Texting Wilde: A Biography Exegesis Project

three quarter view drawing of Oscar Wilde's face

Director: Jason Boyd

The Texting Wilde Project is creating an open access online digital repository of texts comprising the early (pre-1945) biographical discourse on Anglo-Irish writer Oscar Wilde (1864-1900) in order to study the complex genealogy, conflicting agendas, and fictionalizing dimensions of this foundational period of Wilde biography. This repository (prototype going online in Summer 2012) will consist of a bibliography of these pre-1945 texts, linked, where available, to online open access digitized versions, and eventually linked to digital editions. Currently the project is exploring how to customize TEI to facilitate machine-enabled identification and comparison of individual episodes and anecdotes, by marking up a selection of biographical texts.