Occom Online

Samson Occom is going digital. The student of Dartmouth founder Eleazar Wheelock and the first known Native American to publish his writings in English, Occom left behind a collection of 76 letters along with a variety of petitions, journals and other documents. All of these are about to be digitized thanks to a $250,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant awarded to Ivy Schweitzer, professor of English and women’s and gender studies. “The range of these materials will enable even the casual user to better appreciate the cultural richness of Occom’s milieu,” says Schweitzer. “We are transcribing the documents and offering two modes of viewing the transcribed texts: a modernization for users who are mainly interested in what the letters say, rather than the handwritten documents as artifacts, and a text with a literal transcription, that is, with strike-throughs, carets and insertions and original line lengths. This is for viewers who want to use the transcribed letters to help them find their place in the scanned image.” Not all of the 18thcentury penmanship is hard to read. “Occom’s hand was very clear—looks a bit like a typewriter. Wheelock’s is notoriously bad—he often used an amanuensis,” notes Schweitzer.

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