I’m still in the process of setting up my Trailing Eudora site. It needs quite a bit more touch up work before I can say it is fully operational, in fact, but I have added a little bit of content to it. If you are interested in reading the posts I put together after my trip to Jackson yesterday, here they are:
The Driving Tour
The Camellias
Content will likely develop slowly on that site. I might not post more than twenty times to it in the first year. That goes against the grain of how people have defined blogs thus far (as frequently updated personal sites), but it is an example of how a blog can be used to create an archive of information over time.
Content will develop slowly there because I’m going to be pickier about what I put on it. I posted something to this blog about my Welty trailing yesterday that I did not post over there. It was just a personal piece of transitory interest. I want to take more time with the items that go into the Welty project because I do see it as a scholarly project, even the parts of it that might be more personal in nature.
This is the kind of project I’d propose as a thesis if I were still a graduate student. It’s the kind of thesis I think people in the humanities should be writing these days. My guess is the hardbound black tomes are in no danger of fading away, however. People rarely ask me for input in these matters.
It may not be obvious yet why it is a scholarly site. I’m only just getting started. I do plan to add articles of a more critical nature, however, along with classroom lesson plans, photo essays, oral histories, and my own personal accounts of my excursions onto the trails Welty forged with her life and work.
Maybe the critical articles will be the only parts that do define it as scholarly in the end, but the cross-section of genres will make it interesting and useful. I wrote my master’s thesis in 1991. It was probably shelved in a library somewhere later that year. My guess is no one has picked it up since. I haven’t.
Digital scholarship, it seems to me, at least offers the opportunity to make the connections between the critical work and its applications more obvious. That’s what I hope to do with this Eudora project by working on it from a variety of angles and intersections rather than a single central claim. We’ll see what happens there…
Regardless, I’m learning something from it whether anybody else is or not. That’s enough for a start.
