From Fluid Text

Representing re-ordering

One of the biggest challenges to understanding how Walden evolved across the work’s seven extant draft versions—and to representing that evolution in Digital Thoreau’s fluid-text edition—is Thoreau’s frequent and extensive re-ordering of material within and between drafts.

The manuscript of Walden at the Huntington, HM 924, bears the evidence of this re-ordering in many different forms. Examples include Thoreau’s lines circling words and phrases, numbers added in the margins beside blocks of text, and cross-references to other manuscript pages inserted between, within, or beside lines of text. Thoreau sometimes relocates text by interlining it or copying it in the margin near the desired location, rotating the page ninety degrees to do so and using a caret to indicate placement. He sometimes strikes out text at the location where he first wrote it—using some combination of lines surrounding text and vertical, angled, or wavy lines through the text—and re-copies that text, with or without revisions, in a new location.

Pinholes and slashes in the margins of many Walden leaves testify to Thoreau’s repeated re-collations of the manuscript in order to reuse the leaves across drafts or re-sequence the material they contain.

As published in 1854, Walden consists of eighteen chapters, from “Economy” to “Conclusion.” But there are no chapter divisions in the first or “A” draft, which Thoreau had more or less completed by the time he left Walden Pond in 1847. As he continued drafting, Thoreau took some passages that were immediate or near neighbors in A and gave them new homes in the various chapters he created. His decision to separate these passages presents a particular challenge to representing the Walden manuscript as a “fluid text.”

For one small illustration of this challenge, let’s look at a portion of the manuscript in A containing material from “Higher Laws.”

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Reading “T” Leaves

At the July 2024 annual gathering of the Thoreau Society, Beth Witherell and I gave a presentation titled “Reading ‘T’ Leaves.” We were on a panel moderated by Kathleen Coyne Kelly titled “The Durable Text: Editing Thoreau.” Beth and I wanted to talk about some of the things we’ve discovered since launching the Walden Manuscript Project with the digitized images of HM 924—the collection of Walden manuscript leaves at the Huntington—and HM 925, the publisher’s proof sheets of Walden.

In particular, we wanted to emphasize what can be learned from focusing on the manuscript and proof sheets as material objects. Digital Thoreau’s fluid-text edition of Walden attempts to model how the text of Thoreau’s book changed across the seven drafts that make up HM 924. But it has little to say about things like how and where on the manuscript page Thoreau inserts text (e.g., above a previously written line, below it, or in the margin), how he deletes text (e.g. by striking out, rubbing out, or scraping off material on the page), or the physical evidence suggesting how he re-used and re-ordered existing material in moving between drafts.

Tracking the textual changes across HM 924’s seven drafts helps us understand the development of Walden as a work—the formal expression of Thoreau’s evolving thought. Inspecting the manuscript and proof sheets as material objects complements this understanding by providing insight into Thoreau’s methods of revision, what we might call his workflow.

In our presentation, Beth and I reviewed the manuscript’s complicated transmission history before diving headlong into the minutiae of manuscript leaves and proof sheets. The slides below for the most part explain themselves, but they’re best viewed in conjunction with our brief explanation of the manuscript’s history on the main page of the Walden manuscript project.

Digital Thoreau and Huntington Library collaborate to digitize the Walden manuscript

I’m excited to announce that Digital Thoreau has embarked on a new project, funded by an Innovative Instruction Technology Grant from the State University of New York, to produce a fresh encoding of HM 924, the manuscript of Walden.

The grant has made it possible for the Huntington Library to digitize the manuscript and host the manuscript images in its Digital Library, where they can be freely accessed by the public.

The grant team will create online open educational resources on the practice of digital scholarly editing, using the Walden manuscript as a “laboratory” for introducing learners to principles, issues, and tools central to scholarly editing in general and the production of digital scholarly editions in particular.

Whether using these modules as part of a class or on their own, learners will have the opportunity to develop and hone their documentary editing skills by contributing to a brand-new encoding of the manuscript. Using an interactive transcription interface, they’ll be able to view the manuscript images and identify a variety of manuscript features (such as Thoreau’s insertions and cancellations) either through a suite of editing tools or by directly entering XML-TEI.

This new manuscript encoding will serve as an invaluable companion to Digital Thoreau’s current fluid-text edition of Walden, based on a collation of witnesses across the manuscript’s seven draft versions undertaken by Ronald E. Clapper for his 1967 PhD dissertation, The Development of Walden: A Genetic Text. In the intervening years, there has been no comparable effort to chart the evolution of Thoreau’s masterpiece by examining his extensive rewriting and redeployment of passages as the manuscript grew between 1846 and its publication in 1854. We expect that the Huntington’s high-resolution scan of the manuscript will yield numerous new insights and permit the correction of various errors.

The team collaborating on the SUNY grant-funded project, A Laboratory-Based Introduction to Digital Scholarly Editing, includes the following scholars:

  • Dr. Paul Schacht, Professor of English, SUNY Geneseo and Director, Digital Thoreau (PI)
  • Dr. Elizabeth Witherell, Editor-in-Chief, The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau (Princeton University Press)
  • Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar, Associate Professor of English and Director, Center for the Digital Text, University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg
  • Dr. Caroline Woidat, Professor of English, SUNY Geneseo
  • Dr. Rebecca Nesvet, Associate Professor of English, University of Wisconsin — Green Bay
  • Dr. Fiona Coll, Assistant Professor of Literature and Technology, SUNY Oswego
  • Dr. Nikolaus Wasmoen, Visiting Professor of English, University at Buffalo

Open for Business – Fluid Text “Walden” and The Readers’ Thoreau

Today, we’re thrilled to announce that two of our projects at Digital Thoreau — Walden: A Fluid Text Edition and The Readers’ Thoreau — are ready to use.

Walden: A Fluid Text 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, 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.

The Readers’ Thoreau 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. The current lead developer of CommentPress, Christian Wach, has written new code that tightens the integration between the two plugins and adds many new affordances 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.

We have a third, ongoing project at Digital Thoreau: The Days of Walter Harding, Thoreau Scholar. The Days is an effort by undergraduate digital humanists at SUNY Geneseo to explore the life and work of a pre-eminent 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 here and send us your feedback.