Sara Palmer
Digital Scholarship Specialist
Emory Center for Digital Scholarship
Lois Overbeck
Director, Letters of Samuel Beckett Project
Emory University
Large, long-term humanities projects leave a wake of research that may become inaccessible or lost when publication is complete. Following publication of the final volume of The Letters of Samuel Beckett (Cambridge University Press, 2009-2016), came the big question: How can thirty years of essential primary research be preserved for future scholarship? By focusing on assembling metadata, the project could respect literary rights, describe and index the letters, integrate decades of interviews and research, and model humanities methods for new and public inquiry. Through a partnership with the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, the project is now poised to launch a website that provides a wealth of information about the nearly 10,000 letters written by Beckett that are held in public archives. In this overview, the speakers discuss both the importance of the research presented as well as the logistical and technical pathways for the production of a richly nuanced dataset.