Recovery of Literary Manuscripts

Recovery of Literary Manuscripts is an interdisciplinary project applying multispectral imaging to the study of modern anglophone literature.

Founded in 2021 by Michael J Sullivan (PI, Oxford), the project is developing new techniques to restore lost lines of literary manuscripts, revealing more of the world’s extant literature that has remained beyond the reach of critics.

Recovery of Literary Manuscripts has benefitted from seed funding from the Oxford Faculty of English and from Christ Church, Oxford.

Multispectral Imaging in Progress

Digital Scholarly Editing & Analysis

Development of customised and portable instruments has informed our investigations and analysis, allowing them to be taken to any archive or collection and informing the act of critical interpretation and scholarly editing

Multispectral Imaging

  • We image a manuscript under many wavelengths of light, from infrared to ultraviolet and the visible spectrum in between
  • Advanced digital processing combines and statistically reorganises these many wavelengths
  • The resulting images enable visibility and restoration beyond the visible spectrum

Before and After Animation

Project Researchers
& Advisory Board

Our interdisciplinary project is an Arts-STEM collaboration between Literature, Digital Humanities, Imaging Science and Photophysics

Photograph of Michael Sullivan

Michael J Sullivan

Principal Investigator

University of Oxford

Michael J Sullivan is Lecturer in English at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, and General Editor of The Complete Works of Alfred Tennyson for Oxford University Press.

Photograph of Andrew Beeby

Andrew Beeby

University of Durham

Andrew Beeby is Professor of Chemistry at the University of Durham, where his interests lie in the fields of photochemistry and photophysics.

Roger Easton Jr

Advisory Board Member

Rochester Institute of Technology

Nora Crook

Advisory Board Member

Anglia Ruskin University

Keith Knox

Advisory Board Member

Rochester Institute of Technology

Forthcoming

Reading Behind the Lines:
Ghost Texts & Spectral Imaging in the Manuscripts of Alfred Tennyson

by Michael J Sullivan, Roger Easton Jr., Andrew Beeby

This article conducts the first sustained application of multispectral imaging and image processing to the study of modern anglophone literature. The article recovers previously unreadable variants in the manuscripts of Alfred Tennyson, pioneers methods of multispectral processing as a literary-critical act in itself, and theorises the consequences of its restored lines and wider applicability as a new critical method.

Digitally stripping away deletions in manuscripts has transformative consequences for our relations with literary archives, turning previously examined collections into untapped repositories of lost literary lines now newly visible.

The research goes beyond recovering obscured and environmentally damaged lines, advancing processing techniques for corroding nineteenth-century inks and theorising its applications for editing and genetic criticism. The article’s conclusion offers a theorisation and critical conceptualisation of how each of these methods can contribute to the formal and intellectual-historical study of modern manuscripts.

The article therefore advances the future of digital editing and textual criticism as a form of literary criticism, offers a reading of newly restored lines, and theorises the potential of its new methods for analysis of material composition, preservation, and literary form.

Forthcoming, The Review of English Studies

News

The Complete Works of Alfred Tennyson

Results from Recovery of Literary Manuscripts are informing The Complete Works of Alfred Tennyson (Oxford University Press), General Editor: Michael J Sullivan; Advisory General Editor: Catherine Phillips

The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley

Results from Recovery of Literary Manuscripts are informing The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Johns Hopkins University Press), through collaboration with Nora Crook (co-General Editor with Neil Fraistat). Material has been imaged from Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley

Conventional Digitization

Events & Talks

Michael J. Sullivan, ‘Reading Behind the Lines: Ghost Texts & Spectral Imaging in Modern Literary Manuscripts’, Oxford Centre for Textual Editing & Theory, Faculty of English, Oxford, 20 November 2024