A software developer working on a PhD in English Lit is publishing his dissertation on Emily Dickinson, along with scans and text of Dickinson’s letters, hyperlinked and semantically identified with XML, as an “open source” work of scholarly research.
My dissertation project will be an electronic edition of a body of Emily Dickinson’s correspondence. For the most part, I’m writing the software for the edition myself from the ground up, and I intend to release it all as Free Software under the GNU General Public License (GPL) when I’m finished. For components I don’t write, such as the operating system, Web server and database system, I will choose Free/Open Source options whenever available