A Transformative Digital Project in Melville Studies

It was a pleasure to be a part of the panel honoring Robert K. Wallace and the achievements of his team at Melville’s Print Collection Online (MPCO). The standout strength of MPCO is the ease of access it makes possible for high-resolution digital images of the prints that Herman Melville collected, prints that like the books that survive from his library, are sundered and dispersed across numerous institutional and private holdings. This does more than replicate and unify the dispersed physical remnants of Melville’s collection. It amplifies its utility by allowing detailed visual analysis of each print with fast image loading and magnification, facilitating remote access by scholars, teachers, and students worldwide. The rigorous cataloguing achieved by Bob, Samuel Otter, and their editorial associates provides detailed provenance and bibliographic metadata, information on artists, engravers, and publishers, and contextual notes that link prints to known episodes in Melville’s life or to themes and references in his writings. This structured metadata facilitates scholarly research and holds great promise for computer-assisted approaches to Melville’s collecting. MPCO and the visual arts focus behind it establishes a compelling dimension at the basis of Bob’s life work on Melville as a visual thinker, tracing direct and indirect visual influences on his writings and providing a primary source for the study of visual intertextuality. MPCO allows researchers to cross-reference specific prints with textual moments in Melville’s writings, making such comparisons increasingly verifiable rather than just speculative.