From Oxford U. Press:
Oxford University Press made its prestigious and world-renowned collection of scholarly editions available online for the first time today through Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO).
Launching with 171 editions of works written by authors principally active between 1485 and 1660, OSEO contains the original texts of approximately 12,000 works, including 200 plays, some 7000 poems, and more than 5000 letters.
It will provide trustworthy and reliable critical editions of original works by some of the most important writers in the humanities, such as William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, as well as works from lesser-known writers such as Shackerley Marmion. In doing so it will open up research possibilities to students and academics by providing them with the ability to search and compare works of English Literature, Philosophy, History, and Religion.
Here’s a list of titles available as of today.
Sophie Goldsworthy, OSEO Project Director, has posted an overview of the new resource on the Oxford University Press Blog:
We decided that we needed to organize the content on the site along two axes: editions and works. Our research underlined the need to preserve this link with print, not only for scholars and students who may want to use the online version of a particular edition, but also for librarians keen to curate digital content alongside their existing print holdings. And yet we also wanted to put the texts themselves front and centre. So we have constructed the site in both ways. You can use it to navigate to a familiar edition, travelling to a particular page, and even downloading a PDF of the print page, so you can cite from OSEO with authority. But you can also see each author’s works in aggregate and move straight to an individual play, poem, or letter, or to a particular line number or scene. Our use of XML has allowed us to treat the different elements of each edition separately: the notes keep pace with the text, and different features can be toggled on and off. This also drives a very focused advanced search — you can search within stage directions or the recipients of letters, first lines or critical apparatus — all of which speeds your journey to the content genuinely of most use to you.
Direct to OSEO Web Site
About Gary Price
