This project will created a concordance of nature terminology from Henry David Thoreau’s entire body of work, which can then be used by other scholars and researchers in their work. GGC Associate Professor of English Daniel Vollaro received a seed grant to do this research project throught the DH Lab. He intends to create the concordance and study it by following these steps:
- Acquire a Dell desktop to house some of the PC-based corpus linguistics software (finished).
- Creating a machine-readable corpus composed of Thoreau’s main writings and journal writing for research purposes (finished).
- Acquiring secondary comparative corpora to identify a list of search terms related to nature that I can use to search within the main Thoreau corpus (ongoing).
- Searching for patterns of usage.
- Build an exhaustive concordance of nature terminology in Thoreau’s writing.
- Make the concordance 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.