1. The Next 150 Years:
Wharton Goes Digital
Donna Campbell
Washington State University

2. Wharton on the Past and Future

3. 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).

4. 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?

5. 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.”

6. 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.”

7. Digital Humanities Quarterly
Special Cluster on Digital Textual Studies

8. 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)

9. 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.

10. 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

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

12. Example of Text Comparison:
Whitman Archive

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

14. Calendars of Letters:
Willa Cather and Henry James

15. Bibliography: Dreiser Online

16. 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.

17. 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.

18. Example of an Annotations Project:
Melville’s Marginalia

19. Text Comparison and Online Library:
The Newton Project

20. Library and Annotations Project:
Darwin’s Library

21. Digital Exhibits and Collections
Peer Reviewed Sites at The NINES
Project

22. 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

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

24. “Roman Fever”

25. Linguistic Relationships (Wordseer)

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

27. Pulitzer Prize Books, 1921-1926

28. Mapping Social Networks
Crowded Page

29. Whitman-Howells Connections

30. Tracking Information over Time:
Mapping the Republic of Letters

31. Willdigital technologies change the
way we read Edith Wharton?