Woolf Online presents a genetic edition of a 'highly experimental passage' from Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. The project was inspired by Professor Julia Briggs who hoped to "allow students and scholars to see [Woolf's] writing as a fluid process taking place in particular locations and at particular times in relation to other contemporaneous events." The edition includes four layers: the initial manuscript; the typescript sent to Charles Mauron, which represents an intermediate stage between the manuscript and marked-up proofs; the proofs used by the printers with Woolf's corrections; and the first printed editions which appeared in Britain and the US. The site aims to present the different stages of writing in a historical context by including newspaper articles, excerpts from Woolf's diary, letters, and biographical and visual materials of the Stephen family. The project was initiated by Professor Julia Briggs at De Montfort University and continued by Professor Marilyn Deegan of King's College and Peter Shillingsburg of Loyola University. The Woolf Estate and The Head of Literary Estates of the Society of Authors granted permission for the use of Woolf's primary and copyrighted material. The current project is funded by by the British based Leverhulme Trust. Since the launch of Woolf Online in 2008, The National Endowment for the Humanities Editions Program has funded Loyola University to continue the work of mounting a 'knowledge site' for the entire text of To the Lighthouse.

The site is open to the public, and a google search for 'Woolf' brings up the site as the second entry. Director Peter Shillingsburg acknowledges the contributions of several individuals, and a visitor can register to receive a username and password for access to the annotation, scrapbook and commentary sections. The aim is to allow access to the collaborative process "in the first instance, privately," with the hope that "when such work merits publication, scholars will submit to the site for the benefit of other students." Thus, while the site does not use a recognizable platform, the creators do include in their design the possibility for scholarly involvement and contribution. The markup for the transcripts appears to be done in html, and interested scholars can access the page source for the markup code.

    Woolf Online performs the important work of shifting critical focus from criticism on Woolf's authorial intent toward historical readings of Woolf's work. The range of material is intended to facilitate access to equally weighted versions of Woolf's excerpt and contextual information, but at times the site is difficult to navigate. Project Director Peter Shillingsburg states that he hopes to avoid "offering conclusions about the critical significance of the materials." A visitors' experience of Woolf Online does not have a predictable path, but weaves through a shifting collection of texts and media which are constantly rearranging themselves depending on the individual reader's interests.

    While the intention is commendable, the amount of information can seem overwhelming and a little more guidance might be appreciated at times. While I admire the extensive archival material the site provides, I find I am spending more time learning how to use the apparatus than reading the material itself. The site does include twelve help videos with instructions on the various categories of materials.

    My favorite feature is the textual option provided for readers who want to look at the scanned manuscript image alongside the typescript draft rendering. However, considering the objective of the site is to emphasize the process of writing, what might be equally useful is an option for collating the different versions of text. An option for version collation might give the reader a better sense of how the text was altered over time.

    In keeping with the theme of "Time Passes," readers also have the option of examining Woolf's manuscript by day. Woolf wrote the draft over the course of a month in 1926 during the first General Strike in London. The "Calendar" feature allows readers to see a complete list of the site materials written by Woolf and contemporaries on that day. The site links daily transcripts with primary sources, which include diary entries, letters and newspaper articles, written by Woolf and contemporaries on the same day. Shillingsburg suggests that "one can literally watch Virginia Woolf each day, write the manuscript, write in her diary, pen letters, and compose other things [. . .] and, just a click away, one finds accounts of the general strike that was going on practically outside the writer's window." Given that the aim is to allow visitors a better understanding of Woolf's writing experience it might be helpful to make the links that reference the contextual material more apparent to visitors. Future work on the site might also allow visitors to zoom in on the included newspaper images. In addition, the scanned images are numerous, and do not include metadata, which may be an issue for scholars who hope to use or reference the images in other projects.

Alongside essays by Woolf, the site includes articles by scholars Michael Lackey, Marion Dell and Alison Light. The site also includes a bibliography of online and monograph sources for further research on Woolf. These sections would be ideal for future collaborative opportunity. Visitors could provide annotations on sources and suggestions for further reading on Woolf. 

Arising in part from his work on "Time Passes," Shillingsburg's 2009 article on digital editions advocates a movement toward 'knowledge sites' and suggests that, "To be collaborative, the contributions of each scholar should be made up of modular components, connectable, and extendible, such that the parts can be enhanced, repaired or replaced without damaging the network that comprises the whole — whatever it is that the whole turns out to be." While we can see the beginnings of this model in Woolf Online, I look forward to seeing how the Loyola team's uses their experience with "Time Passes" in their further work on To The Lighthouse.

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