Digital Mark Twain Day By Day

 

The online version of David Fears’s Mark Twain Day by Day is currently unavailable on MarkTwainStudies.com.  However, a working version can be found at Internet Archive’s “Wayback Machine” (Archive.org).  Make sure to search for “MarkTwainStudies.com” when prompted.

 

The Center for Mark Twain Studies has partnered with MATRIX: Center for Digital Humanities and Social Science at Michigan State University to create a total revision and reimagining of David Fears’s Mark Twain Day by Day.  The goal is to completely remake the site, adding vastly increased functionality and searchability that allows users to experience and visualize the amazing life and works of Mark Twain.  Joseph Lemak (CMTS) and Stephen Rachman (Michigan State University) will lead of scholarly team of key Twain scholars from a number of diffrent universities and the major Twain archives.  Dean Rehberger (Michigan State University), the director of MATRIX, will lead a team that brings together content knowledge with leading technical humanities practitioners.

This project is supported by generous funding from Susan Jaffe Tane.

As part of of this re-envisioning of the site, the two teams are working on several digital interventions.  We will:

  • create an online meta-biography of Twain that links each daily entry to other online resources in the Mark Twain Studies community (ex. Mark Twain Project in Berkeley, Center for Mark Twain Studies in Elmira, Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford). Many entries contain quotations and/or partial quotations from diary entries, published works, and correspondences. Where possible, these elements will be linked to active digital Mark Twain sites, directing the scholar to the source material. We will be curating these connections as well as providing additional supplementary content.
  • create a network analysis of Twain’s vast circles of acquaintances that is geotagged to visualize a global literary map of Twain’s life, travels, and acquaintances. In doing so we will make use of key works such as The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), A Tramp Abroad (1880), to Following the Equator (1897), and many others.
  • tie this project to other important collections and, as it will be a model for digital resources for other major American authors, such as Edgar Allen Poe and Walt Whitman, for example, it will be an online presence that will inform scholars and the general public about these authors and artifacts in important collections.

The scholarly team includes:

  • Erin Bertam, Mark Twain House and Museum, Hartford, CT.
  • Joseph Csicsila, Eastern Michigan University and Mark Twain Annual
  • Kerry Driscoll, Mark Twain Papers and Project, University of California, Berkeley
  • Joe B. Fulton, Baylor University and Mark Twain Journal
  • Scott Holmes, Mark Twain’s Geography
  • Charline Jao, Cornell University
  • Joseph Lemak, Elmira College (co-leader)
  • Stephen Rachman, Michigan State University (co-leader)
  • Shirley Samuels, Cornell University
  • Matt Seybold, Elmira College
  • Barbara Snedecor, Elmira College
  • Todd N. Tompson, Indiana Univeristy of Pennsylvania
  • Henry Wonham, University of Oregon

The MATRIX technical team includes:

  • Anthony Donofrio, Lead Software Developer
  • Catherine Foley, Head of Digital Library and Archive Projects, Project Manager
  • Jeffrey Goeke-Smith, Head of Systems
  • Gillian MacDonald, Director of the Lab for Education and Advancment of Digital Research
  • Dean Rehberger, Public Projects Coordinator (leader)
  • Alicia Sheill, Head of Operations, Project Manager

 

 

Twain at the writing table at Quarry Farm

Mark Twain writing in the Study at Quarry Farm (1874)