We are delighted to announce that King’s College London is the new institutional home for WoolfNotes, where it will be steered by Woolf scholars, Clara Jones and Anna Snaith.

Spearheaded by scholars Michèle Barrett and Brenda Silver, and technical director Gilly Furse, WoolfNotes is a major digital humanities project that brings into the public domain Woolf’s last remaining substantial unpublished work: her reading and research notes. Woolf's personal reading and research notebooks demonstrate the depth of her historical knowledge and the wide range of her reading, casting new light on both her fiction and critical work. WoolfNotes makes available high specification images of approximately 7000 manuscript and typescript pages from the archives of the Monks House Papers in Sussex (UK), the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, the Beinecke Library at Yale and the Smith College Special Collections (US).

This celebration event will open with remarks from WoolfNotes team followed by a keynote talk from Dr Alice Staveley (Stanford) entitled 'Virginia Woolf in the Digital Age: Archives | Texts | Data'. Dr Nicola Wilson (Reading) will act as respondent and the event will be followed by a drinks reception.

Times and locations

Lecture: Council Room (King's Building, K2.29), 16.00-18.00

Drinks Reception: Anatomy Museum, 18.00-19.00

Abstract and biographies

'Virginia Woolf in the Digital Age: Archives | Texts | Data'

In honor of the launch of WoolfNotes, a landmark digital humanities initiative to open for public view over 7000 pages of Woolf’s manuscript reading notes, Dr Staveley will situate, and celebrate, this project as it dialogues with other largescale digital Woolf projects, including WoolfonLine and The Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP). How do these critical digital archives alter our ways of reading, historicizing, accessing and interpreting Woolf? What challenges—technological, academic, personal, institutional—do these creative-critical undertakings involve? What new work formations—collaborative, international, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational—do they entail? How can seeing Woolf’s texts as data change what we can see and therefore say about her contributions to theories of reading, understandings of textual materiality, and the consumption and distribution of her own books? This talk will also aim to highlight new technological as well as interpretative ways of reading Woolf, demonstrating in practical terms what new horizons for modernist criticism arise when, by means of these curated digital archives, Woolf enters the digital age.

Dr Alice Staveley is Senior Lecturer of English at Stanford University, and Director of the Honors Program and Digital Humanities Minor. Born and educated in Canada, and following graduate school in the UK, she moved to the United States where she has lived and worked for twenty-five years. She is cofounder of The Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP), coauthor of Scholarly Adventures in Digital Humanities (Palgrave 2017), and coeditor of Women in Publishing, 1900-2020 (Edinburgh University Press, 2024). She is writing a book on Woolf, publishing, and new feminist formalisms, and has numerous related articles in Book History, Modernism/modernity and Cultural Analytics.

Dr Nicola Wilson is Associate Professor in Book and Publishing Studies at the University of Reading and co-director of the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing. She is a co-founder of the Modernist Archives Publishing Project. She is currently finishing up a book project on the Book Society - Recommended: The writers who changed how we read - and is co-editor of the recently published The Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing, 1900-2020 (2024).

Image courtesy of the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP).