“As a central part of the multi-faceted Digital Thoreau project embarked upon two years ago by SUNY Geneseo, the Thoreau Society, and the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods, Milne Library is encoding a digital copy of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden to allow side-by-side comparison of its many manuscript versions (based on the pioneering scholarship of Ronald E. Clapper). When finished, it will be a powerful tool for in-depth, scholarly textual analysis – or just a cool way for “Thoreauvians” to see how the text, and Thoreau’s thought, evolved during the nine years between his experiment of living deliberately at Walden Pond (1845-47) and the book’s publication in 1854.
Basic encoding is expected to be finished this summer, thanks to the efforts of Milne’s Technical Services staff and librarians, and the students in Prof. Paul Schacht’s ENG 390 (Literature in the Digital Age) class who spent several weeks this spring marking up a chapter of the text. After more advanced markup is done and Walden in all its pre-publication versions becomes available on the web early next year, readers will be encouraged to interact with the text, including making improvements to the transcription’s accuracy, using social tools.
To get a peek of what Walden will look like and to learn more about the project, visit Digital Thoreau. “
— Milne Library Infobits Newsletter, Spring 2012
