Launch of the Turner Cassity Born-Digital Collection Site

Anne C. Donlonon

The Turner Cassity Born-Digital Collection presents drafts of poetry from the born-digital materials in the Turner Cassity Papers, held by the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives & Rare Book Library at Emory. The born-digital materials in his papers come from his computer, a Compaq Presario SR1222NX.

A screenshot of the homepage of the project site. The title ("The Turner Cassity Born-Digital Collection" appears in large blue letters. below the title, menu items and paragraphs of text appear beside a black and white photograph of Cassity standing beside a telescope, and in front of a long, angular mask hanging on the wall.
The Turner Cassity Born-Digital Collection website

This project is unique for the Rose Library, making born-digital materials publicly available. Normally, this type of material is only available to researchers in the Rose Library reading room. For this project, we obtained permission from the literary executor to make the files available to view online and plain text versions available to download for personal use. This site, built with Omeka, allows readers to browse, search, and view the poems and their metadata, including the date the file was created and last modified. In addition, an exhibit on “Places in Cassity’s Poetry” explores the possibility of applying digital humanities methods including text analysis, named entity recognition, and mapping to born-digital archival materials.

A screen shot of the map of locations in Cassity's poetry. The map shows part of Africa and much of Asia, with many red pins dotting the map. One pin is highlighted, and the info box on the side of the map identifies "Krakatoa" and provides the context where the locations appears: "Chunnel. (Do not sneer; The French dug Suez). Shots heard round the world Need not be metaphor, as Krakatoa proved." The box also provides a link to poem where the location appears: http://cassity.digitalscholarship.emory.edu/items/show/2940 .
Map of locations named in Cassity’s born-digital materials