Intro
Despite his fancy Italian name, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a full, 100% English poet and painter, who lived during the Victorian period. One of the first major projects in Digital Humanities was an online archive created by scholar Jerome McGann and his mates to house all of Rossetti's work. And we mean all of Rossetti's work—everything from poetry, to prose, to painting, to anything else he produced.
What's so cool about this archive is that it gives us a bird's eye view of Rossetti's writing: we have access to it all with just the touch of a button. On top of that, because all of his writing is housed in one online archive, we can do searches of his work to find patterns, themes, preoccupations, and specific words.
If you're interested, for example, in exploring the concept of "soul" in Rossetti's poetry, you can simply do a search for it in the archive's search engine and see which poems the word pops up in. That allows you to compare how Rossetti used the word in different poems and different contexts.
Here's one example from his poem "Love's Nocturn":
Quote
Like a vapour wan and mute,
Like a flame, so let it pass;
One low sigh across her lute,
One dull breath against her glass;
And to my sad soul, alas!
One salute
Cold as when death's foot shall pass.
Analysis
In this poem, the speaker is totally going emo over some lady he's got a thing for. The thing is that he hasn't approached her yet, so he isn't sure if she's into him, and for that reason, he's imagining all kinds of scenarios—not good ones—and he's thinking that if she rejects him, he might as well just, like, die, because his "soul" would be so "sad."
When we use the Rossetti Archive's search engine to "mine" for other instances of the word "soul," we find them in many other poems, including Sonnet VI ("Lost on Both Sides"), Sonnet XLVII ("Broken Music"), "Willowwood," and "The Blessed Damozel," among others. By giving us an overview of where and when this word pops up, the search engine allows us to compare and contrast Rossetti's concept of soul in all of these different poems.
Without this digital search engine, it would take ages to go through all of Rossetti's poetry—and there's a lot of it—just to find those instances of the word "soul." Work that used to take weeks or months now just takes… seconds.