David Atkinson is currently an honorary research fellow of the Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen, UK. He is a member of a team working on the James Madison Carpenter Collection Project, which seeks to publish the collection in a critical edition and to present the digital images and sound files of the collection materials as a freely accessible online resource (http://www.abdn.ac.uk/elphinstone/carpenter/elements/). He recently published The Anglo-Scottish Ballad and its Imaginary Contexts (Atkinson 2014).