Knowledge Sites represent the potential for the assembly of vast amounts of reusable and significant data in a format heretofore unavailable. One principal advantage of conceiving a project in a digital format is the sheer scope that the medium affords. One of the most significant values of literary theorists and critics is an understanding of the “situatedness” of a given literary instance in geographical, historical, and social context. Recognizing the extent to which we are a product of our own “situatedness,” we cannot fail to respect the importance of the context of any piece of literature we study.

As readers of text not of our own time, we are often woefully ignorant of the context in which our subjects of study were produced. Indeed, it may not be possible to attain a fully informed and knowledgeable perspective, given the degree to which social and economic conditions of authorship and publishing, together with the sources from which they drew, have changed from their time and location to ours.

The scope of any attempt to recapture an understanding of the situatedness of a text within, for example, the Victorian period is daunting. Of the forty to fifty thousand novels written during that time, perhaps as few as ten thousand are extant in available libraries and archives today. Such collections as do exist often exclude, in addition to the works of many authors considered “minor,” works published in alternate media. Moreover, there is little record of the disparity of varying editions of many works, given the industry focus on early editions in good condition. Significant evidence of the modes in which these texts may have been read is thus not maintained.

Literary studies which focus on historical investigations of contextual matters such as gender or economic distribution of authors or the economic conditions of production and consumption, particularly those treatments which wish to proceed from a scientific examination of available evidence, are often severely curtailed as a result.

The limitations of non-digital archival methods are encountered by researchers every day. Authors and publishers who produced large bodies of work, whose canons include particularly early historical witnesses of processes instantiations of texts are often difficult to research comprehensively. Particularly, those works produced in a cheap and readily consumable format are difficult to locate, as those very factors have prevented their preservation from being a consistant priority in academic institutions and among booksellers and libraries. Much of the evidence they could provide is becoming, or has now become, lost to us. Moreover, disparate accounts of the facts of the publication process may be seen in differing lights depending upon their assembly. An individual researcher who collects significant data may, by choosing to present those facts in a certain light, concretize their perception for future researchers in a single, printed instantiation which is difficult to modify in that inflexible form.

It is a clear advantage, then, of digital knowledge sites that the individual accounts of an historical instantiation may be assembled and reassembled, added to and confirmed or denied, and reassembled again as assumptions regarding their relationships and relative significance are reexamined. Differing authors and thinkers may thus be able to capitalize on the same resources to extend their insights without repeating the work, and potentially the mistakes, of their forbears.