Holmes Online HTML Version

Twain’s Geography, created by Scott Holmes, maps the life and travels of Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain) to the places he lived in, passed through, and wrote about. Holmes' work shows the amazing promise and possibilities of moving from a print format to a digital format. Its organizing idea is geographic: it takes the chronology of Twain’s life and grounds it in the places where events occurred, linking biography to place with a rich digital interface created in Drupal.

The parts

1. The biographical timeline and narrative overview appear on the home page. This section walks through Twain’s life in 18 place-anchored periods. These include his birth and boyhood in Missouri, leaving home as a typesetter, learning to pilot on the Mississippi, his years out West, the Quaker City voyage, marriage and the Hartford years, time in Europe, the global lecture tour, and his final years. Each period summarizes both events and locations (https://twainsgeography.com/).
2. The location gazetteer (https://twainsgeography.com/gazetteer). Each page covers a specific place tied to Twain — town, city, address, hotel, theater, river, or landmark — creating a comprehensive list (~2,190 entries in places.csv). This is the site’s geographic heart.
3. The Day By Day volumes (https://twainsgeography.com/page/day-day-volume-i) are hosted on Holmes’s site. The site features all four volumes of David H. Fears’s Mark Twain Day by Day: An Annotated Chronology, including front matter, Fears’s dating conventions (University of California Press style, with day-of-week added), the works-cited apparatus, and the dated entries. Entries are integrated with geographic data so the chronology connects to mapped locations.

In short: the site, digitally and expertly, connects three layers — a life-timeline, a place gazetteer, and Fears’s day-by-day chronology — through geography. This integration of Fears and place data forms a useful resource for the current 'Digital Mark Twain Day by Day', which will then be adding network visualizations, search, and a new interface.

Sources: Twain’s Geography — home, Day By Day: Volume I.

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Sections of Twain’s life (Twain’s Geography epochs)

In addition to using the information collected for gazetteer [1]. Holmes use of the stages of Twain's life can be a helpful way to organize the daily entries (beyond simply colume and decade used by Fears).

1. The Hannibal Years — beginning Nov 30, 1835
2. The Restless Typesetter — beginning May 25, 1853
3. Sam Clemens on the Mississippi — beginning Feb 16, 1857
4. Sam Clemens Goes West — beginning Jul 18, 1861
5. Mark Twain, Reporter — beginning Sep 16, 1862
6. The Sandwich Islands and Lecture Tours — beginning Aug 13, 1866
7. The Innocents Abroad — beginning May 16, 1867
8. Pilgrims, Vandals, and Looking for Respectability — beginning Nov 19, 1867
9. Life in Buffalo — beginning Aug 04, 1869
10. Elmira, Hartford, and England — beginning Mar 18, 1871
11. The Hartford House — beginning Sep 19, 1874
12. A Tramp Abroad — beginning Apr 11, 1878
13. Home in Hartford — beginning Sep 02, 1879
14. The Clemens Family Relocates to Europe — beginning Jun 05, 1891
15. The World Tour — beginning May 18, 1895
16. Life in Exile — beginning Aug 14, 1896
17. To the Person Sitting in Darkness — beginning Oct 15, 1900
18. The Man in the White Suit — beginning Jul 14, 1904

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