Frankenstein Variorum

Welcome to our GitHub site! We are preparing a new digital variorum edition of the novel Frankenstein. Our edition is a digital collation of five distinct versions of the novel produced between 1816 and 1831. We launched our project in response to the bicentennial of Frankenstein’s first publication in 1818, thinking only to improve the comparison view of the 1818 and 1831 editions available on Romantic Circles. Since we launched, our project has grown into a more comprehensive effort to revive and rework earlier ambitious digital editions of the novel, from the Pennsylvania Electronic Edition of the mid 1990s onward. One of our projects is to bring together the 1816 manuscript notebook edition of the Shelley-Godwin Archive and the manuscript annotations of the Thomas copy into readable comparison with the print editions of the novel, to help students, scholars, and fans explore Frankenstein’s intensive, nonlinear revision history.

“Beta editions” ready for reading:

• Frankenstein Variorum Collation Data Tables: A work-in-progress view of the aligned collation data designed for the project team to review. You can search most of the novel across 5 different versions aligned in tables.

• The following are distinct editions prepared “under the hood” by correcting prior digital editions and preparing new digital editions the 1823 and Thomas edition. These files represent each edition prior to collation processing. Comparison data is not marked in these documents, but each is a distinct edition in its own right suitable for reading and annotation.

  • 1818 publication of Frankenstein.
    • Pitt-Greensburg classroom edition of the 1818 text (a copy of the same) for use in annotation assignments.

  • The Thomas copy, an edition representing Mary Shelley’s edits handwritten on an 1818 edition of the novel.

  • 1823 publication of Frankenstein (supervised by William Godwin).

  • 1831 publication of Frankenstein.

About Frankenstein and our variorum project:

Presentations

• The Pittsburgh Digital Frankenstein Project: Reassembling Textual Bodies: Presentation for the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh, Cathedral of Learning on 2 April 2018. Explanation of the project and range of collaborating people and institutions. Updated with material on latest full collation of manuscript notebooks, Thomas edition, and 1818, 1823, and 1831 published editions.

• Bicentennial Bits and Bytes: The Pittsburgh Digital Frankenstein Project: MLA 2018 panel presentation on our variorum edition project, reconciling previous digital editions, ongoing stylometric research, and annotation development.

• Frankenstein and Text Genetics: an introduction to the novel and its contexts, and our project’s connection with the Shelley-Godwin Archive

• a slide presentation by Elisa Beshero-Bondar and Raffaele Viglianti for the 2017 NASSR Conference on 11 August 2017: http://bit.ly/NASSR_BicFrank

• Balisage Proceedings for the Symposium on Up-Conversion and Up-Translation (31 July 2017): Rebuilding a digital Frankenstein by 2018: Towards a theory of losses and gains in up-translation

Contributors (alphabetically)

• Elisa E. Beshero-Bondar

• Steven Gotzler

• Jon Klancher

• Matthew Lincoln

• Rikk Mulligan

• John Quirk

• Emma Slayton

• Raffaele Viglianti

• Scott B. Weingart

• Avery J. Wiscomb

More resources, including editions of the 1823 and 1831 versions of the novel, will become available here as our project develops.