Participants

• Faculty: Dr. Elisa Barney Smith, Dr. Steven Olsen-Smith

Funding

• Osher Institute

• Delmas Foundation

Collaborators

• Boise State English Literature Department

• Melville’s Marginalia Online

Description

Dr. Olsen-Smith leads the Melville Marginalia Online project. The pages of many books once owned by Herman Melville have been scanned and are presented online. Dr. Olsen-Smith’s team is identifying locations where Herman Melville hand-wrote notes, markings or underlines in the text. These provide him and other scholars information about the process and thoughts Melville used while writing his books. 

We assist by implementing the open-source Tesseract OCR engine to convert the machine printed text contents to searchable text. We are also adding other technical Document Analysis techniques to improve the content in his system. We have looked at the similarity of styles in non-text marks to distinguish the writer. We have also extracted statistical information about the marginalia such as distribution of marginalia in sections of texts and word co-occurrence frequencies in the marginalia. Open areas include XML processing and further linguistic analysis.

See also the main Melville's Marginalia Online (MMO) website.

Publications

• Jonathan A Cook, Steven Olsen-Smith and Elisa Barney Smith with Remington Lambie, Abby Price and Hunter Tonkin, "Germinous Seeds: Hawthorne's Creative Influence on Melville," Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, The Melville Society and Johns Hopkins University Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, Volume 24, Number 3, October 2022, pp. 7-49.

• Christopher Ohge, Steven Olsen-Smith, Elisa Barney Smith, “At the axis of Reality: Melville’s Marginalia in the Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare,” Leviathan: a journal of Melville Studies, The Melville Society and Johns Hopkins University Press, Vol. 20, No. 2, June 2018.

• Aaron Burdin, “Feasibility of Melville Marginalia Authorship Differentiation,” Masters Thesis, Boise State University, August 2017.