Project
Digital Dickens Notes Project

Project Team
Anna Gibson, Project Co-director, North Carolina State University
Adam Grener, Project Co-director, Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington
Scott Bailey, Technical Lead, Hightouch
Frankie Goodenough, Contributor, Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington
Niqui O’Neill, Contributor, Stanford University
Isabel Parker, Contributor, Wellington City Council,

Project URLs
Project Website: https://www.dickensnotes.com
Public Repository: http://www.github.com/dickensnotes

Project Reviewer
Beverley Park Rilett, Auburn University

Project Overview

Anna Gibson and Adam Grener

The Digital Dickens Notes Project (DDNP) is an online critical edition of the working notes that Charles Dickens used during serial composition of many of his novels. The DDNP website presents visually faithful color transcriptions of the manuscript pages of the working notes, accompanied by editorial annotations and critical introductions, aiming to immerse a broad audience in Dickens’s compositional process. The current version of the website (v1.2, released November 2023) presents transcriptions, annotations, and introductions for the working notes for four novels: David Copperfield (1849-1850), Bleak House (1852-53), Hard Times (1854), and Little Dorrit (1855-57).

The DDNP is directed by Anna Gibson and Adam Grener and emerged from their archival examination of the working note manuscripts, most of which are held by the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Scholars have long recognized the importance of these pages — one Note per monthly installment — for Dickens’s navigation of serial composition, but their significance has been underappreciated due to the difficulties of accessing their rich materiality. While they have typically been seen as “planning” documents, the DDNP harnesses the digital environment to help users interact with the notes as documents of process. Our transcriptions and accompanying scholarly apparatus capture and communicate the notes’ material richness, foregrounding Dickens’s use of the notes before, during, and after composition of a given installment. Dickens used these notes to “plan,” but also to consider possibilities, raise questions, ponder alternatives, document decisions, and even to instruct and remind himself month-to-month. The DDNP helps readers engage with the open-ended nature of serial composition, cultivating an appreciation of the contingencies, indecisions, and elongated developments that characterized Dickens’s craft.

The DDNP facilitates engagement with the processural nature of the notes in three ways. At the heart of the project are transcriptions of the working notes. Each transcribed manuscript page is presented as an image in Mirador, a zoomable viewer leveraging IIIF standards. Our transcriptions capture the size and placement of text on the page (as well as obvious changes in ink color), and communicate the visual appearance of the notes through hand-drawn approximations of non-textual markings such as underlines, checkmarks, and deletions. Transcriptions were created in Adobe Photoshop by Isabel Parker and Frankie Goodenough, students at VUW whose participation was funded by grants and summer scholarships. Second, the transcriptions are accompanied by extensive editorial annotations that illuminate their significance for the novel-in-process. Grounded in archival research that analyzes the notes alongside a novel’s manuscript and corrected proofs, annotations interpret the temporal dynamics of the notes and their significance for the published novel. Third, the DDNP website offers a general introduction aimed at a general readership, a scholarly introduction aimed at advanced students and scholars, critical introductions to each set of notes, and pedagogical resources for teaching with the notes.

The DDNP website was designed and built by Scott Bailey, with support from Niqui O’Neill. The website is built on the Javascript web framework Astro, hosted on Vercel, and uses a search function powered by Lunr. Annotations were created in Annonatate. The code and annotations reside in public repositories on GitHub. An article about the project, which explores its critical interventions and scholarly significance, was published in the 2022 issue of Victorians Institute Journal.

Project Review

Beverley Park Rilett

The Digital Dickens Notes Project (DDNP) enables users to explore Charles Dickens's working notes, which he created as he wrote and published his novels. The notes, typically one sheet for each monthly or weekly serial installment, have been transformed to aid research into Dickens’s methods. Rather than photographs of the barely legible notes, the project provides "visually faithful" transcriptions, preserving the ink colors, non-textual markings, erasures, and word positioning. 

The DDNP website offers seamless navigation through a wide range of visual and textual sources, using the Mirador open-source document viewer application. Users can zoom, compare, and spatially explore visualizations of the transcribed notes. The transcriptions and accompanying annotations are based on extensive archival research and analysis, with critical introductions providing valuable contextual information for each section of notes. The project epitomizes how the digital interface can illuminate the visual and textual record of Dickens’s creative process. 

The project currently encompasses the working notes for four of Dickens’s fifteen novels — David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, and Little Dorrit — with plans to add the three additional novels for which notes exist. The DDNP already has become a vital resource for Dickens scholars, providing new insights into the author’s writing. As a free, open-access digital initiative, the project democratizes access to Dickens’s notes, particularly benefiting scholars unable to visit London to view the originals. The DDNP’s transcribed renderings enhance the notes’ readability and accessibility, even for scholars with access to the manuscript images or printed plain text versions. As the project expands to include the notes for all of Dickens’s novels, its value for scholars will only continue to grow, influencing future readings and interpretations.

Beyond its innovative transcriptions, annotations, and critical introductions, the DDNP models sound technical choices. The website is built on a non-commercial, open-source application with strong community support. In addition to the Mirador viewer interface previously mentioned, the website’s technical details include development on Astro, hosting on Vercel, and a search function powered by Lunr. Transcription images were created with Adobe Photoshop and Annonatate was used to compile annotations. The code, annotations, and developers’ notes are publicly available on GitHub, reflecting exemplary data management and documentation practices.

Adding photographs of the original handwritten Notes alongside the transcribed images is a possibility the project leaders are already contemplating, according to a recent article. Although the manuscript photographs are unnecessary to fully engage with the DDNP in its current form, adding them could make the viewing and interpretive experience more interactive. Two minor suggestions could be implemented over time: adapting the project’s nickname from DDNP to DickensNotes, because acronyms are more difficult to recall; and migrating the domain name from DickensNotes.com to DickensNotes.org, aligning with academic digital humanities projects' typical use of the organization extension rather than a commercial extension. But even without any further adjustments, the DDNP stands as a stellar model of digital humanities scholarship.