Humanities Computing and the Geographical Imagination: The Mark Twain's Mississippi Project

The Mark Twain’s Mississippi Project World Wide Web site (http://dig.lib.niu.edu/twain) presents users with a digital library featuring humanities materials shedding light upon the historical milieu in which Samuel Clemens grew to maturity, and which he remembered and imagined as Mark Twain in a series of celebrated
works based in the Mississippi River Valley of the
mid-nineteenth century. The site will present Mark Twain’s
Mississippi works (The Adventures Tom Sawyer, The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Life on the Mississippi)
online in a fully searchable digital format, along with other contemporary authors’ descriptions, accounts, and definitions of that region. Project staff members have
gathered and digitized over 100 primary source texts,
including travel accounts, immigrants’ guides, gazetteers,
and reminiscences, from participating libraries, and are at work presenting them on the project web site. They have also gathered nearly one thousand images from
these texts, as well as participating institutions’ collections
of visual materials, and are mounting these materials in a parallel database. Project staff have identified and
gathered mid-nineteenth century sheet music totaling some twenty songs describing and mythologizing the Mississippi River, its valley, and its culture. Musicians
have recorded versions of these songs, which will be
featured in database of sound recordings. Finally, the project
World Wide Web site presents spatial data via Geographic Information Systems technology, including geographical features and data sets depicting the changing demographic,
economic, and political contours of the region in this
period. Using these online tools, project users may compare
Mark Twain’s accounts of the Mississippi Valley of the nineteenth century with those produced by other observers, thereby exploring and analyzing significant themes in American literature and history.