The Next 150 Years: Wharton Goes Digital

Donna CampbellWashington State University

Wharton on the Past and Future

Italian Backgrounds

• The Middle Ground• "a tangle of classic and medieval traditions,

Greek, Etruscan, and Germani" (74-75) in which all through the middle ages "the marvellous did not fail from the earth" (78).

• “The gentle furred creature of the Death of Procris might have been the very faun who showed St. Anthony the way” (80-81).

Wharton Goes Digital

• Digital humanities: principles and possibilities• Wharton and digital projects– What’s here? What current resources exist for

Wharton studies?– What’s needed? What might we think about as

important projects for the immediate future?– What’s next? What kinds of digital projects might

prove useful in the longer term?

What is (are) the digital humanities?

Fitzpatrick: “a nexus of fields within which scholars use computing technologies to investigate the kinds of questions that are traditional to the humanities . . . . [Digital humanities projects] “focus on computing methods applicable to textual materials . . .often editorial and archival in nature.”

Flanders: “a critical investigation and practice of the methods of humanities research in the digital medium.”

Types of Digital Humanities Projects

• 1. Digitization: “Translating "cultural" texts (read: literature, art, history) into digital media by creating digital scholarly editions or presentations,” which is the starting point for most digital humanists.

• 2. Access: “Building broad public access to digitized texts,” which often involves collaboration with librarians.

• 3. Analysis: Using computers to analyze those texts, which is “where computer scientists and statisticians get involved.”

Digital Humanities QuarterlySpecial Cluster on Digital Textual Studies

Wharton Quotations on Twitter• There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the

mirror that reflects it. (96)• If only we could stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty

good time. (16)• My little dog / a heartbeat / at my feet. (6) • The only way not think about money is to have a great deal of it.

(4)• They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had

surprised a butterfly in the winter woods. (3)• True originality comes not in a new manner but in a new vision. (3)• Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.

(2)

What’s Here?

• Public domain (pre-1923) texts available from Project Gutenberg and Virginia; page images from Google Books, Making of America, Modernist Journals Project.

• Fine search and description features from the archives: Beinecke Library, Lilly Library, Harry Ransom Center, and others.

• Scholarship online: journals, books, interviews• Exhibits or collections put together by The Mount, the

Smithsonian, and so on.• Some tools (publication information, Wharton Archives

spreadsheet by Sarah Kogan) available at the EWS site.

What’s Needed: Edith Wharton Digital Projects

• Reliable online texts that can be compared for differences in versions and editions

• Calendar of letters• Searchable Bibliography– Secondary sources– Primary sources, including publication dates– Timeline– Collated information on unpublished works

Text comparison applications: Versioning (shown), Juxta, CollateX

Example of Text Comparison: Whitman Archive

Edith Wharton Archives List, Compiled by Sarah Kogan of The Mount

Calendars of Letters: Willa Cather and Henry James

Bibliography: Dreiser Online

Edith Wharton Digital Projects A Preliminary Wish List

Annotated editions (Omeka, Comment Press) • Scholarly editions with textual apparatus, including versions• Allusions to and quotations from source texts• References to scholarship on the passage• Wharton’s comments from letters• Sound, image, and film clips• Information on material culture, performances, history

*Online edition of collected letters, perhaps to complement a print version.

A Wish List, continued

• “Edith Wharton Virtual Library”– Online collection of links to books that Wharton read,

with quotations that appear in her works marked– *Quotations from her Commonplace Book– *Markings from books in her library at The Mount

*Above all, partnerships that will allow these projects to move forward. Permission from copyright holders and archives would be essential for certain projects.

Example of an Annotations Project: Melville’s Marginalia

Text Comparison and Online Library: The Newton Project

Library and Annotations Project: Darwin’s Library

Digital Exhibits and CollectionsPeer Reviewed Sites at The NINES Project

What’s Next? Visualization Tools for Teaching and Research

• Text visualizations (Voyant Tools, Wordle, N-gram Viewer)– Word frequencies within documents – Identifying relationships among words and phrases– Word or phrase frequencies used as graphed over time

• Geographic visualizations (GIS mapping projects)– Social network maps that display the relationships,

travel, and letters between literary contemporaries– Maps and animations for tracking the progress or

transmission of information or texts over time

Simple Text Visualization (Wordle)Chapter 1, The House of Mirth

“Roman Fever”

Linguistic Relationships (Wordseer)

Visualizing Relationships over Time:Wharton’s Novels, 1900-2008

Pulitzer Prize Books, 1921-1926

Mapping Social Networks Crowded Page

Whitman-Howells Connections

Tracking Information over Time:Mapping the Republic of Letters

Will digital technologies change the way we read Edith Wharton?