Melville's Marginalia Online

12/30/2024

Introducing MMO Assistant Editor and UConn English graduate student, Brandon Hurst, designer of our latest marginalia graphing tool, which adapts Matthew Jocker's R-coded full-text sentiment analysis technology with scatter plot coding to represent Melville's points of interaction with books from his library. Brandon, congratulations and well done!

12/30/2024

Brand new features and refinements at https://melvillesmarginalia.org/, including an expanded array of Voyant Tools for all encoded volumes, and a beta version of our new sentiment graphing feature for Melville's copies of Arthur Schopenhauer's writings. Make a year-end tax-deductible donation to the project and help us grow in 2025 https://melvillesmarginalia.org/pages/support

10/03/2023

Join us on Thursday 10/19 at 7 PM Eastern Standard Time to learn about Jonathan A. Cook's latest book, Neither Believer Nor Infidel: Skepticism and Faith in Melville's Shorter Fiction and Poetry.

Register for the Zoom event at https://forms.gle/84J3RYRXs59oqHgE7

02/26/2023

Newly encoded for access and analysis by our team at Saint Joseph's University, and now re-sectioned for optimal graphing. Melville's marginalia in William Alger's The Solitudes of Nature and of Man; or, The Loneliness of Human Life: https://melvillesmarginalia.org/Share.aspx?DocumentID=84&PageID=34632

02/26/2023

Our new marginalia graphing tool is the result of close collaboration between students and scholars in Electrical & Computer Engineering and Literary Studies, bringing transformative new resources and methods to the study of Melville's reading: https://melvillesmarginalia.org/

02/26/2023

Newly added! Graph Melville's marginalia in any encoded volume or set. Hover over graphing bars to display section info and counts for marked words or passages. Click on a bar to visit that section of the volume and consult its marginalia in a new tab. https://melvillesmarginalia.org/

02/05/2023

Suspense is building! Our dynamic graphing visualization tool is almost ready for public use, with vivid quantitative displays for words and passages marked by Melville, and single-click navigation to visualized sections and volumes. Support open-access, cutting-edge digital scholarship today with a tax deductible donation at https://melvillesmarginalia.org/

01/01/2023

Hours remaining! Support MMO with a tax-deductible donation today, and watch us grow in 2023: http://melvillesmarginalia.org/

12/13/2022

2022 goals achieved! . . . capped off by new information and insights on the Melville-Hawthorne relationship and Melville’s reading of Hawthorne in the latest issue of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies.

Follow MMO this month as we prepare to roll out our interactive graphing tool. Please share our posts and consider supporting the project with a year-end tax-deductible donation today:

As a non-profit, ongoing digital humanities project devoted to the reading and intellect of one of America's greatest writers, Melville's Marginalia Online depends on non-commercial forms of financial support. Private donations help pay for web hosting and development, equipment and software, imagin...

11/19/2022

As an anthropomorphized instance of the organic metaphor device commonly encountered in Romantic nature writing, the "germinous seeds" passage echoes the "heart-warmth" of reciprocal sympathy between author and reader in the passage on Shelley that Melville marked in "P.'s Correspondence" and aligns with the Virginian's other indebted pronouncements on the heart-head binary, such as his reference to Hawthorne's writings as "the still, rich utterances of a great intellect in repose, and which sends few thoughts into circulation, except they be arterialized at his large warm lungs, and expanded in his honest heart" (Piazza Tales 245).
https://melvillesmarginalia.org/Share.aspx?DocumentID=16&PageID=2330

11/19/2022

It is clear from his reading of Hawthorne's books that Melville thought his new literary friend embraced the wisdom of Ecclesiastes. Among the annotations in Mosses, the most obvious is his reiterated praise in two readings for the final paragraph on "Vanity Fair" in "The Celestial Railroad" (see Fig. 3). But the preoccupation is no less apparent in his marginalia to the most heavily [End Page 40] annotated work in these volumes, "Monsieur du Miroir," a seriocomic sketch of an unnamed narrator exploring the uncanny world of a mischievous double who haunts him on reflective surfaces.
https://melvillesmarginalia.org/Share.aspx?DocumentID=16&PageID=2134
Houghton Library, *AC85.M4977.Zz846h

11/19/2022

As one of Hawthorne's most candid portrayals of the shy and solitary nature for which he was notorious in life, "Foot-Prints on the Sea-Shore" in Twice-Told Tales, Second Series elicited Melville's interest as much or more as [End Page 27] an expression of the author's disposition than of his craftsmanship . . . In [a] moment of dispositional scrutiny, Melville marked the narrator's account of his escape to a "hermitage" among the rocks the moment he descries another sea-side visitant (324). Hawthorne was even then known to Berkshire residents as the local recluse who on his walks would sometimes hide behind boulders and trees to avoid encounters with other people (Parker, Herman Melville 881).
https://melvillesmarginalia.org/Share.aspx?DocumentID=82&PageID=29708