About White Whale

White Whale is a tool for comparing the works of an author. Repetition of ideas, language, and allusions have struck me as a reader, as I have made my way through Herman Melville's complete works. Not only can you draw lines between the works on topics like sailing, characters finding themselves lost or stuck somewhere, and exploration of exotic locations that lead to inner discovery, but in classical allusions to Ovid and Homer in White Jacket and Mardi or Biblical allusions in Moby-Dick and Clarel (which unfortunately could not be included in the search — see below). I thought it would be helpful to new and seasoned academics and admirers of literature to be able to quickly cross reference between and within works to aid their scholarship and understanding of these texts.
One could compare the use of 'savage' across Melville's works or quickly see how many times 'poison' appears in Shakespeare's plays.
Please keep in mind that the search isn't perfect. It can be slow, especially when searching authors with a large bibliography like Shakespeare's. It also may not be completely accurate. It is based on optical character recognition (OCR) of digitally scanned copies of these texts. The OCR technology isn't perfect and can miss or misconstrue words, so you will want to reference the texts in question yourself, which you can do after searching by clicking on the given page number of a match.
If you have suggestions for improvements or requests, please get in touch.

Authors

An author must be in the public domain to be included on this site. Their works must be available as digital scans on archive.org and must always be available for 'checkout'. Suggestions for authors and versions of works to be included are welcome. Please see below for a list of the current authors, links to their included works and any associated notes with them.

Herman Melville

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare

All of Shakespeare's works are available with the exception of Edward III as nothing beyond the facsimile appears to exist in public domain. As anyone who has studied Shakespeare and the editorial history of his works will know, it is an impossible task to compile the definitive Shakespeare, especially with public domain editions. I have opted not to use facsimiles of the original manuscripts for a few reasons. One, I am not sure scanned facsimiles exist for all of his work, and even if they did would require in many cases choosing between multiple versions of a work. Two, it would be hard to search through the unmodernized (often inconsistent) spellings present in the texts. Instead I have, wherever possible, selected editions that comment on their own editorial process for selecting a base text and where and why they modified where they did.

Charlotte Bronte

Charlotte Bronte

All of Charlotte Bronte's works except for the Juvenilia and the unfinished Emma are included.

Technology

White Whale's search functionality is based off of archive.org and Open Library's APIs. In building this website, I found that these APIs are not very well documented and there are some internal structural patterns that can be frustrating to work with. If you're interested in learning more about what I learned about using these APIs please visit the Github for this project.
The front-end is built with Next.js and the Bulma.io CSS framework.