This edition is still being developed and proofed. Please do
not cite this preview until this notice is removed.
The editors welcome suggestions and corrections (see link above).
The editors would like to thank The Ohio State University Libraries for permission to publish this edition of Samuel Sullivan Cox's "Journal of a Tour to Europe" and to incorporate images of the manuscript held in the Rare Books and Manuscript Library. Dr. Geoffrey D. Smith, Head of Rare Books and Manuscripts, introduced the principal editor to the Cox journal and suggested that he and his students edit the volumen. Lisa Iacobellis , Assistant Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts, scanned the manuscript pages to exacting standards, and Harry Campbell, Book and Paper Conservator for the Ohio State University Libraries, not only undertook the restoration of the journal required before we could work with it, he also agreed to be interviewed about the project, and do much of the restoration, on camera so that this edition could document the alteration of the physical artifact. Harry also provided several photographs of the journal at various stages during its restoration and of various workspaces in the Conservation Division.
Professor Cynthia Selfe helped to film the restoration of the journal, and Richard Selfe provided valuable advice concerning the audio edition that accompanies the text edition.
Deborah Mulhearn, an independent journalist based in Liverpool, England, graciously spent an hour talking with us by phone about her multivolume collection of writing about Liverpool over the past 800 years (Liverpool celebrates its 800th anniversary in 2007). She helped us see Cox's journal in a broader context of travellers' recollections of Liverpool, which served as the European terminus for the Cunard and other steamship lines during the mid-nineteenth century.
Professors Richard Dutton, Alan Farmer, and Lisa Kiser of the Ohio State Department of English helped to resolve some unique editorial problems.
This electronic textual edition also depends on technical support from a number of organizations and individuals at The Ohio State University. The College of Humanities (COH) hosts this Web site and the XML publishing system used by the edition on the Humanities Network, managed by the Humanities Information Systems (HIS) staff. James Cheng, HIS Senior Systems Developer, installed and configured Apache's Cocoon XML publishing application, and Jody Croley Jones, HIS Web Services Manager, created the code behind the comments and corrections page, allowing the editors to respond to readers' feedback. Paul Kotheimer, HIS Instruction Media Specialist, helped design the audio edition, served as audio engineer and editor for the recording sessions, and compressed the audio files for streaming over the Web. Scott Sprague, HIS Electronic Media Producer, consulted with the project concerning video formats and compressed the video files for streaming over the Web.
High-resolution images of the manuscipt pages are housed on the Colleges of the Arts and Sciences Media Manager application, which allows the edition to provide users with zoomable views and numerous detail views of the manuscript pages on the fly, all from archived master images. George Abraham, Web Applications Developer, and Allen Coleman, Digital Library Developer, offered frequent advice and encouragement for our custom applications of the Media Manager image server.
Finally, we would like to thank the Digital Media Project (DMP) in the Department of English at The Ohio State University, which provided classroom support for the editorial team. The director of the DMP, Professor Scott Lloyd Dewitt, generously allocated funds from the DMP to purchase a classroom license for the specialized XML-editing software used by the editorial team.
Links
Ohio State University Libraries
Rare Books and Manuscript Library
Conservation
Division, Preservation Office, OSU Libraries
Media Manager
Humanities Information Systems
Digital Media Project