Writings Site User Guide

Entering the Site

The landing page for The Writings of Mark Twain offers the user three buttons that link to lists of works in the Mark Twain Project edition: “Novels & Travel Books,” “Edited Compilations,” and “All Writings.” The buttons give the user a quick introduction to the different types of content featured on the site while also providing the option to bypass the differences by clicking “All Writings.” The differences between the content types and their treatment on the site are discussed in the next section.

Site Organization and Navigation

Novels and Travel Writings

The title of this section of the writings site is based on the fact that Mark Twain’s book-length works can be fairly described as either novels, such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or travel books, such as Roughing It. He also published book-length collections of short fiction and/or essays, but those works have already begun to be edited and published in compilations, which are discussed in a separate section below.

Below is an image of the landing page for Roughing It.

The Text

The link to the text of a work takes the user to a list of links to the book’s parts. These parts may include first-edition front matter, such as tables of contents and lists of illustrations designed by the author, as well as chapters. Those who view individual parts can navigate from one part to the next using “previous” and “next” buttons at the top of the webpage.

Appendixes and Editorial Matter

The “Appendixes and Editorial Matter” links takes the user to the back matter from the print volume. Appendixes may consist of transcriptions of the author’s working notes and manuscript drafts. Editorial matter may consist of general editorial introductions (concerning the work's history), apparatus introductions (a bibliographic introduction to the process of critically establishing the text), and endnote headnotes.

Search

The landing pages for individual works provide links to a search page for only that work. There is currently to cross-search for the entire corpus of works. The search tool finds exact words and phrases and produces a list of links followed by snippets of the searched word or phrase in context. If a similar word or phrase appears in the text, the sample will be replaced by “No exact text matches found.” For technical information about the search implemented on MTPO2, see our “Technical Summary.”

Endnotes

Volumes in the Mark Twain Project edition strive for comprehensive historical annotation, or “explanatory notes,” and apparatus notes that document the editors’ readings of textual witnesses in critically establishing the authoritative text. In print these two types of endnotes are in the back matter of the volume; in the electronic texts the endnotes are listed at the end of each chapter. The user has the option to turn the explanatory and apparatus notes on and off using a toggle menu in the left margin of the webpage. To open the toggle menu, the user clicks on the “Show Endnotes” button in the left margin. The user can then select what endnotes to turn on or off, press “Hide,” and the toggle menu will disappear. The “Show Endnotes” button remains in the left margin while the user scrolls through the text, so that endnotes can be turned on or off at any point.

When the user turns endnotes on, links to endnotes populate the text. The toggle menu functions as a type of legend for users by telling them the links take the form of tokens: Ⓔ for explanatory notes and Ⓐ apparatus notes. When the user hovers over these tokens in the text, a window pops up adjacent to the note identifying the type of note it is: i.e., “explanatory note” or “apparatus note.” In the case of volumes from the Mark Twain Project edition that have more than one type of apparatus note, the pop-up window will identify the type of apparatus note: i.e., “emendation,” “alteration in the manuscript,” “textual note,” and so on. Additionally, the span of text that has been annotated is highlighted yellow when the user hovers over the links; the annotated text is not highlighted, however, when it spans several pages.

When users click on the inline tokens, they link to a corresponding note in a list of endnotes at the bottom of the webpage, where the pertinent endnote is highlighted yellow to distinguish it from the other endnotes in the list. When the endnotes are turned off, the tokens and the lists disappear, leaving only the author’s text without editorial matter. These two states of the text (with and without editorial matter) may also be useful for keyword searches using the browser’s native search tool; when the endnotes are turned off, the editorial content becomes invisible to the search tool.

In the Mark Twain Project’s printed volumes, lists of explanatory and apparatus notes are typically introduced by headnotes. In the case of apparatus notes, the lists of endnotes may be divided into sections based on the documents consulted. For instance, in a list of “alterations in the manuscript,” one section of endnotes may be based on one manuscript fragment while another section is based on yet another manuscript. The headnotes and the section divisions are linked from the endnote toggle menu. When the user clicks on a link to the headnotes, a new browser tab opens and provides either the headnote page (this is the case with explanatory notes, of which there is only one type) or a list of relevant headnotes (this is the case with apparatus notes, of which there may be several types). In some cases, the endnote headnotes are very brief, while in others they provide thorough descriptions of textual witnesses consulted and, as mentioned above, sub-section headings (these sub-section headings follow the headnotes in the electronic edition). The endnote headnotes can also be found in the “Appendixes and Editorial Matter” section for each work.

Edited Compilations

The following volumes in the Mark Twain Project edition are treated as compilations: the drafts and dictations in Mark Twain’s Autobiography, Volumes 1–3; the short fiction and journalism in Early Tales & Sketches, Volumes 1 & 2; and the short- and long-form writings unpublished in the author’s lifetime and collected in Which Was the Dream? (1966), The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (1969), Fables of Man (1972), and Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians (1989). Because these volumes are functionally and structurally distinct from the novels and travel books, their electronic publication differs in the following ways.

Modified Organization: Chronological Ordering without the Volume Structure

One affordance of electronic publication,relative to a bound paper volume, is a website’s capacity and a webpage’s elasticity. Mark Twain never said The Autobiography should be three volumes; the texts in Early Tales & Sketches were culled from dispersed newspaper and periodical publications and selectively published by the author in story collections; and the volumes of unpublished manuscripts were arbitrarily selected and thematically titled and arranged by Mark Twain Project editors in the edition’s early years. For all of these reasons, the texts previously published in compilations have been published online as chronologically ordered lists, without being chunked into volumes. The user has the option to sort these lists and reconstruct the contents of the volumes with facets, which are more fully described in the next section.

For Early Tales & Sketches and the unpublished manuscripts, the lists of texts emulate the form of a catalog. This approach to listing the texts anticipates future research and editing on Mark Twain’s writings for newspapers and periodicals (in the cases of “tales” and “sketches”) as well as on unpublished writings that have been either recently recovered or extant but not yet edited and published. The rationale for maintaining the texts in chronological lists, in other words, stems from the fact that expansion of these lists is certain. The Autobiography is an exception, first, because the three-volume edition completes that work; second, the editors made distinctions between “Preliminary Manuscripts and Dictations” that are not considered part of The Autobiography proper, “Early Attempts” that are part of The Autobiography but are not dictations, and the dictations that constitute the greater part of the work and its composition. These three types of autobiographical texts are maintained separately with respect to the editors’ distinctions: “Preliminary Manuscripts and Dictations” are placed under “Supplementary Materials,” while “Early Attempts” and “Autobiographical Dictations” are placed under “The Autobiography” and grouped accordingly.

Appendixes and Editorial Matter

As with the pages for novels and travel books, front and back matter from the print versions of edited compilations appear in a section titled “Appendixes and Editorial Matter.” The materials in these sections are typically grouped according to the volume in which they appeared. The Autobiography is an exception. For instance, the editorial introduction in the first volume of the Autobiography applies to all three volumes; therefore, in the electronic edition it is not stated as belonging to volume one. Its relationship to volume one, however, is documented in the metadata for the editorial introduction, so that if the user selects the facet for volume one on “The Autobiography Page,” the introduction will appear among the resulting list of contents. The same is true for the “Ashcroft-Lyon Manuscript,” which originally appeared in volume three, but may be considered a supplement to the Autobiography on the whole; it also will appear in a facet-generated list of contents from volume three. Other supplementary materials from The Autobiography, such as title pages, photo galleries, and appendixes, are titled according to the volume in which they appeared.

Search

The landing pages for edited compilations feature links to a search page for the texts in that section of compiled texts. Search finds exact words and phrases and produces a list of links to relevant pages followed by samples of the term in context. If a similar word or phrase appears in the text, the sample will be replaced by “No exact text matches found.” For technical information about the search implemented on MTPO2, see “The Making of MTPO.”

Headnotes and Textual Commentaries

Individual texts in edited compilations sometimes have a headnote providing context and/or a textual commentary discussing the consultation of textual witnesses and a text’s publication history. The Autobiography’s “Preliminary Manuscripts” have headnotes and textual commentaries, while the “Early Attempts” and autobiographical dictations have only textual commentaries. The Early Tales & Sketches have headnotes and textual commentaries. The unpublished manuscripts published in Which Was the Dream? have headnotes; those published in Fables of Man have headnotes and textual commentaries; those published in Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts and Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians have neither.

When available, the headnotes and textual commentaries provide valuable historical and bibliographic information. To facilitate the user’s awareness of them, they appear at the beginning of a text that has one or both of them, so that the user knows when they are available. So that they do not obscure the author’s text or interfere with the results of browser-native word searching, they are initially hidden behind a button, which, when clicked, shows the headnote and/or textual commentary on a light-gray background that distinguishes it from the author’s text.

Facets

Unlike the novels and travel books, the pages for compilations have facet menus. The availability of facets is determined by the textual corpus and the editorial treatment they were given in the printed volumes. For instance, they may reflect the greater or lesser specificity of composition dates. The titles of autobiographical dictations give the day, month, and year of their dictation, thus allowing facets for year and month, while the composition of unpublished manuscripts may have spanned two decades, thus requiring faceting by decades.

Facets can also preserve features of print volumes that are no longer useful for digital publication but that are necessary to the preservation of the editorial history of the texts. The most significant example of this type of facet are the volume facets. The user can reconstruct the contents of any of the print volumes in which the electronic texts were published by clicking on the facet for that volume. In particular, editors divided the contents of Early Tales & Sketches, Volumes 1 & 2, into sections based on the author’s location: “California, Part 1 (1864–1865),” “Hannibal and the River (1851–1861),” and “Nevada Territory (1862-1864).” These sections are preserved by facets.

In some cases, facets are more peculiar to a series of volumes. For instance, the editors of Early Tales & Sketches, Volumes 1 & 2 generally ordered texts chronologically, but in some cases the editors placed the texts in non-chronological thematic groupings, referred to here as “series.” These series posed a problem for the organization of the texts on the website, where the texts from the two volumes are listed in chronological order (see “Modified Organization” above). Ultimately, the titles of series were added to the metadata of relevant texts, so that the metadata could be used to generate facets for them. The series can be reconstructed by clicking on their respective facets, thereby preserving the history of the texts’ editorial treatment and leaving the list of edited and published texts in chronological order.