Ossian Online: Building an Interdisciplinary Research Environment

This presentation will introduce the early stages ofOssian Online, a new research initiative to archive and edit James Macphersons profoundly influential work of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European culture. The project will deploy digital technologies to pilot a new crowdsourcing model of scholarly collaboration.Ossian Onlinewill build a multinational online interpretive community through the establishment of a virtual research environment. The talk will introduce the works of theOssiancanon and describe the desired outcomes of the new project. The work is much discussed but rarely read, so the paper will outline the rationale for returning the focus of Ossianic discourse to the original texts and print culture in which it first appeared. Progress on digitising and encoding major editions from Macphersons lifetime (between 1760 and 1773) is ongoing, and plans for completing a new critical edition which will visualise the development of the works texts across this period will be discussed. A central part ofOssian Onlinewill involve building an online research environment to facilitate crowdsourced annotation and interpretation ofOssian, harnessing the interdisciplinary reach and appeal of the work. The projects ultimate objectives are to use digital technologies to challenge national and disciplinary models of previous literary criticism which have impeded full appreciation of the cultural importance and significance ofOssian.