The 'Early Ruskin Manuscripts': Critical and practical considerations for building an electronic edition

This thesis outlines my experience working as an intern for the Early Ruskin Manuscripts, 1826–1842 (ERM). The scope of my internship was to support the development of ERM, a scholarly electronic edition of John Ruskin’s earliest works. After an introduction to ERM, I bring to bear several prevailing critical analyses—including hypertext theory, scholarly editing, electronic editing, and the economics of print and hypertext—on the goals of the project and the work I completed. Following this detailed discussion, I make the following conclusions and recommendations in Chapter VI: (1) The drawings and figures that Ruskin drew in his manuscripts should be encoded in-line and treated as data within ERM. (2) Electronic editors are in fact information architects. (3) Small-scale modeling should be incorporated into the development workflow of fledgling electronic editions to the greatest extent possible. (4) Assisting in the creation of an electronic edition is an extremely valuable pedagogical experience. (5) Kenneth M. Price’s assertion that scholarly editing must produce knowledge1 should be the goal and litmus test of any scholarly electronic edition.;1Price, Kenneth M. “24. Electronic Scholarly Editions.” A Companion to Digital Literary Studies. Ed. Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. 2 Oct. 2010 .