The ‘final frontier’ for Lovecraft studies? Not only having all the Joshi-Shultz complete archive of Lovecraft’s letters placed online, in an electronic searchable scholarly edition — but also having that opened up for a 30-year programme of annotation and hyperlinking by scholars.
The big one
21 Saturday Sep 2013
Posted in Scholarly works
Is this in the works, somewhere?
Well the complete electronic archive of all known letters has been assembled as MS Word transcriptions, but it seems that the current arrangement is that an unpublished letter can only be had by bona fide scholars through S.T. Joshi, and that David Shultz is also willing to give scholars the results of a global keyword or phrase search run against the entire collection (like: “did Lovecraft’s letters ever mention Gissing?”).
I seem to remember hearing Joshi in an interview, saying something to the effect of: “well… I guess we shall have to get the complete letters archive online at some point, but I’m not sure how, and it’d be a big job…”
I’m just throwing into the mix the need to plan ahead and to build in an annotation and hyperlinking system, and to set up a structured programme of people to do that. Who knows, perhaps a rich foundation or someone’s posthumous legacy will come up with the funds to do it? I’d like to think that Google would offer to do it, since they have the expertise and funds, but they seem to be pulling in their horns and are perhaps starting in on the downward slope of the tech-company cycle.