Jane austen's desk: the prototype [we are applying for an NEH ?digital projects for the public - prototyping? Award for $100,000 to provide start-up funding for creating a functioning prototype of…

Jane austen's desk: the prototype [we are applying for an NEH ?digital projects for the public - prototyping? Award for $100,000 to provide start-up funding for creating a functioning prototype of ?jane austen?s desk? (JAD), a public-facing website that will become a space for scholars, fans, and general readers around the world to explore and learn, as well as connect and collaborate. JAD will simulate jane austen?s historical workspace, using austen?s writing table and traveling writing desk as a conceit for hosting historical, musical, literary, material culture, and philosophical sources in as interactive a manner as possible. Attracting a wide audience, JAD will foreground austen's active and multi-faceted composition process in the spring of 1813, when austen has just published pride and prejudice and is composing mansfield park. The project will highlight austen's vicarious travel, particularly via her brothers in the west indies and elsewhere; her varied reading; and her views on abolition of the slave trade.]