The cooperative scholarly effort of a diverse panel of experts in a number of academic disciplines and technological fields, The Spectator Project offers students of 18th century European culture and letters a comprehensive research resource that is rich with content and designed for easy use. Essentially a hypermedia research environment, this site makes available digitized editions of the seminal 18th century English periodicals The Tatler (published three times a week between April 1709 and January 1711) and The Spectator (published daily between March 1711 and December 1712, resuming publication in 1714 for an 80‐issue run), both of which highlighted the literary and intellectual talents of representative 18th century wits Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. In addition, editions of relevant related texts, including Eliza Haywood's Female Spectator and Samuel Johnson's Rambler, have also been digitized for perusal.
Though images of a few original issues of these and other publications are available from the site, most of the texts reproduced here are neither digitized versions of the original publications nor facsimiles of the originals. Rather, they are scanned images of monographic editions of periodicals. In addition, The Spectator is available in XML format, complete with hyperlinked bibliographical notes. While the contents of the text reprints are the same as those of the original periodicals, lost are important pieces of information – format, typography, and illustrations, for example – relevant to the study of historical periodicals. The project's administrators duly note this limitation, however, and emphasize that the site's chief functionality allows scholars to compare the content of The Tatler and The Spectator to each other and to related publications that often imitated the theme and content of these influential titles. Indeed, one of the site's most dynamic features is a Split‐Screen Comparison page that allows users to view simultaneously pages of The Tatler and The Spectator, or to compare either publication with pages from Marivaux's Le Spectateur Français. According to the project description, users will eventually be able to compare other texts by means of this feature as well. Soon, scholars will also be able to “conduct complex structured searches […] and to access critical materials that elucidate both the periodicals and the contexts of their production and reception”, with the ultimate capability to produce ranked surveys of citations to any conceivable topic mentioned within the titles.
While The Spectator Project's current applications are vast, it is still under development. Indeed, one wonders if such an ambitious project will ever be completed. In its current incarnation, it already offers users reproductions of definitive reprints in a digital medium that extends the promise of complex and infinitely manipulable textual research. The site is easily navigable by means of text indexes, and links to the DjVu freeware that enables users to view documents have been provided. In brief, The Spectator Project is a thorough and elegantly designed research environment that, despite acknowledged limitations, provides students of eighteenth century studies seemingly endless scholarly applications.
