The short profile in the New Yorker online of epistolary blog Letters of Note makes clear both the totemic status letters hold in our current media moment, and how aberrant an interesting standalone letter is. The blog features mainly celebrity letters and each one has to hold the reader's interest (the most interesting have also now been collected into a book). The letter represents a form of communication thought...
The New York Times had an article today on the planned publication of Robert Frost's letters, arguing that the forthcoming volumes "could soften a battered image" and re-humanize Frost. The article sets up a familiar dynamic, pitting the biographers offering "their" versions of Frost's life against the letters, which, the article assumes, will show the "real" Frost. The collected correspondence, the author writes, will "offer the most rounded, complete...
Well, it looks like the government reading our letters isn't only a historical analogy: in the wake of the NSA leaks, the Times reveals that the government records metadata for all paper mail, too. It should remind us once again that what we think of the quintessentially private form of communication—the sealed letter—in fact travels through many hands and many levels of government bureaucracy before reaching a recipient. This...
"The opening of ... mail, like the revelations that the N.S.A. has been monitoring telephone, e-mail, and Internet use, illustrates the intricacy of the relationship between secrecy and privacy. Secrecy is what is known, but not to everyone. Privacy is what allows us to keep what we know to ourselves. ... As a matter of historical analysis, the relationship between secrecy and privacy can be stated in an axiom:...
Jane Johnson was a vicar's wife in Olney who lived from 1706 to 1759. Her favorite author was Samuel Richardson, her favorite novel was Clarissa, and she appears in many ways to be the mythical "implied reader" for Richardson's works. She imitated his heroines, Pamela and Clarissa, by carefully improving her penmanship and epistolary skill, circulating letters on domestic and religious duties to her female friends and family. She...
I'm fascinated by the ways in which "real people"—which, funnily enough, is how both reporters and academics refer to non-reporters and non-academics—have semi-spontaneously used epistolary genres to respond to the ongoing economic crisis. There are, of course, the letters to the editor and op-eds that have been the way for "real people" to talk back to the media for centuries. But we could also see the Occupy movement's...
Matthew Yglesias has a great article about why an efficient, corruption-free postal system is a good indicator of an efficient, corruption-free government. Now, if only we could put this information to use and get mail-in elections nationwide.
I'm spending a month doing archival research at the Lewis Walpole Library, a lovely place in suburban Farmington, Conn., that houses Yale's eighteenth-century collection. The library—whose manuscript collection still runs largely on a card-catalogue system, with many handwritten cards!—has a fantastic collection of correspondence, including but not at all limited to Horace Walpole's thousands of letters. There's far more stuff than I can see in a month, even...
In April 1691, a reader wrote in to a new periodical, The Athenian Mercury, with a pressing question: "Whether, since Mermen and Mermaids have more of the humane shape than other Fishes, they may be thought to have more Reason." I can honestly say this question had never occurred to me before reading the Mercury, the world's first question-and-answer periodical. (The editors didn't really answer the question of reason, but gave...
Over the course of this school year, I've been involved with starting up Digital Experiments, a new graduate student working group at NYU. We've had a number of goals: familiarizing ourselves with the digital humanities community, learning some semi-tech competent skills and techniques, and working on a collaborative project using the topic modeling tool MALLET. We've got some really cool results using text from The Spectator, but the...