Event Title
Fanny Fern in The New York Ledger
Start Date
28-2-2015 2:10 PM
Description
In the mid-nineteenth century Fanny Fern was the highest paid newspaper columnist in the United States, writing for the widest-circulated publication of its day, The New York Ledger. However, when making claims about Fern’s journalistic career, the vast majority of Fern scholarship to this point has relied either on Fern's six published collections of columns or on the selected columns reprinted in Joyce W. Warren's Ruth Hall and Other Writings (1986). Yet these printed sources represent less than half of Fern’s total journalistic output. The most likely reason for this is one of access. The full run of Fern's columns is simply not readily available. The Olive Branch, True Flag, and Musical World and Times (for which Fern wrote early in her career) have only been very selectively microfilmed and full runs of print copies exist only at a limited number of repositories. And while a full run of The New York Ledger exists on microfilm, Fern's columns extend across nearly twenty reels, making the locating of any one column exceedingly cumbersome. My current project, Fanny Fern in The New York Ledger (http://fannyfern.org), a digital archive that provides access to full-text transcriptions of Fern’s columns and high-resolution digital images of complete issues of the Ledger, is an attempt to remedy this problem.
In my presentation I will lay out the problems inherent in relying on such selective sources when studying Fern and provide specific examples of ways in which access to the totality of Fern's newspaper columns significantly alters the picture of her journalistic persona as presented in most scholarship to this point. And given the relative rarity of original and microfilm copies of the periodicals for which she wrote and the sheer size of Fern's output, I will make a case for the necessity of an online archive that collects all of Fern's journalistic writing, and discuss the methods with which I went about creating this digital archive. In so doing, I hope to prove that a continued reliance on selective sources perpetuates a patchwork literary record of a writer who deserves to be studied in her fascinating and complex entirety.
Recommended Citation
McMullen, Kevin (2015). "Fanny Fern in The New York Ledger," Digital Humanities Symposium.
Fanny Fern in The New York Ledger
In the mid-nineteenth century Fanny Fern was the highest paid newspaper columnist in the United States, writing for the widest-circulated publication of its day, The New York Ledger. However, when making claims about Fern’s journalistic career, the vast majority of Fern scholarship to this point has relied either on Fern's six published collections of columns or on the selected columns reprinted in Joyce W. Warren's Ruth Hall and Other Writings (1986). Yet these printed sources represent less than half of Fern’s total journalistic output. The most likely reason for this is one of access. The full run of Fern's columns is simply not readily available. The Olive Branch, True Flag, and Musical World and Times (for which Fern wrote early in her career) have only been very selectively microfilmed and full runs of print copies exist only at a limited number of repositories. And while a full run of The New York Ledger exists on microfilm, Fern's columns extend across nearly twenty reels, making the locating of any one column exceedingly cumbersome. My current project, Fanny Fern in The New York Ledger (http://fannyfern.org), a digital archive that provides access to full-text transcriptions of Fern’s columns and high-resolution digital images of complete issues of the Ledger, is an attempt to remedy this problem.
In my presentation I will lay out the problems inherent in relying on such selective sources when studying Fern and provide specific examples of ways in which access to the totality of Fern's newspaper columns significantly alters the picture of her journalistic persona as presented in most scholarship to this point. And given the relative rarity of original and microfilm copies of the periodicals for which she wrote and the sheer size of Fern's output, I will make a case for the necessity of an online archive that collects all of Fern's journalistic writing, and discuss the methods with which I went about creating this digital archive. In so doing, I hope to prove that a continued reliance on selective sources perpetuates a patchwork literary record of a writer who deserves to be studied in her fascinating and complex entirety.
