Category: Announcement

Announcements about the blog or other things

Caroline Crane Marsh diaries available

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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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A new feature: Conversations with Elena

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The following post is the first in what I hope will be a series of posts by a friend and former colleague, Elena Chiocchetti.

You may remember Elena from her help with some of my Italian explorations. In addition to those more technical discussions, we exchange email about cultural differences between the U.S. and Italy, as well as about current events. Over the past several years since I moved away from Italy, I have enjoyed our exchanges, especially those on which Elena holds forth on a topic. She writes well, amusingly, and often with the intention of being provocative, so I suggested that she be a guest blogger here. After some back and forth, she agreed, with the content being edited (by me) from our email. Since we write (mostly) in Italian (I need the practice much more than she needs practice in English), I’ll give the original Italian version, and then my (computer assisted) translation into English below it.

On to the first “Conversation with Elena.” Avanti! (=Onwards!)

Scaling back

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As of this week, I’ll be scaling back to doing just one blog post a week instead of two. I have a few larger projects I’d like to do (like work more on John Florio’s dictionary, and do more on the language of lady photographers), and they take time. In addition, we’re also working on a journal article about the Lowell photographer Costillia D. Smith, which also takes time.

However, I hope that those projects, and whatever else comes up, will lead to other interesting posts.