NeuRoN

 

Compiled and Edited by Nicholas Mason (Brigham Young University)

Created in conjunction with the 2017 relaunch of Romanticism on the Net (RoN), NeuRoN functions as a new nerve center for digital research on British Romanticism, offering a stable, extensive, and up-to-date catalog of web-based resources in the field. NeuRoN lists, describes, and links to online archives, databases, indexes, and editions that are at once sufficiently reliable for scholarly use and directly relevant to British literature and culture of the “Romantic Century” (1750-1850).

Covering both open-access and subscription resources, NeuRoN groups sites into the 16 categories (General Research, Literary Texts, etc.) listed in the left-hand menu of this and subsequent pages. Each category has a dedicated subpage, and some resources are listed in multiple categories (e.g., the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery appears under both “Drama, Music, & Popular Culture” and “Art and Visual Culture”). The search icon in the bottom right corner of each page’s masthead allows keyword searches of NeuRoN and other RoN content.

Individual entries include:

• The title of the website or database (hyperlinked to open in a separate tab)
• The name(s) of the resource’s creator, sponsor, and/or editor
• The year of its initial publication or most recent update. Closed dates (e.g., 2004) are used for resources that are either static (a one-time release not designed for subsequent updates) or dormant (with the year indicating the most recent update). Open-ended dates (e.g., 2006- ) mark ongoing projects (with the year indicating when the resource first appeared).
• A one-line summary of the resource’s scope and primary utility for researchers of British Romanticism.
• A  symbol if the resource is only available to individual/institutional subscribers.

The editor, Nicholas Mason, welcomes corrections, updates, and notice of omissions or broken links.

Credits

The genesis for NeuRoN came during the 2017 annual meeting of the Book History Caucus of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism. Concerned that several important new digital resources in the field were being overlooked or underused, caucus members — especially Julia Carlson, Gary Kelly, Michelle Levy, Nick Mason, and Paul Westover — began laying the groundwork for a central, Romanticism-specific aggregator site in the tradition of Alan Liu’s Voice of the Shuttle , Jerome McGann’s NINES (directed afterwards by Andrew Stauffer and now Michael E. Sinatra), and Laura Mandell’s 18thConnect (now directed by Emily Friedman).

Since the Voice of the Shuttle project was discontinued in the early 2000s, various organizations and individual scholars have attempted to fill the void with digital bibliographies of their own. Such sites have tended to go fallow after a few years, but many remain accessible. Especially useful in the creation of this catalog were lists by the British Association for Romantic Studies, the Romantic Illustration Network, Adriana Craciun, Katherine D. Harris, and Michelle Levy.

The NeuRoN masthead features a detail from James Gillray’s 1808 print Very Slippery-Weather and is used courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Special thanks to Alayna Een for her valuable suggestions and keen editorial eye.