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.

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.

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.