Melville’s Marginalia Online

Abstract

This review discusses Melville's Marginalia Online, a digital edition and online catalogue of the private library of author Herman Melville. The project is one of the first to make (parts of) a writer's library digitally available for research. By synthesizing and augmenting existing studies of Melville's reading, MMO provides an original scholarly resource. As such, the site offers an insight into the intellectual environment and literary influences of Herman Melville. Improvements can be made in the way this scholarship is communicated to the user. Moreover, considering the novelty of this type of research in the digital environment, it would be valuable to expand upon the technical implementations, or to publish the XML-transcriptions of Melville's marginalia.

Keywords

• 19th century
• archive
• commentary
• english
• facsimile
• genesis of work
• library
• literature
• melville
• reconstruction
• transcription