Manuscripts are physical documents manifesting Ruskinʼs texts—that is, they consist of various physical witnesses of works. While many manuscripts manifest only a single witness of a single work, more typically a manuscript manifests many texts. The available manuscripts described and facsimilied in the archive are surveyed in Overview of the Manuscripts.

The entry path to a manuscript in the archive defaults to its Apparatus Page, which organizes information about the manuscript (e.g., about the manuscriptʼs title, location, provenance, description, contents, date, and other discussion). The Contents section of the Apparatus Page, which lists the works contained in a manuscript, links to those worksʼ Apparatus Pages.

In the Manuscripts Indices, manuscripts are listed by titles assigned to them according to rules explained in System of Title Citation for Manuscripts.

Ruskin often formed texts into groups, by compiling anthologies of texts or organizing texts into a single composite work. In ERM, this kind of group is encoded as a corpus. Our aim in encoding and describing corpora is to express the textual forms resulting from Ruskinʼs impulse to anthologize, while complying with the TEI standards for XML (see Editorial and Encoding Rationale and Methodology).

Listed in the Corpora Index are titles of projects that Ruskin clearly developed as distinct corpora. The list includes titles that overlap with some found in the Works Indices, since Ruskin conceived of some groups of texts as a single composite work. Other titles in the Corpora Index are nearly coterminous with titles found in the Manuscripts Index, Ruskin sometimes using the physical boundaries of a major manuscript to help define a corpus. Indeed, in the encoding procedures of ERM, any major manuscript forms a kind of corpus, albeit a miscellaneous one, and can itself be made up of other corpora. Listed here, however, are manuscripts that Ruskin identified as distinct anthologies or composites.

Titles of copora default to an Apparatus Page, which in some cases is identical to a Work Apparatus, but which in other cases such as poetry anthologies assembles information unique to a collection (e.g., title, contents, date, organizing themes, and other discussion). The Apparatus Page links to the corpus witness, or in some cases to multiple witnesses or corpora that constitute a version or versions of the collection.

If, in the encoding of the early manuscripts, we discover an intervention by a writer other than Ruskin or if we find that Ruskin transcribed without substantially altering a text by another writer, we encode and class these texts as works by others. Just as for works by Ruskin, these links default to an Apparatus Page.

The Notes Indices list titles of topical notes that are free-standing and hyperlinked throughout the archive. Other forms of commentary, which cannot be indexed because they are not free-standing, include glosses or editorial annotations that hang from specific passages in transcriptions of text witnesses. These annotations cannot be accessed through the indices, but their topics can be discovered via the siteʼs Search function.

The notes fall into the following categories: Bibliographical Biographical Geographical Contextual