" To evaluate Dickinson's process and ambitions as a writer requires that readers recuperate a sense of the state or the groups in which Emily Dickinson herself left her documents "

 

The Dickinson Electronic Archives Projects: A Dynamic Scholarly Edition
Martha Nell Smith

To consider the Dickinson Electronic Archives as a new type of scholarly edition, let's begin with the observation that the descriptive title of the work has, over the nearly seven years since its inception, gotten multiply pluralized-Emily Dickinson, a name for one, has become Dickinson, surname for many; archive has become archives; and project, projects. The Dickinson Electronic Archives began completely focused on the writings of Emily Dickinson, particularly those that she "published" to her contemporaries via distribution through the postal service, through family, through friendly courier, by binding them into hand-manufactured manuscript books and leaving them behind for posterity. So the Dickinson Electronic Archives began as one major project, focused on editing the manuscripts of Emily Dickinson, her "Letter to the World." Of that extended lifelong "letter," Emily Dickinson asked nineteenth-century editor Thomas W. Higginson if it breathed. The multiple projects of the Dickinson Electronic Archives are the witnesses the poet herself so eagerly sought-that "Letter" of hers not only breathes but it begets, seemingly in perpetuity.

Produced by the Dickinson Editing Collective and coordinated by myself, the Dickinson Electronic Archives features digital primary resources (digitized images of manuscripts, transcriptions thereof that will be marked up following the TEI, images of printings with transcriptions also to be rendered in TEI markup) and second-generation digital resources (born-digital creations that call digital primary resources into play; see Unsworth). The Dickinson Electronic Archives organizes Emily Dickinson's writings on the premise that she "published" her poems by circulating them in her correspondences (a practice not entirely exceptional for a woman of her circumstance; see Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson for my extended early analysis of her distribution practices), and features them in Correspondences of Emily Dickinson, which categorizes her writings according to the person to whom they are addressed. Thus, since there are at least 99 individual correspondents to whom Emily Dickinson addressed her letters and poems, there are more than 99 different directories established for the body or "book" of her work addressed to each. Some of these bodies or "books" are slim-for example, the slim volume to her youngest nephew Gib contains only three documents from Dickinson, while the volume addressed to his mother, Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson, contains several hundred documents and is by far the most voluminous of the bunch. In fact, if these bodies or "books" were published as individual volumes and placed on a library shelf, that to Susan Dickinson would take up 40% of the shelf space. Since I just edited a 323 pp. volume of about half of this correspondence (Open Me Carefully), I am confident in saying that this volume(s) would be more than 646 pp. long. This organization of Emily Dickinson's writings that takes as its center not the individual lyric poem but her own production and distribution practices is at odds with that of previous editors. For them, the lyric poem centers (in that it focuses) their editing practices, and so they have divided her work rigidly as far as genre is concerned-separating therefore the letter from the poem-even while acknowledging that such a separation is difficult to discern from the physical grammar of Dickinson's writings. That organization of documents dictated by genre distinction is an organization determined by conventions of print, and all of the bibliographic machinery that makes print, the means through which most literature is distributed, possible. The organization of documents within the Dickinson Electronic Archives has been dictated by the poet's own methods of distributing her work in epistolary form and recording it in handmade volumes.

Thinking about the implications of Emily Dickinson's production and distribution methods has focused my work for nearly two decades, and I want to recall some eighteenth-century commentary on editing before going any further:

To have a text corrupt in many places, and in many doubtful, is, among the authours that have written since the use of types, almost peculiar to Shakespeare.
But not quite. Samuel Johnson might just as well have been writing of Emily Dickinson when he lamented the state of the Bard's texts. He persisted:
No other authour [besides Shakespeare] ever gave up his works to fortune and time with so little care: no books could be left in hands so likely to injure them, . . .no other editions were made from fragments so minutely broken, and so fortuitously reunited. . . . (quoted by Jerome McGann in Critique of Modern Textual Criticism 16-17)

Now, one might say that the poet herself is to blame for the fact that there have been, there are now, and there will continue to be contests over not only who owns Emily Dickinson's words but what object can be called a poem by Emily Dickinson. There are many objects that can be called poems of Emily Dickinson, but what constitutes a poem by her has never been firmly established. Though one does not usually think of scholarly variorums as narratives, they in fact are. In the case of Emily Dickinson, R.W. Franklin's The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition (1998) and Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson (1998), the edition I edited with Ellen Louise Hart, are the latest witnesses to that fact. Franklin sees the nearly 2,000 poems of Dickinson's career, in all their various versions, as the most important fact to highlight about her writing work and he contextualizes that fact with the assumption that her highest writing goal was eventual publication in the print medium. He thus concludes that conventional genre distinctions of prose and poetry were also hers. With that fact and that assumption of reading amply highlighted for Dickinson's readers, Hart and I chose to highlight a different, long-neglected fact-that the bulk of the writing work Emily Dickinson shared with her contemporaries went to a single audience, Susan Dickinson, an audience to whom Emily Dickinson listened (as the exchange featured in "Emily Dickinson Writing a Poem," Dickinson Electronic Archives, attests; focus on the fact that there are two different responses from Susan in their exchange).

Go the website listed below and follow the log on instructions below.
<http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/dickinson/safe/index.html>

Log On Instructions

LOGIN: dickinson
PASSWORD: ink_on_disc;
Note: the passwords are needed ONLY for the Emily Dickinson documents in the DEA and the 3 discussed in this paper are about to become publicly accessible

Hart and I contextualize that fact with an interpretive assumption that stands in direct contrast to that of his about genre-from the material witness of Dickinson's manuscripts, we have concluded that she was not bound by the print-determined distinctions between poetry and prose but, as have many other poets, began to mingle them, blend them, and choreograph them to produce what Susan Dickinson called "letter-poems."

So, there have been, there are now, and there will continue to be contests over whose story of reading Emily Dickinson-diverse and sometimes conflicting stories borne out by editorial practices-is the official, the authentic, the authorized one. I want to say unequivocally that there need not be these contests akin to that of the United States 2000 Presidential Election in which the winner takes all. Or, there need not be a "winner," a contestant whose editorial judgment prevails in these disagreements. The Hart-Smith-Werner Emily Dickinson of the Dickinson Electronic Archives need not usurp the Franklin Emily Dickinson of the new variorum. All of the stories told by these various editions are valuable, and all are authorized, however diversely, for all of the edition-producing narratives are generated by the lives of Dickinson's documents and their print progeny, the score and more bibliographic editions of her writings published since 1890. The scholarly editions of Emily Dickinson's writings found in the Dickinson Electronic Archives are, in spite of their hypertextual presentation and their freedom from pages bound into a single volume, likewise critical narratives of reading, or at least they are the result of these critical narratives of reading.

In his introduction to the new variorum, Franklin describes precisely the sweeping judgment on which his new edition is predicated, a judgment that homogenizes all literary performances, making them over into the images of print: ". . .this edition is based on the assumption that a literary work is separable from its artifact, as Dickinson herself demonstrated as she moved her poems from one piece of paper to another" (FP p. 27). In other words, "poems" are intellectual, abstract objects which can only be represented in, but are not of, the material world. This assumption discounts the possibility that form is constitutive of authorial poetics and that Emily Dickinson may have intended different poetic techniques in her arrangements of the same set of words; and this assumption contends that material facts of presentation are extra-literary, or non-literary. Franklin's frame is either/or and in that follows copyright law: either one is considering the literary work or one is studying its artifactual realization. Presumably, then, the editor's responsibility is to find the proper form, the proper container, for the literary work. The difference that the Dickinson Editing Collective, producers of the Dickinson Electronic Archives, has with this position is key to understanding the poetics of the DEA. Our goal is not to find the proper (in terms of copyright and critical tradition) literary container for "poems" but to find the medium that transmits more, rather than fewer, of Dickinson's poetic techniques. Propriety is not the issue. The issue is textual pleasure and access, and enabling audiences to avail themselves of as many pleasures as possible in Dickinson's scriptures. Conventional editing for print production routinely removes these pleasures from the textual representation, in part because they are not visible to those whose editorial glasses focus on typographical sights.

At this point, Jacques Derrida's opening reflections in Archive Fever are most instructive for analyzing the different ways the archives of the original documents drive different editorial performances:

Let us not begin at the beginning, nor even at the archive.
But rather at the word "archive"-and with the archive of so familiar a word. Arkhe, we recall, names at once the commencement and the commandment. This name apparently coordinates two principles in one: the principle according to nature or history, there where things commence-physical, historical, or ontological principle--but also the principle according to the law, there where men and gods command, there where authority, social order are exercised, in this place from which order is given- nomological principle. (1)

Derrida retains the binding that arkhe makes of commandment and commencement . But because they so aptly delineate the different ways the manuscript archives inform the latest archival productions-Franklin's bibliographic archive of texts, the 1998 variorum, and the Dickinson Editing Collective's electronic archives-for our purposes and considerations, they will be unbound.

Commandment-authority, social order-describes the guiding principle of Franklin's variorum. While versioning reigns in Franklin's production, presumably to show more fully the range of Dickinson's intentions, and he does not, by representing multiple textual versions of a poem, privilege one over another, he throughout privileges not the "work" (as he claims) but the linguistic idea of a poem's "text," the literary component that he believes is separable from its artifactual realization. Through this assumption order is imposed on that which is otherwise unruly-the messy handwritten artifacts of poems, letters, letter-poems, scraps, notes, fragments. The idea of "poem" disciplines and contains views of Dickinson's writings so that they conform to social order and literary law, whatever the material evidence may suggest. According to this principle of commandment, the material evidence, the manuscripts, contain the idea of "poem" and an editor's job is to deliver that idea in a container that makes "poem" extractable. Here textual boundaries are clear, commanded as they are by the ideas that demarcate genres for books.

Commencement-physical, historical, ontological beginning-describes the guiding principle of the Collective's production of electronic archives. Unpersuaded that "poem" is an "idea" easily separable from its artifact, the electronic archives feature images of Dickinson's manuscript bodies in all their sizes, shapes, and messiness. What constitutes a "poem" and poetic meanings is left up to the reader. A work might sport a stamp or a cutout from Dickens that the reader deems part of a "poem," and the electronic archives refuse to bind that element as extra-literary (see, for example, "Dickinson, Cartoonist," DEA; <http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/dickinson/cartoon/index.html>).
Finger smudges, pinholes, paste marks, coffee stains, and traces of ribbons, flowers, or other attachments offer a view into the manuscript circulation and exchange so central to Dickinson's literary world. Also featured are images of the printed pages, the bodies that have transmitted Dickinson's writings to the world, and in these are stories of Dickinson's history as a poet whose writings are read and enjoyed by a wide audience. The tidy organizations of those printings bound into The Poems of Emily Dickinson and The Letters of Emily Dickinson juxtaposed with the not fully intelligible bindings of manuscripts (into fascicles or correspondences) by Dickinson herself, as well as with her many writings unbound (single sheets, notes, drafts, fragments, scraps), renew ontological questions about the identities of these many writings. Textual boundaries are not clear. Underscored is the fact that an ideal idea of "poem" or "letter" must dominate for the writings to be neatly divided by bibliographically-determined genre. With many of the documents, readers cannot help but begin to ask "what is this?" "What is this writer doing?" The electronic archives, then, are not interested in producing Dickinson's works in order to make books but in order to probe and learn from her work as a writer.

To evaluate Dickinson's process and ambitions as a writer-a "private" producer of lyrics, poetic epistles, mixed media layouts, epigrams, and drafts, who apparently had "public" ambitions-Dickinson "poems," "letters," "drafts," and "fragments" need to be unedited, and more of the forms of her literary expressions transmitted. To do so, or to "undo" so (Werner 13), requires that readers recuperate a sense of the state or the groups in which Emily Dickinson herself left her documents-"individual correspondences, the manuscript volumes, and ungathered poems and drafts" (Hart, "New Strategies," 45), as well as the scraps, fragments, and notes. Also important to recuperate is a sense of the two major corpora-the manuscript books and the hundred of poems, letters, and letter-poems shared with Susan Dickinson. Cultivating such a sense requires reimagining (in the various handwritten forms of calligraphic orthography, angled "dashes," and angled and vertical, as well as horizontal, poetic lines; Rowing in Eden 79-95) the writings that have been known and studied for the past century as literary objects ("poem," e.g.) made for print-determined genres. However, typographical translation erases her widely varying holographic nuances and designs, flattening Dickinson's visually expressive scriptures into mechanically regularized alphabetic forms and, as I have already remarked, into genres predicated on sharp distinctions between the epistolary and poetic.

The Dickinson Electronic Archives is designed to facilitate such a reconceptualization of Dickinson's textual world, and thereby open up access for examining Emily Dickinson's writing practices. Highlighting her scribal publication and presenting Dickinson's corpora via photographic reproductions and diplomatic transcriptions of these writings in electronic format have numerous advantages for expanding access. Besides searchability, making information more readily retrievable and manipulable, itself a resource of inestimable value, users can compare, by examining writings side-by-side, various versions of poems and the diverse contexts Dickinson used to present her literatures. Also, full color display of the manuscripts on the computer screen makes visible paste marks, stains, pinholes, and gradations between pencil and pen that are muted and often indistinguishable in the monochromatic halftones in books, marks that Dickinson incorporated into her poetic expression. Visible too are serendipitous technological artifacts making certain elements, the edges of the page, e.g., more clearly articulated (halftone reproduction tends to cut off page edges, making margins appear smaller than they in fact are). Thus many more elements of Dickinson's writing project and its technologies, of the holographic artifacts Dickinson bequeathed to the world, get to be seen by many more readers via production performances in the electronic medium, a powerful tool for helping readers to reconceptualize the texts beyond the "Alabaster Chamber" of the printed page. Knowledge about Dickinson's writings that has been privatized and made available only to a privileged few will be redistributed with a much wider circulation, and new collaborations between editors and readers, heretofore impossible, made possible. Peer review, for example, has been expanded to included the critical review of users as well as the that of scholarly specialists.

What might it mean that Dickinson pursued her poetic project "by following the options released through a scriptural and epistolary environment rather than a publishing and bibliographical one" (McGann, "Visible Language," 45)? If such a move by this major American poet indicates a "democratization of poetry, integrating it into quotidian production" (Rowing 111) and therefore a turning away from the "courtly muses of Europe" of the sort that Ralph Waldo Emerson yearns for in "The American Scholar," how is that important for twenty-first century readers? That coding such texts for delivery through computer systems demands no longer thinking simply in terms of paragraphs or stanzas but in terms of both and more simultaneously is thus a crucial and welcome critical step forward. By contrast, coding Dickinson's "letter-poems" simply as poetry or simply as prose reveals how the writings must be misconstrued in order to fit into a single set of conventions.

Indeed, one can see the problem in conventional bibliographic representation. Franklin's printing of "Show me Eternity, and I will show you Memory - " (FP 1658) indicates well how a letter-poem text must be changed in order to be delivered within the frame of a single set of conventions (<http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/dickinson/letter/hb90.htm>). He says that this "poem" concludes "a letter to Susan Dickinson, following the signature 'Sister.'" Yet the "Sister" he intellectually attaches to the first eleven physical lines of this letter-poem is in fact physically attached to the second segment of this letter-poem (in Printings <http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/dickinson/letter/fp1658.htm>). The word appears, as Hart has so persuasively argued, after a physical space that marks off it and the next eight physical lines as the second segment of this three-part writing (Hart, "Encoding" 263-265):

Morning
might come
by Accident -
Sister -
Night comes
by Event -
To believe the
final line of
the Card would
foreclose Faith -
Faith is Doubt.

Sister -
Show me
Eternity , and
I will show
you Memory -
Both in one
package lain
And lifted
back again -

Be Sue, while
I am Emily -
Be next, what
you have ever
been, Infinity -
(OMC 246; The Letter-Poem, a Dickinson Genre, DEA)

Franklin must ignore the physicalities of Dickinson's document in order to declare as a "letter" writing that does not differ metrically or in subject matter from writing on the same document that he wants to declare "poem." In Franklin's intellectual scheme of things, the first eleven physical lines of this letter-poem would be marked as a sentence (or as sentences) of a letter, and then the following fourteen physical lines would be marked as verse units; thus the logic of the markup would divide this documentary body and its constitutive parts into separate pieces. This dismembering representation bears no correlation to the logic of the physical document nor, as it turns out, to the linguistic content, and in fact distorts a sense of the text so that Hart's insight is unavailable to readers of the new variorum, her critical understanding of Dickinson's poetics "overturned" through the silent erasures of bibliographic grammars: Hart notes that the letter-poem's first segment concludes with the extraordinary logic that "doubt measures the strength of commitment that faith demands and is itself the form in which faith continues," that Dickinson in turn marks this leap in faith with a "leap in the [letter-]poem, which appears physically as a break between" segments. The letter-poem "pairs opposites that are actually complements, morning and night, faith and doubt, eternity and memory, finally leading to the poem's central pair, 'Sue' and 'Emily'" (264). To advance representation and understanding of this document, the Collective, concurring with Hart's interpretation of this as a three-part literary document (and not with Franklin's that this is a two-part document of an epistle followed by a poem), is adopting, augmenting, and revising the more accommodating, flexible but nevertheless rigorous markup scheme, developed by Marta Werner's extension of TEI in her marvelous Radical Scatters (2000).

Ironically, that critical step forward has been taken because the fact that the manuscript is the primary level for coding requires that, in order to translate them into electronic forms, the Collective "read her poems backwards" (a practice Dickinson herself recommended when a reader craves clarify) or behind, away, through, and finally without the frontispiece of poems of Emily Dickinson produced for bibliographic publication. Overturning bibliographic biases for new critical understandings is important not only on the micro level of the line, sentence, stanza, and paragraph, but also on the macro level of corpora. Bibliographic biases have held that the fascicles, the poems in the manuscript books, comprise Dickinson's main body of writing. In sharp contrast, the Collective's work more and more shows that the fascicles are not more literary and artistically significant but are parallel and perhaps even secondary to her main body of writing-the correspondences. This is especially important because studying the correspondences makes, as the example of "Morning / might come / by Accident - " shows, suppressed knowledge about her compositional intricacies and the intricacies of her primary literary conversation, still mysteries after a century of study, available.

Though Franklin's variorum project hierarchizes "poem" over "letter," erasing, as we have just seen, "letter" when it is deemed insignificant for literary considerations, his work nevertheless calls into question, at least implicitly, any assumption that the manuscript books are the central literary works by Emily Dickinson. The versioning display of poems sent to contemporaries in the same font as those recorded in the fascicles refuses Johnson's method of subordinating all versions of a poem to one primary fair copy version (which he might find in a fascicle or in a correspondence) by featuring the versions in a smaller font than that he has designated as primary fair copy. Unlike Johnson, Franklin's hierarchy is not invested in "fair copy" but in "poem." As the example so aptly shows, this investment in bibliographic taxonomies for a poet whose work was decidedly graphocentric erases yet another of Dickinson's corpora: the letter-poem, central to a Dickinsonian poetics in which poetry is, as she and Susan Dickinson believed, "Hope - Sermon - Solace - Life."

Obviously, in producing the Dickinson Electronic Archives, collaboration, or a new model of scholarship central to the ethos of the editions themselves, has emerged and is still emerging.

Collaborate - to work jointly with others esp. in an intellectual endeavor.
To work together, not alone; to work jointly, in concert, not identically. Werner's coding strategy collaborates with critical observations by other members of the Collective, with Thomas Johnson's fretful observation that Dickinson's letters "are so nearly the quality of her poems as on occasion to leave the reader in doubt where the letter leaves off and the poem begins" (L p. xv), and with Susan Dickinson's recognition that something other than "poem" or "letter" was going on in her beloved friend's writing. This call and response commencing in Dickinson's gifts to the world and continuing through all their handlings are at the heart of Dickinson's poetics. Her works, housed in library archives up and down the United States' northeast corridor, animate the many texts that they perpetually generate. The electronic archives are reproducing images of documents that fill those library archives, making available to a much wider audience than has previously had the privilege a more direct experience with Dickinson's handwritten works, which feature line breaks not determined by metrical conventions, punctuation marks not bound to conventions, alphabetic letters not bound to the conventions of either upper or lower case, and other textual behaviors that bear little resemblance to what print leads readers to expect. The electronic archives are also making available the scene of Dickinson's writings, the manuscript page of formal stationery, shopping bags, torn envelopes, and the like that have been disappeared until the past couple of decades. By collecting images of all these items stored in individual folders in a number of different libraries in databases with cross linkings and mutual searchability, the electronic archives are bringing together virtually what has been dismembered by property rights and by literary orders. The poetics of the archive, then, is a poetics of collaborations- multiple, diverse, generative.

Dickinson and her contemporary admirers were constantly extending her texts to her audiences. Through ellipsis and alternative choices, for example, Dickinson demanded that readers collaborate in the making of poems (Rowing 51-95). Her sister Lavinia and Susan Dickinson both relished reading Dickinson's poems aloud to audiences, and accounts of her Norcross cousins testify that Emily, so long assumed to be isolate and antisocial, enjoyed reading her work as well. In the Dickinson Electronic Archives, one can see that her works extend even outside themselves as Titanic Operas and Contemporary Youth's Companion, both late twentieth-/early twenty-first century poetic responses to Dickinson's legacy to which we will return, grow
(<http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/dickinson/titanic/index.html> splash page for Titanic Operas and <http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/dickinson/titanic/table_of_contents.html>,

noting sound files).

The Dickinson Electronic Archives also offers access to previously unpublished writings that directly influenced Dickinson's work. The most important of these is undoubtedly the online critical edition of previously unpublished Writings by Susan Dickinson (poems, essays, reviews, articles, short stories, letter-poems, letters; <http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/dickinson/susan/>). The first online scholarly edition to incorporate user responses as part of its critical peer review process, Writings by Susan Dickinson has proved to be of great interest to humanities computing and textual theory scholars outside Dickinson and nineteenth-century literary studies as its editors test, analyze, and revise their work and the possibilities and perils presented by a dynamic editorial model possible only in this medium.

Another key section of the Dickinson Electronic Archives is "Ned's Notebook," which can be found in Edward (Ned) Dickinson: Correspondence and Notebook, a section in Writings by the Dickinson Family (<http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/dickinson/family/ned/nndex.html>). "Ned's Notebook" features transcriptions of Emily and Susan Dickinson's poetry that were possibly made as Susan Dickinson tried to make her "Book of Emily" in the 1890s. Users of the archives can decide for themselves, and the occasion of this presentation permits me to put out a call for Dickinson's readers to join us in evaluating these documents. What does it mean for our considerations of literary history that Ned and Susan Dickinson made Emily and Susan Dickinson's poems coextensive by placing them in the same manuscript volume?

Correspondences of Emily Dickinson, Writings by Susan Dickinson, and Edward (Ned) Dickinson: Correspondence and Notebook all feature both digital primary resources and second-generation or born-digital resources. The Dickinson Electronic Archives also includes other born-digital resources. Titanic Operas features twentieth-century women poets' responses to Dickinson's legacy. The Dickinson Editing Collective has been-as you can see from the offerings by Alicia Ostriker, the late Gwendolyn Brooks, Ruth Stone, Adrienne Rich, Joyce Carol Oates, Katha Pollitt, Toi Derricotte, and Sandra Gilbert-digitizing readings by these poets so users of the archives can listen to them read Emily Dickinson's and their own poems as they must on her influence. The questions I ask you to consider with the DEA's editors is, what do multimedia presentations of poetry offer scholarly inquiry? What is important about the translation from the written to the aural? What can be learned and how might such translation serve as or crucially augment and extend scholarly annotation?

Other born-digital works in the Dickinson Electronic Archives have been produced by students in American poetry and textual theory classes, and by eleven American literature scholars from around the country to produce The Classroom Electric: Dickinson, Whitman, and American Culture (SHOW <http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/fdw/>). The Dickinson Electronic Archives also features links to sites related to Dickinson, and online articles related to Dickinson, her writing practices, editorial practices surrounding her work, as well as online articles about the work included in Titanic Operas, and links to online articles about The Classroom Electric project.

While the aims and goals of these scholarly sites of the Dickinson Electronic Archives projects have sometimes been wildly misunderstood, especially in the provincial world of Dickinson Studies (where scholars want The Text, either Franklin's or that of the Collective to prevail), it seems only a matter of a very short time that readers will become accustomed to the "new" media and learn to avail themselves of the advantages and useful limitations of electronic access to editions and scholarship. As producers of these scholarly sites of the Dickinson Electronic Archives, we do not aim to have the last or "most authoritative" word about Emily Dickinson, her writings, and the wealth of scholarly and creative works generated by them. All conscientious stories of reading Emily Dickinson and her writings are worth telling and worth hearing. Indeed, by featuring perpetually updatable rather than static, soon-to-be-dated materials, we hope to encourage an online critical exchange that is likewise dynamic, where critical positions can be constantly deepened and updated rather than become fixed and entrenched. In doing so, peer review has been expanded to include critical review by users; scholarly annotation has been expanded to include the artistic performances by writers Dickinson knew and with whom she exchanged work and by writers she could have never met but who have benefitted from her legacy. Thus evaluation and contextualization are not adjacent to but are constitutive of the work of the Dickinson Electronic Archives. If there is a ghost of "Emily Dickinson" in the machines that drive the productions of the electronic archives projects, its clear demand is that we always remember its lyric beckoning, "I dwell in Possibility" (FP466).



WORKS CITED

Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago & London: U of Chicago P, 1996.Dickinson Editing Collective. Smith, Martha Nell, Coordinator; Ellen Louise Hart and Marta Werner, General Editors. Lara Vetter, Associate Editor. Dickinson Electronic Archives. Charlottesville: Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH), U of Virginia. http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/dickinson, 1995 to the present (referred to as DEA). Password-protected sections of the DEA can be accessed with the user id: dickinson; password: ink_on_disc [login is case sensitive]. Besides Correspondences of Emily Dickinson, Writings by Susan Dickinson, Titanic Operas: A Poets' Corner of Responses to Dickinson's Legacy, Edward (Ned) Dickinson: Correspondence and Notebook are major publications of the DEA.
Franklin, R.W., ed. The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition. Cambridge & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard U P, 1998. Poems cited in text are indicated by "FP" and the number given by Franklin.

Hart, Ellen Louise. "The Elizabeth Putnam Whitney Manuscripts and New Strategies for Editing Emily Dickinson's Letters." The Emily Dickinson Journal 4:1 (Spring 1995): 44-74.

---. "The Encoding of Homoerotic Desire: Emily Dickinson's Letters and Poems to Susan Dickinson, 1850-1886." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 9:2 (Fall 1990): 251-272.

---, and Martha Nell Smith, eds. Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson. Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 1998. Poems, letters, and letter-poems cited in text are indicated by "OMC" and the # given by Hart & Smith.

Horan, Elizabeth. "To Market: The Dickinson Copyright Wars." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5:1 (Spring 1996): 88-120.

Johnson, Thomas H. The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Including variant readings critically compared with all known manuscripts. Cambridge & London: The Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1955. Poems cited in text are indicated by "JP" and the number given by Johnson.

---, and Theodora Ward, eds. The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge & London: The Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1958. Letters cited in text are indicated by "L" and the number given by Johnson and Ward.

McGann, Jerome. A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism. Chicago & London: U of Chicago P, 1983; rpt. Charlottesville & London: UP of Virginia, 1992.

---. "Emily Dickinson's Visible Language." The Emily Dickinson Journal 2:2 (Fall 1993): 40-51.

Pitti, Daniel, and John Unsworth. "After the Fall - Structured Data at IATH." Charlottesville: Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH), U of Virginia. www.iath.virginia.edu/~jmu2m/ach98.html

Smith, Martha Nell. "'Because the Plunge from the Front Overturned Us': The Dickinson Electrnic Archives Project." Studies in the Literary Imagination 32:1 (Spring 1999): 133-151.

---. "The Importance of Hypermedia Archive of Dickinson's Creative Work." The Emily Dickinson Journal 4:2 (Spring 1995): 75-85.

---. Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson. Austin: U of Texas P, 1992.

---, ed., with Laura Lauth. Titanic Operas, A Poets' Corner of Responses to Dickinson's Legacy. Charlottesville: Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH), U of Virginia. http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/dickinson/titanic. 1998 to the present.

---, Laura Lauth, and Lara Vetter, eds. Writings by Susan Dickinson: A Critical Online Edition. Charlottesville: Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH), U of Virginia. http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/dickinson/susan. 1998 to the present.

Unsworth, John. "Second-Generation Digital Resources in the Humanities." Opening plenary address at Digital Resources in the Humanities 2000, Sheffield, England, September 11, 2000. http://www.iath.virginia.edu/~jmu2m/DRH2000.html

Vetter, Lara, and Martha Nell Smith, eds. Edward (Ned) Dickinson: Correspondence and Notebook. Charlottesville: Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH), U of Virginia. http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/dickinson/family/ned/table_of_contents.html.
2000 to the present.

Werner, Marta. Emily Dickinson's Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995.

---, ed. Radical Scatters: Emily Dickinson's Fragments and Related Texts, 1870-1886. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1999. http://dev.hti.umich.edu/misc/dickinson/generated/INDEX.HTM