Consultancy: Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London

In preparing the AHRC bid Jim McLaverty had helpful discussions with the University of Hertford and with the Humanities Computing Unit at Oxford, but the most influential source of advice had been Marilyn Deegan at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s. CCH was therefore approached for advice in planning the electronic side of the project.

There were early meetings of the team that was going to prepare the archive with CUP and with representatives of CCH (Harold Short, Marilyn Deegan, Paul Spence, and others).

Subsequently Elena Pierazzo, a Research Associate at CCH, became responsible for liaising with the Swift team, and it was with her good advice and assistance that plans for the website developed.

The website was designed by Paul Vetch, a Research Fellow at CCH, liaising with the Swift team.

Looking to the future, CCH, in collaboration with Paddy Bullard, arranged for a pilot edition of a section of Gulliver’s Travels III, by Edward Vanhoutte and Ron Van den Branden: see the Prototype section.

Cambridge University Library

As the Archive was complementary to the Cambridge edition of Swift’s works, and as Harold Williams’s books and papers had been given to the Cambridge Library, it was decided that whenever possible the copies of the original materials should be taken from their holdings. A meeting was arranged with the Deputy Librarian Brian Jenkins and his colleagues, at which procedures were agreed. The copying of the material has been greatly assisted by the co-operation of the Head of Rare Books, Dr Jill Whitelock.

Digital Divide Data

CCH introduced the team to Digital Divide Data (DDD), a firm based in New York, providing ‘socially responsible outsourced digitization and IT’. The firm recruits and trains Cambodian and Lao staff from disadvantaged backgrounds. DDD was responsible for keying the great majority of the material obtained from libraries as photocopies or images. They worked directly from the images of the eighteenth-century materials and added a basic encoding devised at CCH. The resulting texts were then checked by members of the team or by postgraduate assistants in Oxford. Some supplementary keying has been undertaken by members of the team themselves.