Tracing Elizabeth Cobbold’s “Ode on the Victory of Waterloo” (1815) across The Stainforth Library | The Stainforth Library of Women's Writing

This MLA 2014 exhibit of the Stainforth Library will demonstrate what we can learn from tracing Elizabeth Cobbold’s poem “Ode to the Victory of Waterloo” (1815) across the various facets of the Stainforth Library project as well as the processes of building the Library. Here, you will find brief explanations or illustrations of the following aspects of our work:

Manuscript transcription for Cobbold’s entry
TEI encoding of her poem “Ode to the Victory of Waterloo”
Visualizing where Cobbold’s poem lived on Stainforth’s library bookshelves
Mapping Cobbold’s professional network
Example: use of the Stainforth Library as a pedagogical tool
Example: use of the Stainforth Library in a dissertation chapter on nineteenth-century libraries

We selected Cobbold’s “Ode on the Victory at Waterloo” for this display because it is not anthologized, it was written and published during Stainforth’s lifetime, we have a unique early copy of this poem in the Women Poets of the Romantic Period Collection at CU-Boulder, and finally, because Cobbold was a writer with a broad literary network that spanned disciplines—an attribute that makes her an especially compelling author to study and that shows the broad scope of women writers’ contributions to 19^th-century book culture.

Pardon Our Progress We urge you to bear in mind that this is a project in its early phases of development. We created this multi-faceted, non-traditional presentation in order to represent our processes and early products in a transparent fashion that reveals the breadth of our engagement as much as the rough edges of early methodologies. This is the stage of a DH project that rarely gets air-time. At our workstation, we invite you to be a fly on the wall, so to speak, and listen or observe as collaborators from three different departments and at different stages of their careers learn from one another in recorded interviews, articulate their unique interests in the project, get to know their data set, imagine what they want to build with it, receive some funding, and draw up plans to begin. We welcome your feedback on our work, including ways that you would find this project-in-progress useful for your own research. Send us feedback at sca@colorado.edu or add your entry to our feedback “wish list” notebook at the workstation.