Day 47. My Joel Chandler Harris Workflow

Since I'm about to start on Monday with a new work flow for stories that are NOT in the Joel Chandler Harris workflow (assuming the HAX fix works; I'm optimistic it will!), I thought I would document the workflow here at this blog for the stories published by Joel Chandler Harris, and then in tomorrow's blog post I can document the new workflow for the stories I will be publishing with HAX.

So, Joel Chandler Harris:

I started this blog back in December of 2018 when I read Julius Lester's Complete Tales of Brer Rabbit, which is absolutely the best book to get if you want to know the Rabbit. I fell in love with Brer Rabbit all over again re-reading that book; I had first read it years ago in graduate school. I really like the way Lester chose to simply strip out the Uncle Remus frametale material, and I decided that I would create a public domain project where I would do the same. In addition to stripping out the Uncle Remus frame, Lester retold the stories in his own words. My goal is different: I decided to take the Joel Chandler Harris stories (which are almost all in the public domain), and strip out the frametale material, while also normalizing the eye-dialect to more standard spelling, but without changing the actual words. I got that plan laid out in December, and created a blog with the Joel Chandler Harris texts for all 168 stories that are in the public domain as organized in Chase's The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus. There are just 7 stories missing; those are the stories that Thomas H. English found in Harris's papers and published posthumously; Chase included them in his book but as they are not in the public domain, I am not including those stories in my project.

So, I built this blog with a blog post page for every one of the 168 stories, labeling them by book: Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings, Nights with Uncle Remus, and so on. Where there were illustrations available in the public domain editions of these books, I added those illustrations to the blog post, for example: Mr. Fox and Miss Goose.

Now, during the summer, I am working through the stories one by one with the editorial process described above: I strip out the Uncle-Remus-frame and then I remove the eye-dialect, although I've been leaving some of the eye-dialect in the actual dialogue spoken by the characters in the story. I'm not sure if I am going to keep that style or not; I'll make a final decision on that when I complete all the stories and start doing some global proofreading.

So, if a story was already digitized at Project Gutenberg (where the text is available, not just OCR), then I end up with two blog posts here at this blog: the standardized spelling post plus the original post; for example: Mr. Fox and Miss Goose and Mr. Fox and Miss Goose (original spelling). For stories without a digitized version online, here is just my blog post, with a link to the original version online at Hathi Trust; for example: Taily-Po.

In addition, I am creating a blog post for each story with notes from Florence Baer's comprehensive study Sources and Analogues of the Uncle Remus Tales, published in 1980. These posts are my first foray into doing research on the tales; I'll do more in depth research later on for the tales that are of most interest to me for whatever reason. I'm using the Chase numbers as labels, so that means you can see the posts relevant to a particular story on a single page by using the Chase number; for example: Mr. Fox and Miss Goose is Chase035, so that link shows both versions of the story plus the notes from Baer. As I add additional kinds of blog posts, I will be able to use that Chase number label to display them as a unit.

Meanwhile, I also have all the Joel Chandler Harris stories and books bookmarked at Diigo, and I can browse by book there; for example: His Songs and Sayings. Diigo is a fantastic tool for browsing and for searching, especially as I add tags and summaries to the stories there. The Diigo bookmark links back to the post at this blog for the stories; for the books, it links to the Freebookapalooza blog where I list the different online editions available.

By using the Chase number at Diigo, I will be able to link up the Joel Chandler Harris stories with their analogues; for example, here is Chase008, where I've labeled both the Harris story Mr. Fox and Mr. Buzzard and a Gullah story collected by Jones, Buh Rabbit, Buh Wolf, de Dog, an de Goose plus an African story from Angola, Man and Turtle.

This feature of Diigo will really come into play when I begin doing the research part of this project; for the summer, I am focused almost completely on collecting texts.

My goal is get all the Harris stories edited by the end of the summer. So far, I'm on schedule; fingers crossed that I will be able to carry on for the 36 days of summer that remain; today is exactly my half-way point of the summer!