Meshworks: Sources and Resources
Primary Sources

Manuscript Sources
The Emily Dickinson Archive (edickinson.org), an open-access resource gathering digital surrogates of many of the manuscripts of Dickinson’s poems from many archives is the primary source for manuscript images reproduced here.
Manuscripts images from the following Libraries are included here:
- American Antiquarian Society
- Amherst College Archives & Special Collections
- Beinecke Library, Yale University
- Boston Public Library
- Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University
- Forbes Library
- Houghton Library, Harvard University
- Jones Library
- Library of Congress
- Middlebury College Library
- The Morgan Library & Museum
- New York Public Library
- Princeton University Library
- The Robert P. Esty Library
- The Rosenbach Library
- Scripps College Library
- Smith College Libraries
- State Historical Society of Iowa
- Vassar Special Collections
Scholarly Editions
R. W. Franklin’s The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, 2 vols. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986.
R. W. Franklin, ed., The Poems of Emily Dickinson, 3 vols. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998.*
Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith in Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson. Ashfield, Mass.: Paris Press, 1998.
Thomas H. Johnson, ed., The Letters of Emily Dickinson, 3 vols. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958.
*Unless otherwise noted, the dating of Dickinson’s poems derives from Franklin 1998; the dating of Dickinson’s fragments derives from Johnson 1958.
Birding Guides

C19
C19 data on the birds’ occurrence, arrival, and departure dates is drawn principally from three sources:
- H. L. Clark, The Birds of Amherst & Vicinity, including nearly the whole of Hampshire County. Amherst, MA: J. E. Williams, 1887.
- Ebenezer Emmons, Birds of Massachusetts (1833), originally published in Dr. Edward Hitchcock’s “Report on the Geology, Minerology, Botany and Zoology of Massachusetts”, pp. 528-51.
- J. A. Allen, “Catalogue of the Birds Found at Springfield, Mass., with Notes on their Migrations, Habits, & c., together with a list of those birds found in the State not yet observed at Springfield” (1864), originally published in the Proceedings of the Essex Institute at Salem, Vol. IV, No. 2, September 1864.
C20
C20 data on the birds’ occurrence, arrival, and departure dates has been drawn from two sources:
- Aaron Clark Bagg and Samuel Atkins Eliot Jr.,l Birds of the Connecticut Valley in Massachusetts. Northampton, Mass.: The Hampshire Bookshop, 1937.
- Peter Westover, Birds and Their Habitats in Amherst, Massachusetts with Complete Annotated List of Amherst Birds. Amherst: Hitchcock Center for the Environment, 1977.
C21
- The Massachusetts Avian Records Committee State List, 2021.
- Mass Audubon and the Mass Audubon Breeding Bird Atlas 1 Species Accounts, 2021.
- The Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and Birds of the World, 2022.
- Wayne R. Petersen and Brian E. Small, Field Guide to Birds of Massachusetts. Scott & Nix, Inc., 2017.
- Peter Westover, “Amherst College Bird Survey”, 2008.
Bird Sound Files

The website www.xeno-canto.org (“Xeno-canto”), created in 2005 by Bob Planque and William-Pier Vellinga, and administrated by the Netherlands-based Xeno-canto foundation (Stichting Xeno-canto voor natuurgeluiden), is an open-access site dedicated to sharing recordings of sounds of wild birds from all across the world and the primary source of the sound and sonogram files used in Dickinson’s Birds. Xeno-canto is committed to education, conservation, and science, and their recordings are shared under various Creative Commons licenses that generally allow distribution provided recordists are credited and provided no commercial proceeds are sought.
Map Sources

The nineteenth-century Massachusetts map at the heart of this archive was created by Frances A. Henshaw in April 1823. It appears in her “Book of Penmanship,” a slender volume composed by Henshaw when she was a student at the Middlebury Female Academy and containing both her writing exercises on astronomical geography and her exquisitely hand-drawn and colored maps of nineteen of the then twenty-four United States http://www.davidrumsey.com/maps3127.html. “Massachusetts” is small is scale, measuring only 16 cm (h) x 23 cm (w), and Henshaw’s fusion of alphabetic and cartographic literacy clearly reflects the influence of Emma Willard, the educator and map-maker who led the Academy from 1807 to 1908. Today the map is part of the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, which includes an exceptional rich collection of 19th c maps made by children.
- Alonzo Gray and Charles B. Adams, Map of Amherst, 1833. Courtesy of the Jones Library, Amherst, Massachusetts.
- H. F. Walling, Map of Amherst, 1856. Courtesy of the Jones Library, Amherst, Massachusetts.
- Beer’s Atlas, Amherst Village, 1873. Courtesy of the Jones Library, Amherst, Massachusetts.
Sources + Resources
Abram, David. 1996. The Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Vintage Books.
Ackerman, Jennifer. 2017. The Genius of Birds. New York: Penguin.
Adams, John Luther and Alex Ross. 2009. The Place Where You Go to Listen: In Search of an Ecology of Music. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.
Allen, Aaron S. and Kevin Dawe, eds. 2016. Current Directions in Ecomusicology: Music, Culture, Nature. Abingdon: Routledge.
American Bird Conservancy @ https://abcbirds.org.
Aristotle, De Anima II.8 420b12.
Armbruster, Karla M. and Kathleen R. Wallace, eds. 2001. Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Arons, Wendy and Theresa J. May, eds. 2012. Readings in Performance and Ecology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Arsić, Branka. 2016. Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ayres, Edward L. 2010. “Turning toward Place, Space, and Time.” In The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship, edited by David J. Bodenhamer, John Corrigan, and Trevor M. Harris. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Bandt, Ros, Michelle Duffy, and Dolly MacKinnon, eds. 2007. Hearing Places: Sound, Place, Time and Culture. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
Barclay, Leah. 2012. “Shifting Paradigms: Towards an Auditory Culture.” Proceedings of ISEA 2012 Albuquerque: Machine Wilderness. Albuquerque: ISEA. http://socialmedia.hpc.unm.edu/isea2012/sites/default/files/ISEA2012_confproceedings_WEB.pdf.
Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bergland, Renee. 2008. “Urania’s Inversion: Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, and the Strange History of Women Scientists in Nineteenth-Century America.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 34:1.
Birds of the World: The Cornell Lab of Ornithology @ https://birdsoftheworld.org/bow/home.
Brown, Andrew. 2014. Art & Ecology Now. London: Thames and Hudson.
Caballero, Krista and Frank Ekberg. 2013–. Birding the Future @ http://www.birdingthefuture.net.
Caballero, Krista. 2016. Portable Field Desk @ http://kristacaballero.com/portable-field-desks.
Caballero, Krista. 2020-. Some Spells Are Bigger @ http://kristacaballero.com/some-spells-are-bigger.
Carlyle, Angus, ed. 2007. Autumn Leaves: Sound and the Environment in Artistic Practice. Paris: Double Entendre.
Carson, Rachel. 1962. Silent Spring. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
Chow, Juliana. 2014. “‘Because I see – New Englandly – ’: Seeing Species in the Nineteenth-Century and Emily Dickinson’s Regional Specificity.” ESQ, 60.3, 2014: 413–49.
Clare, John. 2004. Major Works, edited by Eric Robinson and David Powell. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Clark, Timothy. 2015. Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Cole, Norma. 1991. My Bird Book. Portland, ME: Littoral Books.
Cook, Terry and Joan M. Schwartz. 2002. “Archives, Records, and Power: From (Postmodern) Theory to (Archival) Performance.” Archival Science, 2: 171–85.
Cramerotti, Alfredo, ed. 2015. The Blind. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect.
Cummings, Jim. 2010. About Environmental Soundscape Art. http://earthear.com/aboutesa.html.
Cusack, Peter. 2012. Sounds from Dangerous Places. Surrey: ReR Megacorp.
“Dawn Chorus,” conceived and directed by Bernie Kraus and Michael John Gorman @ dawn-chorus.org, 2020.
Digital Amherst @ http://www.digitalamherst.org/exhibits.
Dunn, David. 2021. The Sound of Light in Trees. https://daviddunn.bandcamp.com/album/the-sound-of-light-in-trees.
Ear to the Earth. 2011. @ http://twitter.com/ear2earth.
The Endings Project @ https://projectendings.github.io/.
Emily Dickinson Archive @ https://www.emilydickinson.org.
Emmons, Ebenezer. 1833. The Birds of Massachusetts. In Dr. Edward Hitchcock’s “Report on the Geology, Minerology, Botany and Zoology of Massachusetts”: 528–51.
Farge, Arlette. 2013. The Allure of the Archives. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Foer, Jonathan Safran. 2001. A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by Joseph Cornell. D.A.P.
“For the Birds” by the Birdsong Project: https://open.spotify.com/album/6c8aHa89kWTsrcz0iw7fgS?si=YxOT7jT7S3W6imf0mKOHUw.
Fragments of Extinction. https://www.fragmentsofextinction.org/dusk-chorus-film/
Natural World Museum 2007. Art in Action: Nature, Creativity and our Collective Future. San Rafael: Earth Aware Editions.Nickens, T. Edward. “Listening to Migrating Birds at Night May Help Ensure Their Safety.” Audubon Magazine September-October 2013 @ https://www.audubon.org/magazine/september-october-2013/listening-migrating-birds-night-may.
