About

Goals

This project was inspired by The Complete Letters of Willa Cather, a digital edition of Willa Cather's correspondence published by The Willa Cather Archive. Cather was a celebrated American novelist, active during the first half of the twentieth-century. As a woman with an engaging personal story, remarkable professional accomplishments, and a courageously independent life, Cather’s personal writings are of deep interest to many.

The Complete Letters offers unprecedented access to Cather’s personal writing and voice. Beyond making the correspondence available to a broad audience, the edition also includes a vast amount of information collected and created by the project team (e.g. recorded and annotated references to dates, people, works, and places). The sheer amount of information created as part of the edition presents both challenges and opportunities for reading Cather and her work: How are we to contextualize the over 8,900 references to people, 4,000 references to places, and 3,500 references to works included among the 3,125 published letters?

The Datebook App showcases a series of digital tools that explore and analyze Cather’s letters and the information, or data, at the core of the edition. Digital editions increasingly produce staggering amounts of information (in the form of data and metadata). In visualizing the data underlying The Complete Letters, we seek to model a collaboration between archival content and computational methods that could be applied to other editions of correspondence.

Team

The project was created as a collaboration among Gabi Kirilloff (an assistant professor English at Washington University in St. Louis), Matthew Lavin (an assistant professor of Data Analytics at Denison University) and Sean McCullough (a graduate student in English at TCU). Gabi and Matt had the privilege to work for The Cather Archive in the past (as a graduate student and postdoc respectively). All three of us are interested in the digital humanities, especially in applying quantitative methods to the study of literature.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank The Willa Cather Archive for their assistance with and support of this project. The Cather Archive has generously made the data for Cather's letters public as part of The Complete Letters of Willa Cather. This represents a tremendous amount of time and effort from the editorial staff. In particular, we would like to thank Andrew Jewell and Emily Rau, who were instrumental in the conception of this project. Their expertise, feedback, insight, and encouragement were a vital component of this project.