This project began as an ambitious effort to create a concordance of nature terminology from Henry David Thoreau’s canon, but has evolved into an effort to locate references to extinct and endangered species.
- Acquire a Dell desktop to house some of the PC-based corpus linguistics software (finished).
- Create a machine-readable corpus composed of Thoreau’s main writings and journal writing for research purposes (finished).
- Acquiring secondary comparative corpora to identify extinct and endangered species in Massachusetts Thoreau corpus (ongoing).
- Searching for patterns of usage.
- Build a master list of extinct and endangered species.
- Make the list digitally accessible to other scholars and researchers.
Henry David Thoreau (born July 12, 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts– May 6, 1862, Concord) is an American naturalist and essayist and a renowned transcendentalist philosopher whose writings deeply reflect the literary movement’s ideology. Thoreau is best known for Walden (1854), a book about the two years he spent living in a small cabin he built on Walden Pond, and his essay “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849), which is a defense of individual conscience against the coercive power of the state. Throeau’s writings fill twenty volumes, including articles, poetry, journals, essays, and books. Thoreau has influenced many principled protests against state power as well as individual and collective experiments “simple” living. He is also a proto-environmentalist who is cited as an influence by many American environmentalists.
Modern research into Thoreau has been enhanced by the rise of corpus linguistics research methods. Several Thoreau-related corpus projects are currently underway, digitizing his hand-written notes, essays and drafts into fluid text editions and holographs to capture his work. The New York Public Library, Concord Free Public Library, and the Morgan Library and Museum have digital copies of Thoreau’s handwritten notes and edited copies of his essays and books. “Digital Thoreau” is another organization that has digitized Thoreau’s work, and they have an extensive collection that includes a fluid text edition of Walden. This allows readers to compare all of the seven existing manuscript versions. Digital Thoreau is currently expanding their collection with the help of State University of New York Innovative Instruction Technology Grant.