ENG303. American Dead and Undead

Independently from the main section of my project, which should provide an account accessible in itself, this section serves to answer the following questions:

 

What was the goal of your digital project? What were the biggest successes of your approach? What would you do differently if you had more time? What does your project add to our understanding of the (interconnection of) dead and undead?

 

In my proposal, I set out to explore how the Undead function as commentary on society and social issues. My aim was to find examples within 19th century literature that illustrate if and how the Undead were employed as a metaphor to represent moral conflicts to pious, law-abiding Americans.I decided to focus on publications in newspapers, literal and factual, in order to shed light on how present the concept of the undead was in popular thought. I was concentrating on three types of Undead - ghosts, vampires, and demons - and certain eras in the 19th century especially charged with moral concerns.All this is laid out in more detail within the main section of my homepage, the project "Vice Never Dies".

 

In hindsight, I consider focusing on newspaper articles a good choice. It allowed me to stumble upon new material we did not cover in the seminar, deepening my understanding of the respective historical contexts. As well, newspaper articles seem quite telling in their usage of Undead metaphors: Their authors most likely were not as conscious of the Undead's potential as literary devices as the works of more famous writers were. Thus employed more intuitively, their use gains insights in mindsets of ordinary citizens.

 

As for the use of tools, both seemed to serve the project well. Building a website with WIX offered me a powerful way of setting up the project in a visually interesting and accessible way. Creating statistics with infogr.am proved to create additional insights that work well in interaction with and as background for the textual analysis. Simply crafting the statistics provided me with a better understanding of what I was and should be looking for. The only downside was my attempt to incorporate word clouds: They could have been an accessible illustration and addition to my body of text, but unfortunately tools like Voyant were unable to read pdfs with scans as rough as my newspaper sources. In sum, though, the use of tools improved both the production and presentation of my project.

 

With more time, I would have liked to explore the context of the respective articles in more depth. Some of them seemed to concern interesting and controversial historic events whose different aspects and perspectives would have been interesting to cover.

 

With a larger focus, I would have liked to analzye more current newspaper material to find out for how long the vocabulary of the Undead seemed appropriate to discuss moral issues. This would have added a more comparative dimension to the project.

 

I think my project can contribute to our understanding of the Undead by adding material from less literary realms, namely newspapers, where the Undead are employed in. This illustrates their widely recognizd potential as literary devices. The Undead seemed to be able to function as social commentary back then as they do now, and it is important to understand how symbolism and significance change with the cultural context these employments are embedded in.