The Walt Whitman Archive – Price 1
January 2011
1What are the strengths of this archive? How would you use or refer to this site in your own work?
Kenneth M. Price
Co-Director, The Walt Whitman Archive Hillegass University Professor of American Literature – University of Nebraska-Lincoln
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 At this time, the Walt Whitman Archive is the single most extensive resource for the study of Whitman, and it has progressed steadily toward its primary goal: “to make Whitman’s vast work, for the first time, easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers.” We take an expansive view of what is relevant “Whitman” material in a digital thematic research collection,[ref]Carole L. Palmer, “Thematic Research Collections,” In A Companion to Digital Humanities (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 348-65.[/ref] so we include both Whitman-authored pieces and incoming correspondence, reviews of his writings, selected recent criticism, and other materials not usually included in “collected works.” We aspire to produce the richest possible resource for the study of his writings, life, and reception. Our annotated bibliography, the logical starting point for scholarly work on the poet, includes all known critical writings about Whitman from 1839 to the present day—it comprises over 14,000 entries and continues to grow. The site receives a great deal of traffic: in a typical recent month (February 2010) we had nearly 39,000 visits to our site, more than 30,000 of which were by unique visitors.
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 As a project co-director, I coordinate the ongoing work necessary to build it. (Ed Folsom and I work closely with Elizabeth Lorang, the current project manager, in this capacity.) The site is less used in my work than it regularly constitutes a major part of my work as a scholar. At times, though, I employ the site in much the same manner as other literary scholars, albeit with greater knowledge of the site’s strengths and limitations and with awareness of material now in the pipeline that isn’t currently available to the public. As a literary critic, I appreciate what the Whitman Archive makes newly possible. For example, those of us writing about Whitman can now trace the development of his poetry across multiple versions—in isolated manuscript drafts; in notebooks; in periodical printings; and in various book publications—in a way that was all but unimaginable before the advent of the Web. His manuscripts are dispersed at nearly one hundred repositories around the world. In some cases, what was once a single manuscript has become separated into parts, with different sections of the manuscript held in repositories separated by great distance. Such manuscripts can now be virtually reunited.
¶ 3
Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0
The Whitman Archive has become fundamental to criticism, but citation of the Archive lags behind its actual use. A recent study by Lisa Spiro and Jane Segal indicates that many people use major American literature web sites, including the Whitman Archive, only to then cite print sources.[ref]“The Impact of Digital Resources on Humanities Research” available at
http://library.rice.edu/services/dmc/about/projects/the-impact-of-digital-resources-on-humanities-research
[/ref] This ill-conceived practice needs to change in order for digital humanities to get its due. To enable people to reference individual parts of the Whitman Archive more easily, all Archive pages will soon include additional metadata for use with Zotero and other reference management software. In my own scholarly practice, I have cited the Whitman Archive many times, and when Susan Belasco, Ed Folsom, and I compiled the collection Leaves of Grass: The Sesquicentennial Essays (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), we advised all contributors to cite the Whitman Archive when referring to Whitman texts.
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Provocative comment: “We take an expansive view of what is relevant ‘Whitman’ material.” Is there a defined threshold point at which the Archive wouldn’t include something Whitman-related other than the time, energy, and resources required to include it? I’m thinking of the Disciples section in particular. If this were a comprehensive listing of Whitman’s disciples, it would be HUGE! Is there a criteria for deciding (1) who counts as a disciple and (2) how much information about that disciple should be included? The Disciples section is a particularly interesting section of the Archive for me, because it potentially challenges the notion of The Author as a limiting strategy for what to include on the Archive: if we acknowledge that Whitman and his disciples had a reciprocal relationship on one another, where do we stop in our collection of resources that define that relationship? I’m just thinking out loud here. I don’t have any suggestions or criticisms other than to say that the Disciples section is a really tantalizing space for testing the boundaries of the “expansive view of what is relevant ‘Whitman’ material.”
It is true that the Disciples section could become quite large! Our criterion for the initial selection of disciples was that all of the first four arguably co-authored with Whitman in one way or another. So in that way, at least in our initial conception, the Disciples section keeps a link to the author-centered way of conceiving of how to organize information. However, the Whitman Archive explicitly tries NOT to be unduly limited by author-based conceptions of what is relevant, so we include reviews and criticism that no one would claim should go in a traditional “collected works of [name your favorite author].”
You ask a really interesting question about the boundaries of the Archive. In a sense: are there any? and if so how do you establish them? The question reminds me of a great remark Henry James made in Roderick Hudson: “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which thy shall happily appear to do so.” Ultimately, no doubt, everything in the world is related to everything else, if we had only the wit or knowledge to understand all the connections. Weather patterns in Patagonia probably were somehow connected to how Whitman wrote his poetry. But some things are more clearly and closely connected than others. So in constructing something like the Whitman Archive, with limited time, money, and staff, it makes sense to work on the most important things first, to establish the most important connections, to fill the known scholarly gaps, and to respond to what we know (not enough) about the interests of our various audiences.
“such manuscripts can now be virtually reunited”–interesting, considering that the web is often interpreted as a site for fragmentation, duplication, dispersion, and the corruption of originals. It’s cool that, as you show here, the Archive is actually a way to “reunite” a physically dispersed whole original.
Yes, this is now a relatively well known problem that I’ve discussed myself. It’s exceedingly frustrating, since no scholar would ever dream of citing let’s say an original manuscript, if they had only read the printed facsimile edition. Yet for whatever reason these kind of consideration does not apply in the digital world. I think it’s up to us to train our students to take this seriously.