Casey N. Cep delights in perusing the Emily Dickinson Archive, where, “for the first time since her death, almost all of her poetry, published and unpublished, finished and unfinished, appears together in high-resolution scans”:
Although she wrote 1,789 poems, the Archive includes more than four thousand images: completed poems, but also the drafts and altered versions that reflect her constant
editing and meticulous revisions. Even more material will continue to be added. Never before has the zoom button been so useful: letting us see the very fibers of her paper scraps, the subtle bleed of ink from one side of a page onto another, the creases of bindings and page folds. You can browse by image or by first line and search by date or by recipient. You can press a button and a transcription of the text unfolds to the right of the image. There is even a lexicon, which lets you choose any one of the more than nine thousand words that Dickinson used in her work and then bring up its definition from the very dictionary she used, the 1844 edition of Webster’s. …
Some gimlet-eyed and buttoned-up scholars will rail that real scholarship can still come only from the actual, physical materials Dickinson left behind, but I think they are wrong. The open access archive of Emily Dickinson’s work is hopefully the first of many such online repositories that will allow more of us the opportunity to admire and understand original manuscripts. We have all had the experience of an archive—if not one of a celebrated author, then at least the more important archive of our mother’s attic or our grandfather’s basement—and while dusty hands and allergic sneezes are the traditional badges of such research, the digital archive promises new rewards: annotations and bookmarks, screenshots and downloads.
(Image of an envelope with Dickinson’s writing via the Emily Dickinson Archive)
The Dish 