We've been so busy with the release of A Player and a Gentleman (our critical edition of Harry Watkins's diary, published by University of Michigan Press) that we've neglected to let Friends of Harry know that our digital edition of the diary is now available at U-M Library Digital Collections!

Well -- most of the diary, anyway. What's up right now is roughly sixty percent of our transcription. We are currently working on the remaining text (the last five volumes of the diary), with the goal of posting it by the end of 2018. Whereas A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century US American Actor features about forty percent of the diary -- selected, corrected, annotated, and edited for enhanced readability (including an introduction; a chronology of Watkins's life; indices of People, Plays, and Subjects in the book; and beautiful maps depicting Watkins's travels designed by HWD editorial associate Shane Breaux) -- The Harry Watkins Diary: Digital Edition provides a free, searchable transcription of the entire manuscript, encoded in XML in accordance with best practices recommended by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). You can even filter your search by "tag," which allows you to limit your results to characters, titles, people, or places. 

We are particulary indebted to Chris Powell at U-M Library, who worked tirelessly with us to create the beautiful interface. (Chris found some coding errors, too, for which we're equally grateful!) We are also grateful to Kat Hagedorn, Lauren Havens, Jeremy Morse, and LeAnn Fields at U-M Library and University of Michigan Press, who invested lots of time and energy in this project as well.

We hope you enjoy browsing and searching the digital edition. Let us know what you think!