Herman Melville has long been considered an experimental and enigmatic author, but only recently have the techniques of digital humanities made it possible to reveal new aspects of his genius. Herman Melville and the Digital Humanities is the first book-length study to demonstrate how computational methods can deepen our appreciation of Melville’s work and the importance of the material text.By integrating text encoding, text analysis, editorial theory, and book history, Herman Melville and the Digital Humanities presents case studies leveraging data from Ohge’s extensive collaborative work on Melville’s Marginalia Online and the Melville Electronic Library. Using a pragmatic, mixed-methods approach, it shows how researchers can navigate ‘fluid texts’—such as the eight stages of composition found in the Billy Budd manuscript—to pinpoint how revision functions as both textual phenomena and critical metaphors of the text.The study also situates Melville’s nineteenth-century innovations within contemporary debates on Artificial Intelligence. By juxtaposing Melville’s scrivener Bartleby with the ‘mettlesome poet’, Ohge argues that while digital tools are now indispensable research facilitators, they can never replace the human experience of archival research, close reading and sympathetic engagement with literature. What is needed is a set of critical tools to determine the most responsible uses of digital tools. Computational approaches offer not a departure from the book as object, but rather a sophisticated means of recovering and modelling its contingent, material reality.Ultimately, this monograph centres human ingenuity, highlighting the enduring value of adaptation, ranging from reader responses to musical and artistic performances of Melville’s works.
