Visualizing the Frankenstein Variorum

The Frankenstein Variorum team has completed work on a digital scholarly edition that compares five distinct versions of the novel Frankenstein. While we have presented this project at several conferences in recent years, we share a new view of the project at TEI 2024: a visual summary of our publication method, and a visual survey of our collation data. Now that we have fully published the Frankenstein Variorum's TEI edition files, we are analyzing what we have learned about how much the novel changed over five distinct instantiations. These include: ● The 1816 manuscript notebook, ● The 1818 first anonymous publication, ● The Thomas copy's marginal handwritten revisions that were later lost, ● The 1823 edition produced by Mary Shelley's father, ● The 1831 edition, substantially revised. Our poster, prepared in English and Spanish, features visualizations from our project, sharing how the TEI grounds the edition's interactive visualizations of the novel's transformation over time. This poster perpared for the TEI 2024 conference displays:1) a "big picture" view of Frankenstein’s changes over time drawn in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) from our TEI data, and 2) our publishing process applying JavaScript-based static site generation to publish the edition, and Our TEI standoff spine and edition files store the collation data of the novel's five versions, and the pipeline processing and algorithmic refinement of those files has been the subject of several past conference papers and presentations. Now that the edition is complete, the TEI data invites us to analyze the edition's moments of alignment, divergence, and gaps where material was missing or removed. For this poster and for our edition, we illuminate the Variorum interface design and visualize Frankenstein's transformations, each built directly from the TEI. If successful, our poster will welcome discussion of our publishing architecture and invite a holistic, nonlinear exploration of the digital variorum edition.