In search of the great white whale

All the cool kids are talking about shortcomings in digitized text databases. I don't have anything so detailed to say as what Goose Commerce or Shane Landrum have gone into, but I do have one fun fact. Those guys describe ways that projects miss things we might think are important but that lie just outside the most mainstream interests—the neglected Early Republic in newspapers, letters to the editor in journals, etc. They raise the important point that digital resources are nowhere near as comprehensive as we sometimes think, which is a big caveat we all need to keep in mind. I want to point out that it's not just at the margins we're missing texts: omissions are also, maybe surprisingly, lurking right at the heart of the canon. Here's an example.