Digitising the Manuscript Letters of John Ruskin

The first stage of this project was funded through the Friends of the National Libraries Digitisation & Open Access Fund and explored how machine learning can reveal hidden patterns in Ruskin’s correspondence. Working with postgraduate students, we digitised a sample of Ruskin’s letters and ran a series of experiments using the digital transcriptions to explore establishing new possibilities for research and digitisation of the c10,000 manuscript letters in The Ruskin Whitehouse Collection. The project has now been extended to transcription of Ruskin’s notebooks and to building the framework for an open source edited collection of Ruskin’s letters online.

A handwritten letter pictured next to the digitally coded transcript of that letter. — Encoded transcription and digital image of Ruskin’s letter to Joan Severn, 2 July 1867, MSL 6/4/4 © The Ruskin, Lancaster University

Project Leads: Professor Sandra Kemp, The Ruskin, and Dr Chris Donaldson, School of Global Affairs