Our project teams have been searching the Gale ECCO database for English-language cultural responses to people, places, and events of the Pacific voyages, in an effort to gauge how philosophers, playwrights, poets, and novelists responded to the voyages. We are assembling our database findings in TEI and marking them to analyze their representations of Pacific encounters. We aim here to record and chart how the English Atlantic media responded to the Pacific voyages, and what new perspectives were emerging on humanity and nature between the 1760s and 1790s. Thus far we have assembled the following editions, visualizations, and analyses:
- Scrapbook of Pacific References: This is assembled as an annotated bibliography with extracted passages from texts that make brief but significant references to the Pacific voyages. This is sortable by date or genre of text, and we have also made our base TEI XML scrapbook file available.
- We have prepared digital editions of full poems and plays devoted to events and people of the Pacific voyages, with javascript interfaces to highlight and chart specific kinds of cultural interactions we've marked in our TEI coding. The two poems on this list represent interesting bookends, since Fitzgerald's "The Injured Islanders" was published in the year before word of Cook's death reached England, while Anna Seward's "Elegy on Captain Cook" was written directly in response to that news, and we expect that Seward's "Elegy on Captain Cook" marks up a turning point in the representations of sailors and Polynesians. Our SVG graphs were developed by extracting data from our contextual markup, for which we've posted our guidelines. The following texts and visualizations are (or will soon be) available:
- The Injured Islanders (1779) * TEI *
- Elegy on Captain Cook (1780) * TEI *
- Graph of Cultural Interactions in the Poems
- Omai: or a Trip Around the World [coming]
- Named People and Places: We are assembling a central list of named persons and places across the files we have been coding. This list is a preliminary extraction of all the distinct names we've coded as of December 2013, and will eventually be replaced by search engines and a central prosopography file (providing centralized information on each distinct person and place).
Here are two additional views of our text encoding work on the Seward Elegy:
*This Juxta Commons view was recently compiled from our most recent coding of the poem, which corrected some errors. Unfortunately, the Juxta view does not permit us to view the elaborate contextual encoding our team worked on this spring!