This digital collaboration aims at allowing readers to engage with multiple, different representations and readings of Hester Pulter’s striking verse. The distinctive nature of the project is that it does not adopt an editorial process that strives to establish a single, ideal edited form for these works, but instead endorses multiple, equally authorized versions as a way to foreground the complexity of Pulter’s poetics and the affordances of scholarly editing in the digital age.
The Pulter Project seeks to pull back the editorial curtain to reveal to readers the often invisible decisions underwriting the making of poetry and poets. At the core of our site is a tool, powered by the Versioning Machine, featuring side-by-side versions of each poem. These versions include:high-resolution, zoomable photographic facsimiles of manuscript pages; transcriptions of the poems that capture changes by the main scribe, Pulter (probably), and the manuscript’s first readers; elemental editions: deliberately pared-down modernizations with minimal notes; amplified editions: commissioned from experts to foreground different aspects of Pulter’s verse.
http://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/about-the-project.html
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