Digital Thoreau invites scholars, teachers, students, and all who care about the thought and life of Henry David Thoreau (1817-62) to engage in new and meaningful ways with Thoreau’s writings, Thoreau scholarship, and each other.
The project’s core is a digital text of Walden encoded according to the standards of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and enriched by scholarly annotations, links, images, and social tools that enable users to create conversations around the text.
The annotations from Walden: An Annotated Edition, edited by Thoreau biographer Walter Harding, together with digital assets from the the Thoreau Society’s Harding Collection (curated by the Thoreau Institute Library at The Walden Woods Project) provide a base layer of context on which future layers will be built.
Digital Thoreau’s Walden differs from every available print version by incorporating all seven draft stages of the work, which was begun during Thoreau’s two-year experiment in deliberative living at Walden Pond (1845-7) but not published until 1854. Based on Ronald E. Clapper’s pioneering scholarship on the manuscript variants—The Development of Walden: A Genetic Text—Digital Thoreau’s critical apparatus of Walden permits users to compare manuscript versions side by side and track Thoreau’s changes across versions. In addition, it enables users to compare the transcribed manuscript versions to digital images of the manuscript leaves themselves. Finally, the social tools in Digital Thoreau make it possible for readers to improve the transcriptions’ accuracy.
Ultimately, Digital Thoreau aims to offer the most complete and interactive online corpus of Thoreau’s published works, manuscripts, journals, letters, and related materials, contextualized with the best existing scholarship and open to the widest audience for access and response.
Thoreau’s writings have informed modern thinking in areas as widely diverse as philosophy, politics, natural history, and spirituality. Digital Thoreau is a means to learn about these writings and the man behind them, add to what we know, and join a conversation that has been going on for more than 150 years.
