Hawthorne's Celestial Railroad
a publication history

In a recent post on my personal blog, I veered away from my discussion of the University of Victoria’s Digital Humanities Summer Institute and into a rumination on Thoreau’s place in the digital humanities. I noted that Thoreau seems to me a useful role model for digital humanists because he encourages us to take a critical stance toward the technology that we use. Thoreau worries that we’ll become “the tools of our tools,” and that’s an outcome (or even a perception) that DHers should seek to avoid.

Keeping with this spirit, I attended the Geographical Information Systems (GIS) class at DHSI with a genuine question in mind: “do I actually need GIS for my research?” My Celestial Railroad project does include a geographic component. I’m tracing the spread of one Hawthorne story through the United States in the 1840s and 50s, tracking editorial changes made to various witnesses, as well as the larger cultural response to the story found in introductions, editorials, and references to the text. I’ve already mapped the story’s spread using David Rumsey’s historical maps in Google Earth. When I described my project to a friend in a geography department, he wondered why I needed to spend a week learning GIS at all. He pointed out that Google Earth was sufficient for creating most visualizations. If I wasn’t planning to use ArcGIS’s more advanced analytical tools—if my research question didn’t include issues such as topography, population density, or other census data, for instance—then learning GIS might be a waste of time. Why bring a jack hammer to a project when a hammer will do the job?

We spent the first three days of DHSI working through lessons and practicals that taught us the basics of the ArcGIS software. On the fourth day of DHSI, I started working on my own project with Henry S. Tanner’s 1846 “traveller’s map” of the United States, which is available through the wonderful, freely available David Rumsey Map Collection. I wanted to use Tanner’s map because it includes “the roads, canals, and railroads of the United States.” Though “The Celestial Railroad” satirizes antebellum American optimism in technology—including the railroad in its title—I suspected that the story owed its popularity to the transportation system of the 1840s and 50s. That’s not a surprising hunch, perhaps, but I hoped ArcGIS might help me verify it.

I spent a while georeferencing the Tanner map: aligning major points on the historical map with those same points on a modern basemap. This process can distort the historical map, depending on how precise it is by modern standards. You can see this distortion on the edges of the map below. Once I finished this process, I added my spreadsheet listing nineteenth-century reprintings, references, and reinterpretations of “The Celestial Railroad” to the map. In a few steps, I was able to separately map reprints, references, and reinterpretations on the map, using larger markers to indicate cities where multiple witnesses appeared. I must say: when those markers first appeared on the Tanner map, falling almost exclusively along his road and railroad network, I felt quite a thrill.

Click image for a high-resolution version.

That’s as far as I got at DHSI. Though fun, did I make use of ArcGIS’s full analytical powers? No, not quite. As I reflected on the week’s exercises and my map, however, I did think of some possibilities. I sent out a tweet wishing for datasets of nineteenth-century U.S. counties and nineteenth-century population data. Bethany Nowviskie responded with a link to the Newberry Library’s Atlas of Historical County Boundaries, which is freely available. She also sent information about historical census data, but that data is unfortunately not available at my institution.

If I can get hold of that data, though, I think I could do more. For instance, I could analyze the population that lived within certain distances of publication sites. I could determine—within a generous margin of error—how many Americans lived within 5, 10, or 20 miles of a “Celestial Railroad” publication. How many Americans had local access to Hawthorne’s story?

To return to my original question: do I really need ArcGIS for my work? Maybe. I see potential geospatial questions that would require the analytical power of GIS. So I’ll keep tinkering, and I’ll keep reporting on that tinkering here.

Juxta 1.4 was recently released, and it includes an important new feature for my work:

In addition to importing UTF-8 encoded plain text files, this new version of Juxta now supports direct import of XML source files in any well-formed schema, include TEI p4 and p5. No more preparing specialized versions of your witnesses for import into Juxta. Just import them and instantly start collating and learning things about your texts! You can configure how Juxta parses the tags it encounters. It can either include them in the reading copy, exclude them, or collate the tag type. For example if <b> changes to <i> for the same word across different witnesses, Juxta can help you detect this move. Complete details are in the online documentation on this website.

In other words, I can now compare TEI versions of “The Celestial Railroad.” I’ve been working with my research assistant to clean up the TEI on my most important versions so that I can build some comparison sets in the new version of Juxta. Exciting times!

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.