The Digital Mitford is a digital humanities project, transcribing and encoding the collected writings of Mary Russell Mitford (1787-1855).  Mitford was an key member of the transatlantic intellectual community, with personal and professional relationships with major figures of the Romantic and Victorian age, like Benjamin Haydon, William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, and Elizabeth Barrett-Browning.  She was also an accomplished poet, dramatist, and writer of short fiction.  Rienzi (1828), the most popular of her dramas, ran at Covent Garden for fourteen nights, and went through several print editions in Britain and on the continent.   Our Village, a collection of short rural scenes in the style of a journalist’s account, was widely popular and remained in print through the early twentieth century.  Today, Mitford has been overshadowed by other authors, but The Digital Mitford is working to recover Mitford’s contributions and legacy.

A key aspect of our work at The Digital Mitford is the commitment to not only archive and catalog Mitford’s writing but to create the tools necessary to  analyze these large data sets.  Mitford wrote more than 2,000 letters covering a range of topics.   By tagging important names, places, and themes in her letters and works, we will be able to generate visualizations, mapping the patterns of discourse and  social relations within Mitford’s extended intellectual community.

The Digital Mitford is made possible by the efforts of Elisa Beshero-Bondar, University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg (Principal), Kellie Donovan-Condron, Babson College (editor), Alexandra Drayton, University of St. Andrews (editor), Eric Hood, University of Kansas (editor),Rebecca Nesvet, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (editor), Elizabeth Raisanen, UCLA (editor), Samantha Webb, University of Montevallo (editor), Lisa Wilson, SUNY Potsdam (editor), David Birnbaum, University of Pittsburgh (advisory board), Frederick Burwick, UCLA (advisory board), Pat Duck, Regional University of Pittsburgh Library System Coordinator (advisory board), Nicholas Joukovsky, Penn State University (advisory board), Diego Saglia, Università degli Studi di Parma (advisory board), Gregory Bondar, Penn State University and University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg (consulting editor), Thomas Lombardi, Washington and Jefferson College (consulting editor), M. Stephanie Murray, Carnegie Mellon University (consulting editor), Elaine Frantz Parsons, Duquesne University (consulting editor), Dave Robinson, University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg (consulting editor), Megan A. Hughes, University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg (project assistant).