“I desire to speak somewhere
without bounds; like a man in a waking moment”
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Friends,
First, Walden: A Fluid Text Edition is now available
for use. This edition enables readers to track Henry David
Thoreau's revisions to Walden across the seven
manuscript versions he composed between 1846 and 1854.
To create it, we've taken the critical apparatus of the
manuscript versions first prepared by Ronald E. Clapper in his
1967 Ph.D. dissertation
The Development of Walden: A Genetic
Text and encoded it in TEI. When displayed in the
Versioning Machine (
http://v-machine.org), open-source
software first developed under the editorship of Susan
Schreibman, our TEI makes it possible to compare any of the
seven versions with any other or with the base text, the
Princeton University Press edition of
Walden. To produce
our fluid-text
Walden, we worked closely with Prof.
Clapper; Elizabeth Witherell, editor-in-chief of Princeton's
The
Works of Henry D. Thoreau; and Syd Bauman, XML
Programmer-Analyst at Northeastern University Libraries. We
gratefully acknowledge their assistance and the cooperation of
Princeton University Press.
Second, we've launched
The Readers' Thoreau (
http://commons.digitalthoreau.org),
a website that embeds the published version of
Walden in
a social network, making it possible for readers to form groups
to discuss Thoreau's classic in the margins of the text and in
discussion forums. Funded largely by a State University of New
York Innovative Instruction Technology Grant,
The Readers'
Thoreau is built entirely with open-source tools and has
resulted in improvements to those tools that will benefit
everyone who uses them. The social network is provided by
Commons In A Box, a WordPress plugin developed at City
University of New York, and the in-text social reading
capability comes from another plugin, CommentPress. Christian
Wach, the current lead developer of CommentPress, has written
new code that tightens the integration between the two plugins
and adds many new features to the CommentPress interface,
including more granular visibility settings, the ability to
"like" and feature comments, and the ability to let selected
users enrich their comments with media. Readers will be able to
filter the comments that are visible to them so that they see
only those they care about. In addition, all readers will be
able to follow discussion among a "panel of experts" — readers
whose knowledge of Thoreau gives their contributions to the
discussion added interest and value. We've seeded these expert
comments with the late Thoreau scholar Walter Harding's
annotations to his 1995 edition of
Walden.
Finally, I'd like to invite you to watch the development of a
third project at Digital Thoreau,
The Days of Walter
Harding, Thoreau Scholar (
http://walterharding.org).
The Days is an ongoing effort by undergraduate digital
humanists at SUNY Geneseo to explore the life and work of a
preeminent Thoreauvian who helped to found the Thoreau Society
in 1941, produced numerous scholarly books and articles on his
subject — including the influential biography
The Days of
Henry Thoreau (1965) — and taught at Geneseo from 1956 to
1982, where he achieved the ranks of SUNY Distinguished
Professor and University Professor. Using the open-source
archiving platform
Omeka,
Geneseo students are digitizing materials from Harding's vast
trove of Thoreauviana and organizing them into online exhibits.
We're excited about all three of these projects. We hope
you'll visit them at
http://digitalthoreau.org, engage with
them, and send us your feedback.
With warm regards,
Paul Schacht
Professor and Chair
Department of English
Director, Digital Thoreau
SUNY Geneseo
Welles Hall 226
Geneseo, NY 14454
Digital Thoreau is a collaborative enterprise of SUNY
Geneseo, the Thoreau Society, and the Thoreau Institute of the
Walden Woods Project Library. Special thanks to Princeton
University Press for their generous cooperation.