Data Approaches to Emily Dickinson and Eliza R. Snow

Cynthia L. Hallen describes her launch and development of the Emily Dickinson Lexicon (EDL) project, a dictionary of all the words in the poet’s collected verse. With English and linguistics majors volunteering as apprentice collaborators, Hallen, starting in the 1990s, began the ambitious project of digitizing the Franklin edition of Dickinson’s poems and using the newly developed WordCruncher concordance program to amass the lexicon. Hallen describes her use of the EDL along with other digital philological tools in a senior capstone course where students learned principles of philology as well as skills of lexicography, etymology, exegesis, rhetoric, style, translation, discourse analysis, and literary interpretation.