All Astir

• Extracts All Astir P lans are progressing for the Ninth International Melville Society Conference , “Melville and Whitman in Washington: The Civil War Years and After,” to be held in Washington, D. C., from June 4 to June 7, 2013. The George Washington University will be hosting most of the plenary sessions and panels, and cultural events will take place at other venues in the city. The plenary speakers will be John Bryant (Hofstra University), Ed Folsom (University of Iowa), Kenneth M. Price (University of Nebraska, Lincoln), and Elizabeth Renker (Ohio State University). Details about the conference can be found on the Society webpage (melvillesociety.org) under the “Conferences and Events” tab and also on the conference Facebook page, “Melville and Whitman in Washington: The Civil War Years and After.” The Society website has a new look, thanks to its editor Robert Sandberg. It now features three columns, instead of two, in a wider format. When you visit the site, in addition to getting the latest news about upcoming conferences and events, you can read items in two continuously updated newsfeeds from the New Bedford Whaling Museum: one announcing upcoming events and the other displaying the latest contributions to an online Flicker exhibit, “Signifying the Whale.” “Melville’s Marginalia Online,” edited by Steven Olsen-Smith, Peter Norberg, and Dennis C. Marnon, continues to enhance its interface for the photographic display of books scanned or made available by Houghton Library, the Berkshire Athenaeum, Woodstock Theological Center, and the University of Virginia. Villanova University’s Digital Library has assisted the project. Recently mounted volumes include Shakespeare’s Dramatic Works and Sonnets and Wordsworth’s Poetical Works. The interface now includes a filtering option for displaying marked and annotated pages apart from unmarked content. The project invites feedback as well as financial support from users through designated links at http://melvillesmarginalia.org. Scott Norsworthy’s site, “Melvilliana,” which can be found at http://melvilliana.blogspot.com, contains a wealth of information and also links to other Melville-related sites and blogs. John Bryant, director of the Melville Electronic Library (MEL), reports significant progress as MEL completes the first year of its three-year NEH Scholarly Editions grant. Thanks to MEL programmer Nick Laiacona and his staff at Performant Software Solutions, development of TextLab, MEL’s manuscript transcription and print collation tool, is nearing completion. When c  2012 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 77 A L L A S T I R fully operational, TextLab will allow editors to build MEL’s “textual core,” consisting of all versions of Melville’s manuscript and published writings. Thanks also goes to MEL researchers on the TextLab team (Brett Barney, Les Harrison, Wes Raabe, Lewis Ullman, and Marta Werner), who have tested and will continue to test the tool throughout the year. In addition, Bryant and Associate Director Wyn Kelley met at MIT with HyperStudio’s director Kurt Fendt, programmer James Folsom, and associates Ayse Gursoy and Elyse Graham to share news about TextLab and to hear of HyperStudio’s development of Annotation Studio, which will be adapted to MEL as our “Melville Remix” workshop for annotating Melville texts and images. But even as MEL is building these tools (focusing for the time being on Moby-Dick, Battle-Pieces, and Billy Budd), other MEL teams are focusing on building content for annotation. MEL coeditors Dennis Berthold and Bob Wallace are supervising the Moby-Dick and Art project; Kelley and Brian Yothers are building a database of travel-related place names and coordinates for future mappings, and Timothy Marr and Tony McGowan are heading up the Battle-Pieces timeline annotation team. Bryant and Wallace are also supervising the gathering of images of Melville’s print collection from various affiliates: thus far, the Osborne Collection at Southwestern University (TX) and the Melville Society Archive at the New Bedford Whaling Museum have contributed images of over 50 items. Anyone interested in MEL should contact Bryant or Kelley and consider attending MELCamp4, a genial and informative...