From Archive to Database: Using Crowdsourcing, TEI, and Collaborative Labor to Construct the Maria Edgeworth Letters Project

This article unpacks the archival, textual, and encoded layers that comprise the Maria Edgeworth Letters Project (MELP), an open-access digital archive containing the correspondence of the Anglo-Irish Regency author Maria Edgeworth and her circle. These layers reveal the impossibility of flattening or standardizing our work and instead advocate for a more inclusive and collaborative digital humanities model that accommodates both institutional and volunteer labor. Just as different methods were used to approach each archive and manage our project across multiple institutions, each transcription requires a different level of care, especially as various notes and collaborators are cited in the final project. Through the use of TEI, we can flexibly represent diverse aspects of each letter while still maintaining a database-readable structure. We endeavor to connect each person, place, or work identified in Edgeworth's letters and our database to a larger network of linked data in order to place our project in conversation with other archival resources. For entities that are unidentified or unknown, we create new name authority files or produce internal data files that can be viewed by our collaborators and users. MELP's flexible structure thus allows it to strive for interoperability while refusing to efface the individual traces of its collaborators, entities, and material artifacts.