Now, scholars and lay readers alike will be able to browse easily through handwritten versions of favorite poems, puzzle over lines that snake along the edges of used envelopes and other scraps of paper, or zoom in on one of Dickinson’s famous dashes until it almost fills the screen.
“To have all these manuscripts together on one site and to have it so
thoroughly searchable is extraordinary,” said Cristanne Miller, a
professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo and a member of
the project’s advisory board.
(Also, hilariously: “They have the furniture, we have the daguerreotype; they have the herbarium, we have the hair,” said Michael Kelly, the head of archives and special collections at the Frost Library at Amherst and a member of the online archive’s advisory board. Which prompted thoughts of actual scholarly hair-pulling....or even....hair-splitting?)