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   from the issue of April 17, 2008

     
 
  Digital Research in the Humanities | First in a four part series

Cather Archive takes Nebraska author global

 BY SARA GILLIAM, UNIVERSITY COMMUNICATIONS

Any Nebraskan knows a few bits of Willa Cather trivia. We read "My Antonia" in high school. We've passed through her hometown of Red Cloud.

 
<h2>See the <a href='http://www.unl.edu/ucomm/unltoday/popups/2008/20080417_cather.shtml'>Cather Archive Video</a></h2>
 

See the Cather Archive Video



Cather is a familiar face in Nebraska libraries and classrooms.

A cutting-edge digital project at UNL, the Willa Cather Archive (http://cather.unl.edu), is expanding the knowledge of Cather's life and writing, sharing her legacy with scholars, book lovers and students around the world.

The archive features correspondence, interviews, journalism and fiction by Cather, and as tools for scholarly analysis of her work.

The archive is supported by the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, a joint initiative of the University Libraries and the College of Arts and Sciences.

The main architect and editor is Andrew Jewell, assistant professor of digital projects in the University Libraries. He researches and builds digital humanities publications, and helped create the Nebraska U Web site (http://unlhistory.unl.edu) through which students build their own scholarly digital projects.

The archive has existed since the mid-1990s, when the University of Nebraska Press began compiling an online collection of Cather's work. It entered the realm of modern digital scholarship several years ago when Jewell - who received his doctorate in American Literature with an emphasis in Cather studies - was "given leave to go nuts with it."

The contents of the archive are extensive and highly detailed. Part of what the site offers is access to Cather's early journalism, nonfiction, and fiction, some of which the archive presents online for the first time. Although her will prohibits the publication of her personal correspondence, the archive features detailed summaries of more than 2,000 letters Cather wrote, photos, audio and video clips, and syllabi for teachers.

The site allows visitors to delve into text analysis, searching for the appearance of specific words and phrases in Cather's writing.

"Text analysis lets people get at texts in a new way - quantitatively," Jewell said. "Thanks to Brian Pytlik Zillig's TokenX software, users can analyze Cather's language usage, and how it changed over time. Exploring language patterns is a new way into Cather's work; it allows you test your instincts about what's important in her language usage. Our goal is to find ways to utilize the electronic medium to get people at the stuff they couldn't see when flipping through a book."

Planned for publication in summer 2008 is "Mapping a Writer's World: A Geographic Chronology of Willa Cather's Life," which was funded by the Nebraska Humanities Council. This geographic chronology will be map-based, allowing users to visually track Cather's movements throughout her life. Jewell noted that many people don't realize that Cather isn't just a regionally known writer; in fact, she lived and traveled and is read and celebrated all around the world. One day, Jewell would like to expand the project to "map" Cather's fiction, so that scholars can explore "imagined space" (places in Cather's fiction) versus the real space that inspired it.

Through UCARE grants or work-study positions, students play a role in the creation and maintenance of the archive.

"Students get very invested in these projects, which is a phenomenon that seems distinctive to students doing digital work in the humanities," Jewell said. "This process invites real, active contributions by students. They get to see their work published online."

Jewell first became involved in digital humanities research when he was a graduate student at UNL.

"I got started working on the Whitman Archive, and right away I realized that despite my student status, I was invited to debate with (English professor and Whitman Archive co-director) Ken Price about project decisions," Jewell said. "Digital research in the humanities requires collaboration and teamwork with a range of people, especially students. Sometimes the contributors write original content, other times the value is in dogged transcription work or improvement of the technical infrastructure. It's all important in the end."

Many aspects of digital humanities research that excite students appeal to faculty members as well.

"I feel much less confined as a scholar," Jewell said. "I am invited to dream up new approaches and envision new resources that I would appreciate as a literary scholar, and then I get to build those resources. It's also exhilarating to do something that is valued in the Cather scholarly community and reaches a wider audience. If you publish something in a scholarly journal it is read by a handful of people - if you're lucky. Meanwhile, we have 75,000 to 80,000 unique visitors to the archive per year."

The never-quite-finished na-ture of digital research is both a blessing and a curse.

"An archive like this is designed to encompass the whole world of its subject," Jewell said. "Thanks to the digital medium, the Cather Archive and projects like it can expand and grow larger and richer. Each level of richness, however, sometimes feels like another plate that needs to be kept spinning in the complex structure of the site."

One of the most-touted aspects of digital humanities research is its collaborative nature. Jewell noted that there is a long tradition in the culture of academia of "looking out for oneself." His experience working with digital humanities has been exactly opposite this traditional paradigm, and he and his colleagues envision a promising future for the field at UNL.

"I think it's almost inevitable that much of human culture's common way of encountering information is going to be through the digital medium," Jewell said. "Scholars who embrace the technology will help determine what that encounter will be."



See the Cather Archive Video



GO TO: ISSUE OF APRIL 17

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