Digital Emerson: A Collective Archive

Digital Emerson: A Collective Archive is a group project designed and implemented by the graduate students in "Literary History Becoming Digital" (ENGL 529):

authors: Aaron M. Moe, Adam Heidebrink , Charlie Potter, David Tagnani, Juan Carlos Flores, Jennifer Kiehne, Kellie Herson, Rachel Sanchez, Stacy Wittstock.

The seminar considered the problems -–scholarly, ethical, aesthetic, technical, and cultural-- that arise as literary studies moves away from old technologies and artifacts and is replaced or augmented by the digital.

We have called it “A Collective Archive” after Walter Benjamin's article “Theses on History” in which he describes the reciprocal action of the archive as a place that simultaneously contains and commits history. The archive, according to Benjamin, is as much a record as it is an argument. So, too, this website both records our efforts to understand Emerson and share our knowledge as much as it also makes an argument for the value added to the study of Emerson in a web 2.0 context.

What we have assembled is an extensive archive--one that includes primary texts as well as secondary material.. Our approach has been to foreground Emerson’s recurrent calls for the individual’s creative engagement with intellectual history.

The site is divided into three distinct sections: Text, Context, and Hypertext. Thus, in addition to the sections providing Emerson’s published texts, we developed what you might call the “value-added” sections we have named“Contexts” and “Hypertext.”