dh projects & references

links to general web resources, texts, & similar digital humanities projects

It excavates the state statistics, merchant magazines, and logistical logs cited by and parodied in Thoreau’s acerbic accounting. Triangulating such tabulations with his Georgic tours, this project maps the evolving agents, envelopes, instruments, territories, and symbiotic material relays – of production and consumption – linking the landscapes of Concord with Boston and global empires. In drawing out the material intensities and distributed impacts of antebellum industrialization, this digital and spatial re-reading of Thoreau is an extension of the eco-critical analysis of Leo Marx, Lawrence Buell, Donald Worster, and, more recently,  Patrick Chura and Timothy Morton. Their readings excavate the systemic literary and cartographic tropes structuring Thoreau's narrative journeys through 'Nature(s)', pulling from rhetorical/genre traditions of geographia, topographic, chorographia, chronographic, hydrographia, anemographia, and so on.  This series simply supplements these  representation frames by focusing on the contemporaneous, interested 'ideals' of improvement espoused in nascent tabular and statistical form.