Digital Thoreau: Crowdsourcing Commentary

Awarded Grant: $15,000

Principal Investigator:

Paul Schacht, Geneseo

Using Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, Crowdsourcing Commentary seeks to build a platform for collaborative textual annotation, enabling individuals across multiple courses, campuses, levels of expertise, and intellectual approaches to engage in rich, vibrant, multi-layered conversation around a single text. Participants will be able to find and contribute to discussions sorted by identifiers such as community (e.g., a particular class on a particular campus), discipline (e.g., philosophy, history, literature, geology, biology), topic (individualism, transcendentalism), and contributor-type (scholar, student, general reader). This massive yet organized engagement will simultaneously leverage and illustrate the social nature of interpretation.

Co-PI’s and Key Partners:

Joe Easterly, Electronic Resources and Digital Scholarship Librarian, Milne Library, SUNY Geneseo

Reports and Resources:

• This document provides a status update on Crowdsourcing Commentary and includes links to both the project home page and to open source code developed as a direct result of the project: Project outcomes update
• The Rochester Democrat & Chronicle published a story by James Goodman on Tuesday, March 18, about the full range of Thoreau-related activities at SUNY Geneseo, including Digital Thoreau. Since the D&C is owned by Gannett, the story was subsequently picked up by USA Today. The article mentions the particular Digital Thoreau project funded by our SUNY IIT Grant, The Readers’ Thoreau, which finally went live in February, is open to the public, and is being used this semester by two classes: ENGL 340 at SUNY Geneseo, Literature and Literary Study in the Digital Age, and ENG 362 at the University of Maine, Farmington, American Environmental Writing, taught by Prof. Kristen Case.
• Project Website
  
• Project outcomes report
• Final project outcomes report
• Article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (October, 2014)

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