Features

The site has a number of features intended to facilitate examination and use of the materials:

Bibliographical Description.  A technical bibliographical description is provided for each volume or artifact presented on the site.  This description includes the collation formula for each printed edition and notes on the variant contents of particular copies.   Additional information on format, physical makeup, and provenance are provided for each manuscript, as well as comments on the place of the volume’s texts in the transmissional history of Donne poems.   For a comprehensive account of each printed edition, see Geoffrey Keynes, A Bibliography of the Works of Dr. John Donne, Dean of St. Paul 's. 4th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973).

Volume Index.  Users may toggle back and forth between an alphabetized list of titles or a page-ordered table of contents by ticking the appropriate bird's eye at the top of the index page.  Titles used in the index are the Donne Variorum short forms, and each abbreviation is accompanied by a regularized version of the first line of the poem.  Each index entry is a hot link; clicking on it brings up the combined transcription-image file of the poem in the volume. 

Browser. Top- of-screen buttons and fillable panels allow users to browse through the volume page-by-page or  to jump directly to a specified page by entering its number in the blank box.

Zoom  Feature. An included zoom feature permits examination of page images in minute detail. Click the page image to enlarge. A new window will open in which options are listed at the top. To move the image, left-click, hold,  and drag with the mouse.

Concordance .  An on-the-fly concordance can be generated for each volume.  This  concordance employs the traditional key-word-in-context format to present an ordered list of each occurrence of a given word in the volume, but it differs from conventional concordances in a number of ways:

1. In addition to the list of words in modern typeface, users can view each word as it appears in the original image.
2. Users may choose whether or not to deploy a list of stop words in concording the volume. If this option is not selected, every article, conjunction, and preposition will be included in the concordance.
3. Constructions containing ampersands, elision marks and apostrophes, parentheses, hyphens, and digraphs (ae) may be concorded along with actual words.  These non-alphabetical  marks and symbols appear at the head of the alphabetized word list.
4. The concordance does not distinguish between words beginning with capital letters and those beginning with minuscules, but spelling has not otherwise been regularized in the volume. Thus, for example, "soul” and "soule” appear as separate entries in the alphabetized list of key words.

Selecting a word to concord from the drop-down list presents the user with an organized set of all lines that contain the selected word, with the word itself highlighted in yellow.  To the left of each line the Donne Variorum abbreviation for the poem containing the line is displayed, and this is followed by an IDentification code containing (a) the Donne Variorum numerical siglum for the poem, (b) the siglum of the source text (00A for the 1633 Poems), and (c) the line number in the poem.  Entries in the set of lines are organized numerically by poem number and, within each poem, line number.

Each line in a concorded set is a hot link, which can be clicked to bring up the combined transcription-image containing the selected word. In this display, the transcription line containing the word is located on the page by yellow highlighting.

Composite List of Variants. Organized sequentially by volume page number, this list pulls together in a single list all press variants so far identified in the edition. To facilitate analysis of the typesetting of the edition, including identification of corrected (cor) and uncorrected (unc) states of individual sheets, we have added to the page number an indication of the signature and forme on which each variant appears.

As used here, “corrected” and “uncorrected” are technical terms indicating whether the printer stopped the press to reset portions of type, not whether a reading is "right" or "wrong," and affixing the proper cor or unc label can be tricky in certain instances.   In cases where the status of a given variant is not obvious,  comparison of  other variants on the same forme can be helpful.   Thus inclusion of the information on signature and forme noted above.