John Ashbery's "The Skaters": digital edition and archive

It is my great pleasure to announce Robin Seguy's  genetic edition of John Ashbery's great poem "The Skaters." This is the first in the newly created Text/works series, a digital library that intends to make freely accessible critical editions and analytic tools for an array of 19th to 21st century French and American poetry collections.

We are very grateful to John and David Kermani for making the typescripts, as well as the text of the poem, available.

In its current state, this edition offers:

     – a plain text version of the poem, with optional display of the lines and stanza numbers;

     – the transcription of two typescript drafts of the poem, as well as 20 poems and fragments—18 of which are unpublished,—pertaining to the first typescript's dossier. The genetic dossier is displayed, with all variants, in four formats: HTML and XML-TEI, along high-resolution image files and searchable PDFs of the original pages;

     – three annotated versions of the text: one showing “referential” data such as names, places, time markers, etc., the second the use of personal pronouns, and the third thematic data such as sounds, colors and weather notations throughout the text;

     – a full searchable index, with links to the poem lines;

     – a few elements of quantitative analysis, such as number of occurrences and frequencies for lexical items, etc.

http://www.text-works.org/