Heyward Ehrlich: A Melville Webliography
Herman Melville Sites on the Internet
Test draft March 4, 2001Heyward Ehrlich
Dept. of English
Rutgers University
Newark, NJ 07102Please send comments to ehrlich@andromeda.rutgers.edu
Table of Contents
General statement
Most Melville texts are available in electronic form, whether freely on the internet, by commercial subscription, for restricted use by local researchers, or on CD-ROM.
The better known Melville works are freely available in some form on the internet or World Wide Web: Typee, Omoo, Moby-Dick, Barteby, Benito Cereno, The Confidence Man, Billy Budd, and many shorter works. But the less-often read works are not to be found anywhere on the internet: Mardi, Redburn, White Jacket, Pierre, Israel Potter. The most comprehensive collection of Melville e-texts is on the E-codex CD-ROM.
Copyright
For the most part, copyrighted materials are not freely available on the Web or internet. The public domain material which is available varies greatly in quality. One problem is that much public domain electronic material is not usefully documented as to its source. Another is that there is much variety from text to text in its scholarly reliability or usability. In my researches in several authors I have not found a significant difference in quality between academic and non-academic text sources even when the former prominently announce their superiority.Forms and formats of electronic texts
Back to top
- Plain texts. These ASCII or "vanilla" texts can use any text editor or word processor to display, search, copy, or print their contents. Typically they employ monospaced "typewriter" typefaces and possess no encoding.
- HTML texts. Intended to use a web browser (such as Internet Explorer or Netscape) to display, search, copy, or print their contents, Typically they are seen in proportionally spaced "book" typefaces, often with chapter division and pagination.
- Indexed texts. Prepared for rapid searching and retrieval or in-context concordance displays. These texts may be usable with web browsers or may require proprietary software in order to find "strings" in context and perform textual analysis.
- Secondary materials. The Web is rich in course introductions, bibliographies, encyclopedia articles, instructor lectures, text annotation, and class commentary.
- Search engines and directories. Guides such as "Yahoo" can find desired subjects in web pages.
- Subscription databases. Copyrighted articles in journals, magazines, and newspapers as well as indexes to recent material may be found at subscribing institutional research centers.
- Assisted research: Personal research by subscription, model papers for download or sale
Historical editions:
Electronic versions of early editions of five Melville novels, Typee (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1846), Omoo (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1847), Mardi (2 v., New York: Harper & Brothers, 1849), Redburn (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1849), and White-Jacket (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1850) are available only by subscription to the Early American Fiction project of the University of Virginia and Chadwyck-Healey. Check with your local research library to see if it subscribes. There texts are not generally available on the internet.Constable edition (16 vols., London, 1922-24, repr. 1963 )
Apparently the basis for the extensive E-Codex collection of Herman Melville texts on CD-ROM (1994), described as "The complete works including the Novel, Short Stories, Letters[,] Criticism, a Biography, and an extensive Bibliography." This plain text edition is available from Insight Engineering, PO Box 10785, Franconia, VA 22310-0785. Secondary material on this CD-ROM includes the Newton Arvin biography and union catalogue bibliographies locating 3177 articles and 2603 monographs.Hendricks House (14 vols, Chicago, 1947--)
An early computer-based concordance to Moby-Dick prepared for this edition by Prof. Eugene F. Irey of the University of Colorado (1972) led to the release of the first widely available Melville e-text on the old pre-WWW internet. Unfortunately, the circulated version lacked "Etymology," "Extracts," and Chapter 72 and suffered from major defects and dropouts in the last three chapters. Although subsequently repaired in major archive locations, the corrupted texts are still in circulation.Northwestern-Newberry edition
The electronic texts of three Melville novels, Redburn, White-Jacket, and Moby-Dick, based on the Northwestern-Newberry edition (Chicago, 1968--), were re-issued in a single Library of America volume (1983) and subsequently on CD-ROM by the Electronic Text Corporation as The WordCruncher Disk: Volume 1 (1990). This unusual CD-ROM disk proclaimed itself to be a "meledy [medley] of significant documents, literature, and information" and also included texts of a dozen other American authors, the Bible, Shakespeare, and various other materials. These texts were encoded with the accompanying hypertext software, WordCruncher. Although this remarkable CD-ROM is out of print, the electronic texts of these three Northwestern-Newberry Melville editions are now deposited at the Oxford Text Archive and the Virginia Electronic Text Center for restricted scholarly use.Back to top || Back to Table of Contents
Starting Points
Donna Campbell
Jack Lynch
Keele
Melville.Org
Melville Society
Paul Reuben
Voice of the ShuttleBack to top || Back to Table of Contents
Guides to Electronic texts
Alex
Great Books
IPL
Penn (formerly CMU) Online books PageBack to top || Back to Table of Contents
Search engines and directories
Northern Light
AltaVista
Open Directory
YahooBack to top || Back to Table of Contents
Archives
Bartleby.com
Bibliomania
Concordance.com
Elibrary
ESP (Electronic Scholarly Publishing)
Litrix
Making of America Michigan
Michigan HTI
Mindport
Netlibrary
OTA (Oxford Text Archive)
Project Gutenberg
Virginia ETC
XroadsBack to top || Back to Table of Contents
Defunct or moved sites
Columbia Bartleby
OED
OBI: Online Book Initiative
Toronto
Virginia Tech Eris
Wiretap
WordCruncherBack to top || Back to Table of Contents
Software
Web browers: Internet Explorer, Netscape, Opera
Text comparison: Comprite, WordPerfect, Nota Bene
Index/Concordance: OCP, Tact, WordCruncher, ZyIndex, Dynatext, Folio Views, Concord
SGML: PanoramaBack to top || Back to Table of Contents
Other formats
PDF: Adobe Acrobat
XML:
Handheld text readers
ELECTRONIC TEXTS
Back to top || Back to Table of ContentsNOVELS
Billy Budd Billy Budd Virginia Billy Budd Mirror Billy Budd Bibliomania Billy Budd Oxford Text Archive (Text from Bibliomania, searchable) Confidence Man Confidence Man Virginia Confidence Man Xroads, Virginia, notes Confidence Man Litrix Israel Potter See E-Codex CD-ROM Moby Dick Moby Dick (americanliterature.com) by chapters Moby Dick Virginia - by chapters Moby Dick Michigan (Irey OTA Version) Moby Dick Keele -- textual links in Extracts (Andrew Graham) Moby Dick: "The Great Grey Whale" Keele Moby Dick Litrix - by chapters Moby Dick Adelaide -- HTML by chapters Moby Dick Princeton: Searchable (Glimpse) -- no Etymology or Extracts Moby Dick Project Gutenberg (1991 -- no Chap. 72) | Correction for Chapter 72 Moby Dick Project Gutenberg -- 2001 revised version Moby Dick Litrix Moby Dick Mirror - one file