This is an online archive dedicate to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who before looking at this archive, I had no idea who he was. He is a 19th century English poet, illustrator, painter, and overall artist, who was, according to the site.”
the most important and original artistic force in the second half of the nineteenth century in Great Britain.” So I was pretty surprised that I had never heard of him. Done in four installments, the website aims to provide access to all of Rossetti’s works stretching from 1848-1920. It is part of NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship) which an open source collection of scholarly articles on important 19th century British and American culture. The archive is groups his works into nine different categories then sorts the works chronologically and alphabetically. This makes finding specific works very easy. Clicking on an piece brings up the description of the work as well as a scholarly article on the piece. There is a cool timeline feature in the poems section that plots all of Rossetti’s poems. I thought this was really cool because it put into perspective just how many poems he had and the span of which he was working. If there is particular piece you want to look up, you can go to the search engine that allows you to put all of the information you know about it and searches the entire archive for it. Overall, the website is very easy to navigate and is organized in a cohesive and maneuverable fashion.
I can’t think of any person going to this site unless they already knew about Rossetti, so I wonder if there would be a better way to get this site to a wider variety of people.