Access and Affiliation: A Biography of Digital Melville

Abstract:This biography of the Melville Electronic Library recounts its growth in the context of the development of the intellectual potentials and technological challenges of digital humanities scholarship and reflects on the prospect of an affiliation of Melville projects, collectively called Digital Melville. MEL's fluid-text editorial approach is designed to give readers fuller access to interpretable versions of Melville's works. its proposed interactive visualization of Melville's lost copy or "third Moby-Dick" exemplifies how readers may navigate revisions to Melville's text otherwise obscured, dismissed, or "disappeared" in traditional editing. Digital technology addresses such problems of denied access and builds multi-generational, international communities, evident in MEL's interactive editing and mapping tools TextLab and Itinerary. By embracing "adaptive" as well as authorial and editorial revision, MEL's more comprehensive fluid-text approach also enables material-based contextualization of Melville in adaptation and translation. MEL's three-part structure—Archive, Editions, Projects—invites readers to use the archived and edited materials to generate new scholarship or linked sites. Its current affiliation with the University of Chicago's CEDAR initiative and its transition to Chicago's OCHRE database system is a step toward enhanced interoperability, and may inspire other digital projects, big and small, to join the emergent Digital Melville community.