UNL professors work to create digital Walt Whitman archive

Walt Whitman, one of America's most influential and significant poets, isn't an easy author to parse through.

His writing is complex, dense and requires careful study of fragmented manuscripts to fully appreciate or even understand. Since the mid-1990s, the Walt Whitman Archive has been engaged in an ambitious project to digitize Whitman's notebooks, manuscripts, essays, letters, journals and key contextual resources into an integrated and user-friendly website. In 2007, the Archive moved to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and under the co-direction of Ed Folsom and Kenneth Price, has made exciting developments into both the public understanding of Whitman, as well as the potential for digitization in the future of academia.

"His textual record is complicated," said Kenneth Price, Hillegass University professor of American literature at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and author of ‘Whitman and Tradition: The Poet in His Century' and ‘To Walt Whitman, America.'

"He published ‘Leaves of Grass,' famous for appearing in six different editions in his lifetime. You'd have to be at a very wealthy institution, like Harvard or Yale, in order to see all of the different editions and they're usually locked away in rare book rooms."

Price said the project marked the first time all of this material and editions could be made freely available worldwide. While the tools used to distribute free information over the internet have changed dramatically since the Whitman Archive started in the 1990s, its mission has stayed constant.

"The ambition was to build a huge site that incorporated all of Whitman's work and presented it more accurately than a print presentation could do," Price said. "But as we've gone along, our understanding of Whitman has been enriched and our understanding of what the electronic medium can do has been extended. Technology has changed and so new possibilities are now available to us."

One of these changes is increasing interest in user participation and interactivity, allowing ever-more opportunity for accessibility and expansion. One of the more exciting developments happened in April 2011, when Price discovered approximately 3,000 previously unidentified documents in Whitman's handwriting.

"These are documents that he produced as a government clerk in the years just after the civil war from 1865 to 1873," Price said. "He was working in the attorney general's office, and this was a time right after the war when a whole lot of crucial issues were being worked out in the U.S."

Findings like this aren't only intriguing for fans of Whitman, but will forever change the way people approach his work.

"He was right there in the middle of key issues and debates about policy and politics of that time," Price said. "Realizing what he knew and when he knew it is going to change the way people understand his poetry."

Brett Barney is a research associate professor in the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at UNL and senior associate editor of the archive. He offered his own insights into the way the archive will change the study of Whitman.

"One of the chief things that the archive has contributed to the discussion of Whitman is the revelation that Whitman was a careful composer and an even better reviser," Barney said. "By bringing to life his multiple drafts which are very heavily edited, it makes it hard to see him in the same way that he is often depicted historically, as a sort of romantic moment-of-inspiration kind of writer."

Because Whitman is one of the nation's most popular and enigmatic writers, it may seem strange that a comprehensive undertaking hasn't come about before. Price says in the case of his recent discovery, Whitman's signature wasn't on the documents, requiring a special familiarity with his handwriting that make the finding all the more incredible.

Price is more surprised by how long it took for Whitman's poetry manuscripts to surface.

"These are early drafts of some of the most famous poems ever written in North America, never collected before our project," he said. "We've been going around to more than 30 different libraries and other kinds of repositories around the country and to some extent around the world. We're gathering all of those poetry manuscripts, purchasing high-quality scans of them, putting them up on the web, transcribing those sometimes very messy manuscripts, and then providing annotations, explaining them and dating them."

This process is laborious, to be sure, but represents what is likely a massive switch in scholarly research. In Price's mind, the advent of technology allows machines to zero in on linguistic, cultural and textual patterns we were previously unaware of throughout history.

"Reading is changing," Price said. "One of the things that people will need to figure out as we go forward is how to integrate a deep project like the Whitman Archive with the larger collections of texts like Google Books. How do you integrate the small, highly edited, highly cared-for texts, with these larger collections which are less carefully edited and controlled, but have the advantage of a far vaster amount of content."

On a personal level, both Price and Barney say the Archive has been a positive and influential experience.