infobong.com

As a former English major turned media-studies dude, I'm intrigued by these projects to take older texts from the Western canon and re-situate them within contemporary life. For example, I don't think I would have read any of The Diary of Samuel Pepys, if it weren't for the project to take the diary entry-by-entry and recontextualize as a blog.

Stanford's Discovering Dickens project takes a different approach. Although Dickens' novels were serialized and sold piece-by-piece when they were first release, readers usually consume the fiction as a whole, published as a single volume. With the project, Stanford is going back to the future and printing Dickens' work in its original installments and mailing it out to readers on a weekly basis. This year, the project sent out copies of Great Expectation to readers around the world. Subscriptions for next years novel, A Tale of Two Cities, opened today. Sign up now, and you'll get the book mailed to you week-by-week, starting in January. I haven't read A Tale of Two Cities since high school, so I'm looking forward to the first issue.

Hopefully we will see more projects like these; I can only imagine what someone might do with Thomas DeQuincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater.