This project is a collaboration between Dr. Betty Schellenberg, Professor in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University, and the Digital Humanities Innovation Lab.
Manuscript Verse Miscellanies 1700-1820 is a searchable database that describes hundreds of manuscript poetry books found within multiple libraries and archives across the United States and the United Kingdom. These handwritten books—which Schellenberg has termed "manuscript verse miscellany"—contain both original poetry as well as poetry copied from print sources. These books were created in order to be shared within a social network; in other words, they functioned as sort of an 18th century TikTok: the compilers of these miscellanies would find, adapt, remix, and reassemble poems and combine them with their own or their friends’ poetry in order to create unique literary compositions.
The act of compiling is central to this project: the original authors of the miscellanies compiled materials to create them and the project team has collected the metadata for these books—previously scattered across libraries and archives—and compiled it into a database, making new explorations of the books and their social networks possible.
Through the database, Schellenberg and her team are attempting to determine the common organizational, decorative, authorial, and thematic features that can be identified among these artefacts. Ultimately, Schellenberg hopes to use the database to define manuscript verse miscellany as a new literary genre.