At this January’s MLA Convention, I’ll be presenting on The Society for Textual Scholarship‘s sponsored panel, Text:Image; Visual Studies in the English Major (viewing the panel description may require an MLA membership). I’ll discuss “Mapping the Antebellum Culture of Reprinting,” thinking through my experiments with GIS in the past few years, particularly since attending the GIS course at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute this past summer.

So I was thrilled this past week to read William G. Thomas’ talk, “What We Think We Will Build and What We Build in Digital Humanities,” from this year’s Nebraska Digital Workshop, and to learn from the talk about Thomas’ project, Railroads and the Making of Modern America. The project itself is fascinating, and I immediately wondered if some of their data might help me investigate the circulation of “The Celestial Railroad.” I’ve suspected for awhile that Hawthorne’s tale—which satirizes uncritical modernizing through the central image of a railroad—ironically may have spread around the country through the railroad system.

The historical map that I georeferenced at DHSI seemed to bear this conclusion out. On the Railroads and the Making of Modern America site, however, I was able to download a KML that more precisely charts the 1861 railroad system in America. I used ArcGIS to convert this KML to a shapefile, and then imported that shapefile into my “Celestial Railroad” map. The results were exciting:

The blue circles represent reprintings of the story; the yellow triangles represent paratexts. Larger icons mark places with multiple reprints or paratexts.

With only one exception—Louisville, Kentucky, which sits beside the Ohio River—the entire textual history I’ve so far uncovered for “The Celestial Railroad” seems to unfold along the nineteenth-century railroad network.

Of course, these results point to more work that needs to be done. The “Railroads” project claims they will soon be releasing their data for the American railroad system in 1840, 1845, 1850, and 1870. With that data, I could more finely tune my own investigation—correlate reprintings and paratexts from each time period with the exact railroad system that might have ferried them. That would allow me to see whether Hawthorne’s tale grew with the railroads. If it did—well, that would be interesting to say the least.

Things are moving for “The Celestial Railroad” project. After the slow work of last year—which can be forgiven, I hope, as I was a brand-new faculty member—this year I have two undergraduate assistants helping me transcribe and encode the hundreds of paratexts—the texts that introduced, commented upon, quoted, or invoked what may have been Hawthorne’s most popular early story. We’re building the archive in the background of this website, and I hope to publish most of the “Celestial Railroad” reprints and paratexts this summer.

Which leads me to the question, “What’s next?” I’ve been thinking quite a bit about this over the past year, and have explored a few possible directions for this research. Exploring the extensive reprinting history I’ve uncovered for this one story—a non-canonical story by a hyper-canonical author—has convinced me that similar textual narratives must exist for many stories and poems—both by canonical and by forgotten authors.

Once I publish my Hawthorne research this summer, I want to start working on something much bigger: a reprint discovery engine for nineteenth-century periodicals archives. I imagine a tool not unlike the Google Ngram Viewer, but focused on textual reprint and reference. This project would likely start by investigating a database like the Library of Congress’ “Chronicling America” collection, which is open and includes “an extensive application programming interface (API) which you can use to explore all of our data in many ways.”

I imagine the reprint discovery tool developing in two stages:

1. In its first stage, the tool likely would require base texts for each inquiry. Users would enter, say, the text of Poe’s “Purloined Letter” and the tool would automatically break the short story into n-grams—sequences of words or letters. Then, the tool would automatically query a periodical archive for each n-gram sequence. Why so many queries? As I found with the Hawthorne project, simple title searches are insufficient, as reprints were often untitled or retitled by newspaper and magazine editors. I addition, title searches won’t return quotations from or references to the base text in other kinds of articles: such as the sermons or religious articles I found that quoted just a line or two from “The Celestial Railroad.” The tool should allow readers to tweak the length of the n-gram sequences on the fly—in my OS X-bound imagination, I see a slider—so that an inquiry could be broadened or narrowed based on the results returned. Such a tool would allow users to discover not only reprints of their chosen text, but also the paratexts essential to understanding the reception history of the story or poem.
2. In the tool’s second stage, I would hope to automate the first part of the reprint discovery process: the discovery of base texts. The problem with the tool I’ve outlined in stage 1 is that it would likely only be used for texts scholars already find interesting—stories or poems that scholars suspect are worth searching periodicals archives for, because they have some sense of an existing history of widespread reprinting and/or reference. If the tool itself could dig into the archive in search of base texts, however, then we might discover texts that were widely reprinted and referenced but have since fallen out of our cultural memory. Such a tool could generate significant new scholarship, as important new texts and authors resurfaced and demanded further study. How might this work technically? I’m not certain. Perhaps the tool would crawl through the entire archive database, breaking the archive itself into n-grams and then looking for matches. I’ll need a programmer to tell me whether that’s in the realm of possibilities, or whether there’s another approach that would be more fruitful.

This all leads me to three questions for the digital humanities community:

1. First, am I missing an existing tool that would enable this sort of discovery? I don’t want to spend time figuring out how to reinvent a tool that already exists (or nearly exists, and merely wants tweaking).
2. Second, does the tool I’ve described sound useful and compelling? Does this meet a need for scholars in literary history and/or periodical studies? If you were reviewing this grant proposal, what would you say about the tool’s “potential contributions to the field?”
3. Third, would you be interested in collaborating to build such a tool? I will, of course, list this project on DHCommons, but if you’re reading this and thinking either “this idea perfectly dovetails with my own research project” or “I could write an algorithm to do that in an afternoon,” please send me an email!

There are, of course, many more possibilities growing from such a tool. As I mentioned in my last post, thinking about nineteenth-century reprinting culture immediately leads to geospatial questions. Perhaps this reprint discovery tool could map search results, so that users could navigate results geographically. Indeed, such a tool might help untangle the complicated web of nineteenth-century reprinting culture, visualizing relationships between publications that frequently borrowed from one another and suggesting relationships scholars had not previously spotted. Perhaps I will speculate on geospatial possibilities in another post. For now, if you have ideas or suggestions for a C19 reprint discovery engine, please share them in the comments.

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.

While preparing for this week’s Modern Language Association Convention in Los Angeles, I revisited the amazing digital collection of the David Rumsey Historical Map archive. This site provides digital copies of many of the 24,000 maps in the archive, even allowing visitors to download high-resolution files of them. I’ve used several of these maps of the United States in the late 1830s and 1840s to trace the spread of “The Celestial Railroad” across the country.

This week, however, I discovered that a number of the maps in the collection can be downloaded as a .kmz file to be viewed in Google Earth. Importing this file into Google Earth allows you to lay maps from the Rumsey collection over the Google Earth globe. These maps are georectified, meaning that the features on the maps have been lined up with their precise places on the more precise modern globe.

After playing with these maps for a few minutes, I quickly decided to overlay an 1839 map from the Rumsey collection with a .kmz I created in Google Maps of the towns in which “The Celestial Railroad” was republished between 1843 and 1860. Within minutes I had this visualization—a “historical” map of the story’s reprintings—

I made larger the markers for those cities where the story was more frequently reprinted. So New York and Philadelphia are the largest, as the story ran many, many times in both cities. That resizing was, for this quick project, entirely subjective—I hand-sized each city’s pin.

This isn’t, of course, the best visualization one could create of this, but I was impressed that I could put something that looks this good together in only a few minutes. I plan to keep experimenting with the Rumsey maps in Google Earth as I think through how best to tell the geospatial aspects of this story about Hawthorne and 19th Century publishing.

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:

Inside Higher Education ran a story today about academics using Twitter at the 2009 MLA (Modern Language Association) Convention. I was one of those academics, and was interviewed for the story. I have some reservations about the way the story was framed, as you can see in my comment below the article on IHE. Overall, though, I’m glad to see the Twitter/Digital Humanities crowds (not exactly continguous groups, but groups with significant overlap) garner the attention they have this year.

For those of you who check this blog but don’t follow me on twitter, a few items worth your consideration are Brian Croxall’s paper on the real human costs of a sagging job market—delivered in-absentia, because Prof. Croxall couldn’t afford to attend the conference without a job interview—and a followup by Jennifer Howard published by the Chronicle of Higher Education. Though he wasn’t at the convention, Prof. Croxall’s paper was likely the most talked-about paper presented this year, due in large to the twitterers and bloggers who shared and promoted it.

Also worth a look is “Make 10 Louder: the Amplification of Scholarly Communication,” in which Amanda French parses the use of twitter at MLA.

Finally a lighter must-read: Mark Sample collected the many fake “MLA tips” that circulated among the twitter crowd in the weeks leading up to the conference. For job seekers like myself, these provided a welcome distraction from interview preparation, and and important reminder not to take myself too seriously.

Well, it’s been a relatively busy week. I wrote earlier about being given a month’s access to the full archive America’s Historical Newspapers. This investigation has been fruitful: I’ve found a new reprinting in the Jamestown Journal of Jamestown, NY (12 Oct. 1843) and several interesting articles that reference the story, one of which will show up in the revision of the article I’m working on, “‘Taken Possession Of’: Hawthorne’s ‘Celestial Railroad’ in the Evangelical Canon.”

Later in the week, a link in Dan Cohen’s twitter feed led me to a Language Log post that mentions the Pennsylvania Civil War Newspapers archive (whew!). I didn’t know this archive, and a quick search there returned yet another witness, from the Lancaster Intelligencer (1 Feb. 1859). This one includes a short editorial preface—these are my favorite witnesses, as they add not only to the corpus of reprintings but also to the cultural narrative surrounding the story.

This project continues to grow exponentially; every new resource discovered returns new results.