Hawthorne's Celestial Railroad
a publication history

If you’re planning to be in State College, PA for the C19 Americanists Conference this weekend (May 20-23), come hear me discuss the impetus and progress of the Celestial Railroad project. I’ll be part of the first “Pecha Kucha: New Media and Scholarly Presentations” panel, chaired by Meredith McGill and Martha Nell Smith, at 10:45 in Boardroom #2. It should be fun: we’ll each have 20 slides for 20 seconds apiece to describe our projects (that’s 6:40 total for each talk), followed by a lively conversation among the panelists and audience.

Last week I spoke on this project in the UVA Scholars’ Lab, as part of a joint presentation with my colleague Alex Gil. Alex is working on a 20th Century edition of Aimé Césaire that makes use of many of the same technologies as celestialrailroad.org, and the two talks complimented each other well.

In my talk I discuss not only the technology I’ve used in building this edition, but also the literary and historical discoveries the project has helped me make about Hawthorne, his audience, and his career. The Scholars’ Lab has posted the talk as a podcast (clicking the link will open iTunes). My talk starts at 28:08, but please listen to Alex’s talk first. The Q&A at the end addresses both talks.

Next week I’ll be presenting about this project as part of the University of Virginia Scholars’ Lab’s “Digital Therapy Luncheon” series. While preparing for that talk, I compiled for the first time a list of all the nineteenth-century books, sermons, newspapers, &c. in which I’ve uncovered references to the story. This is a very unofficial list—I don’t detail the article name for newspaper references for example. But it’s impressive for its length (which will be the point of showing it during my presentation). Eventually I’ll compile a better scholarly version and create a permanent page to display it; for now I wanted to post what I have:

Recently Gideon Burton speculated at Academic Evolution about what it would mean to be an open scholar: “someone who makes their intellectual projects and processes digitally visible.” One of the benefits Burton sees in open scholarship is that “having open data is in fact provisioning for serendipity,” allowing folks working on related projects to find and, hopefully, support each other’s research. Open scholarship requires a scholar “open to input from those outside of the project, the institution, or even academia”—which is to say, it requires a paradigm shift, especially from the cloistered traditions of humanities scholarship.

In the few posts I’ve added to this development blog, I’ve tried to open the project up in this way. While still in the midst of research, I’ve discussed the genesis of the project, the tools and resources I’m using to research and build the site, and my ongoing textual and technological discoveries. This work has already born fruit.

In a recent post I discussed the online newspaper archives I’ve used to find reprintings of “The Celestial Railroad,” and I speculated about which archives I’ve found most useful. Soon thereafter I received an email from a marketing director at Readex, whose America’s Historical Newspapers I had omitted from the “most useful” list. He politely asked me why, and whether I had any suggestions about how AHN could better serve scholars working on similar projects.

When I replied that I simply hadn’t found much in AHN—no witnesses, and only a few references to the story—he responded with a list of search results he’d found of “The Celestial Railroad,” which included at least one witness and several references I’d not discovered. The problem, it turns out, was that UVA only subscribes to three of the seven available series of Early American Newspapers.

Searching the entire database, he found many that I would never had known existed, because I had no idea that the database I was accessing through UVA’s library was incomplete. Had I not been posting my research, this serendipitous conversation (between an academic and a marketing director, no less) would likewise never have happened.

The story has a happy ending. Readex has generously given me personal access to the entire database for the month of November—not quite as good as UVA subscribing to it, but given how tight both library and personal budgets are right now, I’ll take it. I also understand that worse encounters are possible through open scholarship, including intellectual theft. But this exchange demonstrates that Burton’s ideas can pan out in the ways he imagines. I’ll certainly keep blogging this project, and likely will do so more fervently from now on.

I’ve just discovered a new reprinting in the Louisville newspaper, the Baptist Banner and Western Pioneer. This was a random discovery–I borrowed several papers that seemed likely candidates and started browsing. This is my first Louisville discovery, and expands the map of printings toward the South.

This blog is build in Wordpress, but the site itself likely won’t be.  The online edition of “The Celestial Railroad” will need to serve as a repository for scans and text versions of many copies of this text.  I could, of course, build such a site from the HTML up, but I’ve been looking at Omeka, developed by the folks at George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media, as a possible platform that will do much of the heavy lifting for me.

Omeka is designed to archive and present historical materials, which is, in essence, exactly what I want to do.  Last weekend I attended an Omeka “playdate” at GMU—essentially a day-long training sessi0n—and returned optimistic about the platform as a possible solution for a digital edition like this one.

Before we get there, however, I have to do the bibliographic work—comparing the many editions of the text.  For this I will use Juxta, developed by NINES right here at UVA.  Juxta will allow me to import and immediately see changes between many different versions of “The Celestial Railroad.”  It should help me see lineages of printing, as particular changes propagate through witnesses, and hopefully to notice significant editorial decisions made by particular groups or editors.