) XML format in order to fully transcribe Tannahill's letter to MLA standards
- Migrating all letter transcriptions to TEI-XML and releasing the source files for open download
- Finding a method to combine language tooltips with TEI-XML in order to migrate all poems and songs to TEI-XML
- Adding all remaining Tannahill poems, songs, and correspondence to the archive
- Continuing to expand the digital humanities focus of the website through further spatial and text analysis of the works
- Adding more traditional essays or blog-based close readings of Tannahill and his work
- Visualizing and analyzing Tannahill's relationship with other Scottish laboring class poets and songwriters
- Analyzing Tannahill's work from a psychoanalytic perspective for traces of depression
- Examining Tannahill's use of Scots language in his published work versus his personal correspondence, and whether these similarities or differences match with the habits of other Scottish writers
Transforming Robert Tannahill has been supported by an undergraduate summer research grant from the Creighton College of Arts and Sciences and the Honors program, as well as the Creighton Center for Undergraduate Research and Study (CURAS).