Introduction
The
Dickinson Electronic Archives is an online, on-going project that
seeks to facilitate closer scholarly attention to Dickinson's works
as physical artifacts. To this end, its editorial board, consisting
of Martha Nell Smith, Ellen Louise Hart, and Marta Werner, have
coordinated the creation of a large website that makes Dickinson's
writings available in searchable digital reproductions of the
manuscripts, transcriptions, and notes. The archive offers numerous
digital representations of Dickinson's and others' manuscripts,
teaching tools, and responses to Dickinson's work.
Biography
Because
the choices an editor makes about a poet's work will derive from her
notion of the poet's biography, it is important to consider the
editor's biographical assumptions. The editors of the Dickinson
Electronic Archives see Dickinson as vastly different from how she
has been portrayed in most other scholarly work. Rather than an
eccentric recluse, frail and "surprised" by the intensity
of her own work, the archive portrays Emily as a woman who nurtured
intimate personal relationships, who collaborated on her carefully
crafted poems, and who displayed a lively sense of humor in her
works. The editors actively seek to dispel some of the more popular
Dickinson stereotypes, bringing their readers a fuller, more humane
picture of the poet.
Editorial
Theories
The
archives follow some of the same basic editorial principles as Smith
and Hart's Open
Me Carefully.
The editorial board stresses the importance of the manuscript as a
physical artifact and seeks to dismantle some of the ways in which
Dickinson is commonly seen: that her writing was the product of a
solitary process, that she did not have much of a sense of humor, and
that her notion of a poem was a "small" lyric that is
almost swallowed by the white space on the page.
The "Detailed
Description of the Archives Project"
makes the argument —in opposition to other Dickinson editors
— that Dickinson's works are not as transferable from one medium
to another; on the contrary, they are not separable from their
artifacts. One of the editorial board's chief concerns is how we
"see" poems, and they contend that seeing Dickinson's texts
as "scribal objects [rather than printed ones] profoundly alters
one's experience of her literary presentations." According to
them, for Dickinson, "editorial interference 'defeated' her
poetic objectives and dissuaded her from conventional publication via
mechanical reproduction." The possibility of seeing the works as
Dickinson wrote them (although in digital form) opens up vast new
interpretive possibilities.
The
project rests on the assumption that Dickinson is the best authority
on her work: like the archive, the other online projects the
collective is producing will represent Dickinson's writings by taking
"Dickinson's manuscript [corpus] . . . in all its
authority." She was a graphocentric poet, and to fully
appreciate her work it is important to see how her audiences would
have actually seen her poetry. That said, the editors do not discount
other printed editions of Dickinson's works; on the contrary, they
argue that the electronic medium will only enhance the printed
editions, and that scholars, in their desire for completeness, will
continue to consult everything available about Dickinson. They are
careful to acknowledge that their work is a product of years of
scholarly work. Nor do they ignore the fact that the manuscript
reproductions on the archive are just that; the graphics are another
"production performance" of Dickinson, and not the thing
itself. However, for their purposes, the electronic medium comes
closest to allowing a huge audience to see how Dickinson intended her
work to be seen.
Genre
Another
chief goal of the project is to allow readers to envision Dickinson's
entire oeuvre and the complex relations within it. While previous
editions of her work have classified her texts as traditional genres
— poems or letters or something else — the Dickinson
Archives seek to portray Dickinson's collapse of these categories and
how she presented her work to her readers. They introduce a new
genre, the "letter poem"—a blending of the two
genres—which seems closer to many of Dickinson's original
presentations than an artificial division into letters and poems.
Organization
of Site and Poems and Paratext
The
editors plan to organize the archive as a set of correspondences
between Dickinson and various readers, chief among them Susan
Dickinson, who figures prominently in their minds as Emily's main
audience and intellectual inspiration. The archives, they hope, will
also facilitate research into Susan's work and the connections she
had to Emily. By highlighting Susan's work, they hope to facilitate
study of Dickinson's writing practices and to dispel the notion of
her as an isolated writer. This organizational strategy also reflects
another assumption of Dickinson's writing: that, for her, the
circulation of her poetry to friends and family was publication.
However, at this stage in the site's development even the basic
intended organizational structure is not apparent; the table of
contents on the main page does not consist of Dickinson's addressees,
except for the entry of Higginson's "Letter to a Young
Contributor," which at this point is offered without any context
(at least on the main page). Indeed, the opening page seems to give
no indication where the real heart of the archive is, and its
ambiguity can be a bit overwhelming for the first time user. The
"Work in Progress" is perhaps the most extensive part of
the archive, though its entry in the table of contents belies this.
Under "Works in Progress" is "Working Image
Repository"; click on this, and you get "Emily Dickinson's
Correspondence," but even from this screen it is not clear that
the window contains more than correspondence with Susan. The user
must scroll down past an introductory note to find other
correspondences. Moreover, "Work in Progress" is restricted
to users who know the password, which cuts out a great number of
potential users. It should be noted, though, that this is not the
editors' choice, but is a result of Harvard University Press's
unwillingness to make the site free to all Web users.
The
manuscript archives themselves are listed by their Harvard manuscript
numbers. The Johnson numbers are given only in the notes with the
hope that "as we work through each correspondence, Johnson's
representations will disappear." As the archives are not indexed
by titles or first lines, the archive search engine is invaluable in
locating specific texts.
The
editors have chosen to supply a typewritten transcription alongside
each poem in the Dickinson archive (except with Susan's manuscripts,
which require the user to press a button to view the manuscript with
a transcript), which draws the attention of the reader away from the
sometimes practically illegible handwriting of Dickinson to the more
familiar printed form of her verse. While it is important to have the
transcript somewhere on the site, it may be a better choice to allow
the user to explore the manuscript first without the
"crutch" of a transcription. To the editors' credit, they
have written the transcript in a courier font, which makes it seem
less authoritative than a more printerly font like Times Roman. In an
effort to be lighthanded, they have put the notes to the poems in a
separate window, which allows the reader to choose whether to view
them. Perhaps this would be a better choice for the transcriptions as
well. One very valuable feature of the manuscript images is their
ability to be enlarged, which makes reading them much easier.
Editorial
Practices
Because
the archive project is still a work in progress, it is difficult to
judge how completely the editors will achieve their objectives. The
"Work in Progress" site does go a long way toward achieving
the goals of the project, however. In helping to dispel the
stereotypical notions of Dickinson, the editors have put together
sets of three poems under the titles "Emily Dickinson Writing a
Poem," "Emily Dickinson, Cartoonist," and "The
Letter Poem." These are edited with introductions, notes, and
questions for discussion and collaboration, making them an excellent
teaching tool.
Acknowledgements
The
editorial collective is generous in their acknowledgements of those
who have supported the project and the scholarship that has led up to
it. Their "Detailed Description" is peppered with
references to earlier scholarly work on Dickinson; they mention
Johnson's Variorum,
Franklin's Manuscript
Books,
Marta Werner's Open
Folios,
among others. They also thank the individuals and institutions from
whom they have received technical support and the institutions that
have provided funding.
Lineation
Unlike
editors who must decide whether to represent Dickinson's original
lineation, working with the manuscripts themselves does not require
such a decision; the line breaks are Dickinson's. The transcriptions
the editors provide also reflect her original lineation.
Spelling,
Punctuation and Capitalization
While
early editors like Bianchi and Todd regularized Dickinson's
non-standard mechanics, again, by choosing to reproduce the
manuscripts, the archive retains the Dickinson's original mechanics.
The manuscript images show the ambiguity of some of Dickinson's marks
without offering an interpretation. The transcriptions, however, must
make some decisions about these mechanics, and they attempt to
represent the manuscript as closely as possible in type.
Dating
and Attribution
The
editors have dated the archives using similar methodologies to those
found in Open
Me Carefully.
Rather than using Johnson's dates, they look at handwriting, the
type of paper, and references within the texts. They acknowledge that
the dating is approximate, and unlike Johnson, refrain from giving
specific years unless they have clear evidence. Instead, they give
approximate dates, such as "late 1860s" or "early 1850s."
Online Considerations
The
electronic format allows for things impossible or difficult to do in
print: it gives access to a much greater range of Dickinson
manuscripts than is easily available in print; it allows for detailed
analysis of the manuscripts, including complex searches of the images
and typescript; it invites collaboration at almost every point, as
the archive is constantly being revised; and its location on the Web
invites a much wider audience than might be found for a printed
"scholarly" publication.
The
archive repositories—both Susan's writings and Emily's—are
the most fascinating sections of the site. Unlike traditional
scholarly sites, which use a light colored background with black
text, the editors have chosen a black background for the manuscript
reproductions and cream-colored text. The dark background focuses the
eye immediately on the manuscripts, setting them off beautifully,
although for long periods of viewing the color reversal is hard on
the eye.
While the
archives' editors celebrate the capability of the computer to release
readers from "the constraints of the book, the machine that has
made the object," they face a new set of constraints —
those of the machine. In one readily apparent example, the quality of
the user's monitor greatly affects the quality of her experience at
the site. Depending on the monitor's resolution and the speed of the
connection, the quality of the images can range from excellent to
mediocre, to even illegible. As well, if the viewer has a smaller
screen, constant scrolling up and down the screen to view the whole
poem affects the way the user sees the poem in a way that viewing the
entire poem at once (in a book) does not; and, a slow modem may make
the huge site virtually inaccessible. In many cases, the quality of
the viewer's experience online reflects how much money she has to
spend on her computer equipment, while the purchase of a book enables
ensures that everyone who owns it will have equal quality of access
to its materials.
Another
benefit of a printed book is the reader's ability to always know
exactly her location in it. If she turns to the back for a note, she
can easily flip back to the text when she is finished. Likewise, she
always knows how much longer the book or chapter is. On such a large
site, though, the user's place is not always clear. The Dickinson
archive's navigation system is a bit sparse, and having a stationary
navigational frame would possibly aid in keeping a frame of reference
for the user.
Final Thoughts
The
Dickinson Archives site is already a powerful production of
Dickinson's work, allowing many of its readers to get a feeling for
her actual manuscripts for the first time. It does much to realize
its editors' wish for a democratization of scholarship: "[T]his
redistribution and wider circulation of information that helps
constitute expertise will profoundly reinflect scholarship as a
multitude of critical intelligences can be brought to bear on
questions previously the province of an exclusively informed
few." While the archive still has some organizational problems
at this point, it is an indispensable edition of Dickinson's work,
and as it develops promises to become even more valuable.