This digital edition has been
peer reviewed by Romantic Circles. It is among the first Romantic Circles projects to be
set up as a static website, in keeping with best practices for preservation.
[1]
If you find errors of any
kind, textual or technical, please email the Technical Editor for this edition,
Laura Mandell. For the full team, see People
below.
As explained in greater
detail in the Editor's Introduction, the digital
Lyrical Ballads project was first released in 1998 by Romantic
Circles and has been revived in 2026.
This digital edition can be reused and shared because it has a Creative Commons Zero
license.
Originally coded in the SGML version of TEI.2, the 25 files of each witness were transformed using a Python Script to render tags compatible with TEI/XML, Protocol 5. After validating against a TEI All Schema as TEI/XML (P5 Version 4.11.0), XSL transforms were used to create the editions.html page, to create web pages for each witness and volume, to splurge out the XML witnesses and volumes into separate item files, to create single-item web pages, and to create comparison pages for each item. Python and transforms are only used to prepare the files for uploading and archving. That is, the XSLTs do NOT run on the fly: everything is run beforehand and the resulting html files with their css and js are uploaded to static server space that is publicly available. A static search engine is forthcoming.
| TEI/XML download | CSS download | JavaScript download | XSLT download |
Further information is offered in the Technical Editor's Introduction.
How the files have been named: In all except a few special cases, the file names for the editions are made up of "LB" — for Lyrical Ballads —, then the last two digits of the year published (1798, 1800, 1802, 1805), whether it has a Bristol imprint or a London, and then initials for a particular library. For example, LB98-Bbl, is a copy of version of the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads published by Joseph Cottle in Bristol (B), currently held by the British Library (bl). The irregularity of the file names have been preserved for the sake of preserving the publication history of this digital edition.
A main folder contains all of the downloadable folders above. LBObjectsGrouped.xml should be in the main folder; cfisonMain.css needs to be in a compare folder along with the html pages generated by running LBOjectsGrouped.xml using compare.xsl.
Bruce Graver: Bruce Graver is Emeritus Professor of English, Providence College. He edited Wordsworth’s Translations of Chaucer and Virgil for the Cornell Wordsworth (1998), co-authored with Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum Peggy Webling and the Story Behind Frankenstein (Bloomsbury, 2024), and wrote The Stereoscopic Picturesque (Liverpool UP, 2025). He is currently preparing, with Patrick Vincent, editions of Mary and Dorothy Wordsworth’s 1820 Continental Travel Journals for Liverpool UP, as well as a short biography of William Wordsworth for Reaktion Books’ Critical Lives series. Contact
Laura Mandell: Laura Mandell is Professor of English and Presidential Impact Fellow at Texas A&M University where she founded, and for 12 years directed, the Center of Digital Humanities Research. She is the author of Breaking the Book: Print Humanities in the Digital Age (2015), Misogynous Economies (in 18thC Literature, 1999), and numerous articles and chapters. Dr. Mandell is Technical Director for Romantic Circles and the Texas A&M Digital Cultural Heritage Project, including this edition of Lyrical Ballads and the Criticism Archive. She spearheaded the Early Modern OCR Project or “eMOP,” a project concerned with improving OCR for early modern and 18th-c. texts via high performance and cluster computing, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Dr. Mandell’s digital projects also include the Digital Mary Leapor’s Poetry, and Digital Editions, Start to Finish, an open access textbook for creating digital editions. Contact
Ronald Tetreault: Dr. Tetreault, Professor of English and European Studies, Dalhouisie University, was co-editor of the original digital edition of Lyrical Ballads.
Pratham Tushar Shah: Pratham Shah is a master’s student at UCB in Data Science who likes building websites, working with data, and making digital things a little more thoughtful and a little easier to use. When he’s not debugging or organizing content, he’s probably overthinking design details in the best possible way. Contact