In the narrative of how the internet transformed education, a minor detail is often overlooked. Before Google became a verb, before Wikipedia debuted in 2001, and before the term “digital humanities” was coined, Larry Benson, a Harvard professor, was sitting at a personal computer, pecking away in Unix code, creating something that had yet to be given a name.
Like many good stories, this one starts with a real-world issue. In the 1980s and 1990s, Benson instructed a sizable lecture course on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales that occasionally attracted 300 students at a time. He was able to recover the magnetic tapes that the publisher had used to print The Riverside Chaucer after editing the book, which was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1987 and is still the standard scholarly edition. He realized that machine-readable text would be important, something that most people at the time didn’t. Email was still relatively new. Volumes of encyclopedias were available. There was no universally accepted definition of a “digital text”; the Text Encoding Initiative did not release its formatting guidelines until 1994. Benson nevertheless began construction.
He created the Geoffrey Chaucer website at Harvard. The full texts and a comprehensive glossary derived from those tapes formed the foundation of the website, but it developed into something more complex. Notes explained to a medieval audience the significance of the Wife of Bath’s scarlet stockings. A click brought up passages from The Romance of the Rose that demonstrated how the Wife of Bath’s entire rhetorical style was shaped by a character named Duenna, an experienced master of the art of love. The Black Death of 1349, medieval astronomy, courtly love, and summaries of significant academic works were all included. It was a self-contained library in the purest sense. Even a student with no prior knowledge of England in the fourteenth century could leave with a great deal of knowledge.
It’s difficult to ignore how subtly radical this was. Benson wasn’t attempting to democratize knowledge or upend publishing, two terms that are frequently used these days, typically by venture capitalists. He was attempting to explain Chaucer to his pupils. However, because he decided to make it publicly available, anyone with an internet connection could simply enter “Harvard Chaucer” into a browser. pupils in high school. Retired educators. The Riverside Chaucer would have cost a month’s salary for scholars in those nations. They were all treated equally by the website, which is to say, like readers.
Before social media, word spread via syllabi, librarians, and the gradual build-up of bookmark folders on university computers. 83 million visits were recorded by a site counter that was set up in 2004. How many more came before that is unknown. When you sit with it, the number is astounding. In contrast, imagine that this was a website about Middle English literature that was run by a single man. It had no marketing department, no monetization plan, and no algorithm that would have propelled it to the top of search results. It was truly helpful, which is how it got there.
It’s also important to note that Benson completed the majority of the work himself. He may have made the decision based on instinct or habit, but it proved to be prophetic. In contrast to other options available in the late 1980s, Unix was robust and portable. Additionally, he purposefully avoided using third-party proprietary tools that would eventually become outdated by keeping the site’s architecture simple. That seems almost counterintuitive. Like most institutional web design, academic web design is driven by the desire to integrate, modernize, and add features. Benson appeared to recognize that self-control was a form of future-proofing in and of itself. The simplicity of the website contributes to its longevity.
As is common with websites, the website was eventually updated and moved to a new platform. The texts, glossary, and annotations that help a first-year student understand why a certain line in the Prologue is funnier than it appears, however, are still its essential components. Harvard English professor Daniel Donoghue, who has written about the site’s past, called Benson’s strategy a “egalitarian vision.” That statement is accurate, but it’s also far too formal for the actual feel of the website. It seems more like a door left open than a vision statement.
If you only look at the major platforms, it’s easy to overlook the story’s larger pattern. The Conversation, an academic news outlet that started in Australia and moved to the UK in 2013, was founded on a similar intuition: that the barrier between the two was primarily structural rather than intellectual, and that researchers had things to say that the public genuinely wanted to hear. The Oxford English Dictionary, which was created in part by volunteers working from small spaces with unbelievable dedication, spent decades becoming the world’s definitive record of a living language. These are not technological tales. These are tales of individuals who decide that knowledge needs to move and then carry out the unglamorous task of doing so.
That kind of story can be found on Larry Benson’s website. It’s possible that he was only addressing a classroom issue and the rest came about because he never fully realized the scope of what he was creating. It’s also possible that he didn’t care because he knew exactly what he was doing. In any case, the door remains open after 83 million visits.
