About the Archive:

The 19th-Century Concord Digital Archive (CDA) gathers the cultural record of Concord, Massachusetts in an interactive digital archive, useful to a multidisciplinary group of scholars. The archive acts as an on-line repository of important primary documents that would otherwise require much time, difficulty, and expense to gather while site interaction encourages the user to explore different ways of interpreting materials, spurring new and exciting research questions and outcomes. The proposed breadth of the collection, gathered around a particular structure, in this case the town of Concord, and housed in a standardized digital format will allow the CDA to become an ever-expanding dataset that utilizes various tools to view, manipulate, and interpret primary texts.

Concord, Massachusetts figures centrally in critical discussions of 19th-century literature, philosophy, history, race theory, women’s issues, architecture, and government.  The materials included in the archive reflect a rich humanities data set, as the texts bridge the divide between canonical, well-studied figures and unknown figures that flesh out the historical and literary record. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott resided in Concord and interacted with those groups less frequently recorded in historical documents and represented in digital archives:  free African-Americans, Irish immigrants, the poor, and the criminal class.  While a broad set of texts are projected for inclusion in the archive, including interlinked literary texts, maps, architectural drawings, photographs, census materials, educational minutes, town reports, police reports, broadsides, physical artifacts, music, town records, and period newspapers, the beta launch includes texts that revolve around the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery Dedication, September 29, 1855. 

Many of the documents that are projected for archive integration are owned by the Concord Free Public Library Corporation (CFPL), with which the CDA has recently signed a legal partnership. By linking the two entities in partnership, users will have integrated access to digital representations of the physical document (CFPL) and the technologically constructed, scholarly edited texts and user interfaces that allow interpretative scholarship (CDA).