"A Dictionary of Sensibility" is a collaborative student project that came out of a graduate seminar led by Jerome McGann and Patricia Meyer Spacks in the fall of 1995. For the rationale of the project, I quote the Dictionary's introduction: "This hypertext offers a new approach towards understanding the language of eighteenth-century sensibility. It provides an atmospheric view of the multiple connotations of the terms of that language. Rather than attempting strict definitions, this project offers a tool for recognizing the multivalence of such words as 'virtue,' 'enthusiasm,' and 'community.' Our hypertext collects excerpts from primary texts of sensibility and scatters them among twenty-four key terms. We imagine the sensible reader exploring these passages to understand the different vocabularies of the period."
The project was originally to be an anthology and, in an early consensus, we decided to make it hypertextual. From the beginning, we wanted to avoid certain features common to many scholarly hypertexts. For instance, we did not want an image-based, documentary archive; nor did we want a complex interface that was short on intellectual content. Our real aim was to make a hypertext in which navigating through the project would necessarily involve drawing out conceptual connections; to this end, a dictionary seemed perfect. By establishing a set of diverse terms (or keywords, like "heart" and "character") that would be relevant to our excerpts from the primary literature of sensibility, we ensured that the project would have two competing content areas: a list of terms and a group of passages. Neither area could take precedence; the terms were to interpret the passages, and the passages were to generate the terms. With every term linked to multiple passages, and every passage linked to multiple terms, the structure of the Dictionary would be reconstituted every time someone navigated through it. Rather than limit our interpretive intervention to the correlation of terms and passages, we agreed to append to each passage a few exigetical comments -- usually suggestive, never conclusive -- toward the end of raising interpretive questions about the primary literature.
It was surprisingly easy for us to construct a termlist; much more difficult were the commentaries on the passages. Group members had different ideas about what kinds of questions comments should raise, how extensive they should be, to what degree they should be grounded in a critical literature -- really, we diverged on every methodological and stylistic point conceivable. We decided (for obvious pragmatic reasons, but also in the name of heterogeneity) that we would each contribute a number of entries; every entry would include a passage from the literature of sensibility along with a few critical comments. Every entry would be hyperlinked to several terms in the termlist, but would necessarily be written entirely according to its author's own predilections. The volatile results of this loose collaboration will quickly be noticed by anyone who browses the Dictionary. As a final gesture toward synthesis, each group member would write an introduction to several of the terms, incorporating the separate selections and insights of every other group member who had contributed entries to that term. In the final analysis, though, the term introductions are just as heterogeneous as the entries themselves.
Since the Dictionary's publication on the World Wide Web, it has received an incredible response. There are over two hundred web-links to the site. Most of these links come from course syllabi (undergraduate and graduate) and online collections of humanities sites (such as Alan Liu's "Voice of the Shuttle" and Jack Lynch's collection of eighteenth-century e-texts). There are links from Bedford Books and the History Channel. Other links have appeared on organizational pages, biographical pages, general reference pages, and many academic resource pages of various kinds. Several professors -- at the University of Virginia and elsewhere -- have found the project to be a useful context to bring into their eighteenth-century literature courses, and it has been cited as an exemplar of innovative online humanities work.
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