With the freedom and ease the modern web offers, blogs and digital passion projects are appearing more than ever. I’ll be taking a look at the Digital Thoreau Project, an initiative dedicated to digitizing and studying the work of Henry David Thoreau, and analyzing some of the rhetoric it provides as a part of the digital ecosystem.
The Digital Thoreau Project is dedicated to maintaining a digital repository of the work of Henry David Thoreau and those who have studied his work. Chiefly, it aims to provide a more accessible digital version of Thoreau’s book “Walden”, and the multitude of manuscripts that preceded its publishing. Thoreau’s other works are also available on the website, as they are all old enough to be in the public domain, as well as William Rossi’s essay, “Making Walden and Its Sandbank”. The website provides what’s known as a Fluid-Text version of the “Walden”, where users can have different versions of the text side by side, and compare them easily. It also provides a Manuscript Search Tool for viewing high resolution photos of Thoreau’s original manuscripts of “Walden” from The Huntington Library, with corresponding transcripts. The website’s work is largely inspired by Ronald Clapper’s 1967 UCLA Dissertation titled, “The Development of ‘Walden’: A Genetic Text”, and asks the question of how his work can be furthered through the use of digital archival, reference, and community.
The website is built using WordPress, as made evident on the Community page, where a WordPress login icon appears at the top. The website’s flagship project, the Fluid-Text edition of “Walden”, is built using a tool called Versioning Machine, a web tool specifically designed to view and compare different versions of texts. The project also follows the standards of the Text Encoding Initiative, or TEI, which is a standard for displaying machine-readable text. The Manuscript Search Tool makes use of the International Image Interoperability Framework to display the images of the manuscript. All of these tools are freely available for anyone to use.
This website is very word-heavy, which shouldn’t be surprising as it is a website dedicated to literary study and criticism. While that may sound like bad web design, the site is still fairly well laid out. I recall learning from an introductory web class that you have about five seconds from when a user opens your website for them to understand what’s going on. Upon opening the site, I’m greeted by the site’s mission statement in large font: “Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.” The home page itself is well designed, with a dropdown menu of all the projects and links to other important pages at the top, with relevant information about the site spanning the main length of the page. While wordier than some other websites, it’s clear and concise about what the website aims to provide. The content is contained in the middle third of the page, with text on the right and a relevant picture on the left, and it’s a design element I’d like to use in my own site. The main walls of text are tucked away in the project and blog pages of the site, though even there, they are well contained and ordered. Anne Frances Wysocki’s “The Multiple Media of Texts” makes a point to look at the elements of a webpage in 3 ways: Naming them, contextualizing them, and identifying their relationships. The amount of text on this website does not detract from a viewer’s ability to identify and understand what the elements of the page are conveying, and when there is lots of information, it compartmentalizes it to be separated and consumed in smaller chunks.
Often times, what can seem boring to many of us is fascinating to a select few. I admire the dedication of the authors of this website, and their commitment to archiving the analysis of classic literature. There may be lots of information to digest, but they’ve made the effort to create an easily navigable site for studious readers of Thoreau, both old and new.