DONALD ROSS
210L Lind Hall, (612) 625-5585
rossj001@tc.umn.edu
Department of English, University of Minnesota


"Aids for Editing Walden," Computers and the Humanities, 15 (1981), 155-62.

Thoreau's Walden is represented by journal passages, seven draft manuscript stages, and the final edition. The stages represent two distinct drafting periods with a two-year hiatus, and the second period involved many substantive additions to the book's theories and imagery. This study first describes several programs which were developed to help scholars keep track of the complex history of the manuscript. The major bodies of information, such as where journal sources exist for the book's paragraph, were keyboarded separately. Output options were established for selective tabular information. In the second part of the study, the history of the development of two sample paragraphs was simulated using a text editing program-each stage of the manuscript was represented as a series of text-editor commands, so that the current draft could be reproduced by implementing these commands. In conclusion, this form of representing multiple stages of a manuscript was compared with the traditional "variorum" collation apparatus, and the computer-base system was recommended to the attention of future literary scholars.


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