Textual Decisions

It is necessary to give an explanation of the decisions made for the site in terms of its presentation of textual material and different versions of text. This project is a pilot, in part working to test out difficulties involved in presenting Wordsworth's manuscripts electronically for a larger project. As a result, we have been consciously experimental with the materials, trying out different ways of presenting texts. The "Speculative Texts" are a good example of this (see below).

On the site, texts appear in four states:

• as a photographic image of the manuscript page

• as a photographic image of the Cornell transcription page (static)

• as a transcription of the manuscript page linked to the database (searchable)

• as a reading text fully linked to the database (searchable)

For reasons of resource, because of the nature of the project as a pilot and because of the pre-existence of the published Cornell volumes we have not presented all the manuscript texts in fully searchable forms (although this could be done later).

At present they appear as follows:

Home at Grasmere

Early Prelude MS JJ