UPDATE: This now being done via The Scott Polar Research Institute, here.

I remember coming across an online project, which blogged the letters of a First World War soldier’s letters home, matching the dates of the letters to the date of posting, ninety years on. A great idea, in my opinion: it is one thing to sit and read such letters one after another, quite another to read them as they were written, to get some feel for the periods of time involved.

I wondered how this would work with fiction: perhaps recreating an epistolary novel like Lady Susan by Jane Austen, or Les Liaisons Dangereuse, with separate twitter accounts for each protagonist.

Then I remembered that Dracula was an epistolary novel – it was made up of letters, diary entries and even a journal recorded onto wax cylinders. Wouldn’t that be cool to recreate as a blog, resorting the entries into chronological order, with links to maps and contemporary photographs?

Yes, such a good idea that it is already being done, here.

But then an even more (to me) exciting idea occurred to me: Why not blog Robert Falcon Scott’s journal, which so movingly records his epic expedition to the South Pole?

The first proper entry won’t be made until the third week in November, but after that I will have a post for every day of the diary until the end of the story. I will try to add links from the entries to Google Earth, photographs and Wikipedia.

You can follow the blog, or follow the expedition on twitter, here: http://twitter.com/scottslastexp

There are plenty of other books crying out for this treatment, like Boswell’s Journey to Scotland, Pepys’ diary and the The Pillow Book of  Sei Shōnagon.

Any suggestions are very welcome – wish me luck!

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