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The Wordsworth Variorum Archive (WVA) will be a collection of all of Wordsworth's poetry, with texts taken from the published first editions supervised by Wordsworth. The intent is to make available to students and scholars the text of the poetry as it was seen by Wordsworth's contemporaries. The access sequence moves from published edition to the table of contents for that edition to the text of the poem as published in that edition. Currently there are eleven editions of poetry available.

In addition to the text, edition-specific concordances are also available. These concordances are programmatically generated. A custom-built application reads through the table of contents for an edition and then parses out individual words and lines. These word and line lists are then compared to a list of "noise words" and all noise words are eliminated from the concordances, and a "jump words" index is created. (Follow this link to see a list of the "noise words" eliminated from the concordance.) The "jump words" are used to maintain relatively small line index files (currently 275 entries produce a line index file about 30K to 40K in size) for better performance. Finally the "jump words" index, word index and line index HTML files are generated with the appropriately cross-indexed hyperlinks. Currently there are edition-specific concordances available for all of the WVA editions.

About the Editor

The Wordsworth Variorum Archive was designed and is maintained by Professor Jim Garrett, an associate professor at the California State University at Los Angeles (CSULA) (click here to visit his campus web page).  Professor Garrett specializes in British Romanticism and British literature of the nineteenth century and hopes to complete the WVA before he dies. A graduate of UCLA, CSULA and USC, his book on Wordsworth and nationalism, Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation, has been published by Ashgate Publishing. Here are some links for the book:

Catalog Page at the Publisher (includes excerpts from the book)

Click here to see the publisher's flyer for Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

Professor Garrett received his B.A. in English from UCLA in 1982. Following a brief visit to graduate school, he began work in the computer industry working first as a technical writer and editor and later as a systems analyst and programmer with Burroughs (later Unisys) Corporation, McDonnell-Douglas Corporation, Kaiser-Permanente Health Foundation, and the California State University at Los Angeles. His computer specialties included document and graphic design, database design and development, and software utility development. He left the computer industry in 1991, received his M.A. from CSULA in 1993 and his Ph.D. from USC in 1999. He taught at Occidental College before joining CSULA in 2003.