Melville's Marginalia Online
Herman Melville was a 19th century American author. His manuscripts have not survived, but the books which he once owned or read do, and they contain hand written annotations (marginalia) by Herman Melville. The pages of the books have been scanned and are presented online with OCR turned into XML.
Dr. Olsen-Smith’s team identifies and analyzes the marginalia and the textual content that was highlighted by the marginalia. These provide information about the process and thoughts Melville used while writing his books. We assisted by implementing full text OCR to convert the machine printed text contents to searchable text. This allows statistical information about the marginalia such as distribution of marginalia in sections of texts and word co-occurrence frequencies in the marginalia to be extracted and analyzed. We are supplementing this with linguistic analysis.
Publications:
Jonathan A Cook, Steven Olsen-Smith and Elisa Barney Smith with Remington Lambie, Abby Price and Hunter Tonkin, "Germinous Seeds: Hawthorne's Creative Influence on Melville," Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, The Melville Society and Johns Hopkins University Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, Volume 24, Number 3, October 2022, pp. 7-49.
Christopher Ohge, Steven Olsen-Smith, Elisa Barney Smith, “At the axis of Reality: Melville’s Marginalia in the Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare,” Leviathan: a journal of Melville Studies, The Melville Society and Johns Hopkins University Press, Vol. 20, No. 2, June 2018.
Participants:
Dr. Elisa Barney Smith (LTU), Dr. Steven Olsen-Smith (BSU), Dr. Tosin Adewumi (LTU), Nudrat Habib, PhD Student (LTU).
Contact
Elisa Barney Smith
- Professor
- 0920-492194
- elisa.barney@ltu.se
- Elisa Barney Smith
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