Communities of Collaboration: Building the Maria Edgeworth Letters Project

The Maria Edgeworth Letters Project (MELP) is a digital, searchable, open-access archive of Edgeworth's correspondence that is building a collaborative international community, simulating the sprawling network encompassed in her letters, and demonstrating how Edgeworthstown in Ireland became an important node in the exchange and production of knowledge in the Romantic period. With more than 15,000 manuscript pages from over thirty archives, MELP crowdsources transcriptions through the Zooniverse platform, edits and encodes them through collaborative workflows across five universities, and assembles taxonomies of people, places, and works mentioned in the letters in order to create a sustainable digital project.