Caroline Crane Marsh diaries available

In thinking about the Alphabetical Diaries, I ended up exploring two other notable diaries. One is by Julia Wilbur, and is featured on my simulacrum of the Alphabetical Diaries. The other diary is by Caroline Crane Marsh (CCM), the American ambassadress (wife of the American ambassador) in Italy, for the period 1861-1865. I was so taken with CCM’s diaries that I decided to make an HTML version of the diaries that makes them a bit easier to read. I’ve also added a few different ways to browse and search the diaries, making use of the additional markup structure that I added to the diaries.

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Dear Diarist, fun is where you find it! (part 1)

Sheila Heti collected 500,000 words from a decade’s worth of journals, put the sentences in a spreadsheet, and sorted them alphabetically. She cut and cut and was left with 60,000 words of brilliance and mayhem, joy and sorrow. These are her alphabetical diaries.

From the book jacket for Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti (hard cover 2024 U.S. edition)

When I read a similar description of Alphabetical Diaries in a book review, I was intrigued about both how Heti did it and what the results were like. (You can read the “B” chapter via a link on her site.)

Continue reading “Dear Diarist, fun is where you find it! (part 1)”