LBT is a growing digital archive of books, pamphlets, and periodical essays illustrating the causes and controversies that preoccupied Byron and his contemporaries. The documents, large and small, ephemeral and monumental, underscore the social dimensions of publishing in the romantic era; the archive uses notes, commentary, and links to highlight relationships among their readers and writers.

Byron was at once a social critic and an object of criticism, a brooding misanthrope and an icon of fashion. His life and writings were the subject of scores of books and pamphlets that sparked yet further controversies that often developed a life of their own. These quarrels over manners and morality, politics and religion were occasions for rhetorical exchanges that were sometimes brilliant, sometimes mean, and sometimes both.

If Byron was the focus of controversy, the focus of LBT is less on the man than the controversies that enveloped him. The documents collected are intended to explicate the who, what, where, and why of arguments that tended to be violently personal. The controversialists—not just Byron, but Leigh Hunt and William Gifford, Lady Caroline Lamb and the Countess of Blessington, John Wilson and William Lisle Bowles—were colorful people themselves. Their lives, and those of scores of less familiar persons, will be documented through contemporary memoirs.

In its early stages LBT will concentrate on the life-and-letters genre in which writers would tell their own stories in the form of epistolary exchange. Through these memoirs one gains access not only to Byron's correspondents, but to the correspondents of those correspondents, an extensive circle of persons well connected in the literary and fashionable worlds. LBT tracks the names of all persons mentioned in the letters and will use these to construct a database mapping the social spaces in which controversy played out.

Once the memoirs are properly underway the archive will shift focus to Byroniana: to the poems, satires, imitations, parodies, reviews, and newspaper sallies that made, in Pope's words, “the life of a wit a warfare upon earth. ” While these may be of small interest in themselves, collectively they illuminate the sometimes devious mechanisms by which the literary and social systems operated in Byron's time. Digital editing can render obscure and ephemeral works accessible by providing the necessary context: linking to parallel documents, supplying names concealed behind asterisks, and identifying anonymous writers and exposing their motives and character.

Documents in LBT are created in TEI-XML, which should give them an enduring life. They will be made available through a Creative Commons license so that they can be freely circulated and reused for other purposes with only an acknowledgement of the source. As the semantic web develops in the years to come LBT will strive for integration with the expanding network of romantic texts on the internet, underscoring the social dimension of social-text editing.