The Walt Whitman Archive

-- Reviewed by Ben Goldman

"I am large—I contain multitudes."

One unimpressed reviewer of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass began his criticism by reviewing Whitman's appearance (see image, right). This reviewer, Charles Dana, wrote of Whitman's:

garb, half sailor's, half workman's, with no superfluous appendage of coat or waistcoat, a 'wide-awake' perched jauntily on his head, one hand in his pocket and the other on his hip, with a certain air of mild defiance, and an expression of pensive insolence in his face which seems to betoken a consciousness of his mission as the 'coming man'.

Apparently, this assessment was not entirely uninvited, given the confident voice of the poem ("I wear my hat as I please, indoors or out"), but also since Whitman, in his preparation for publishing the first edition, chose not to provide his own name on the title page of the book. Opposite the author-less title page was this arresting image of Whitman, in the form of an engraving the editors of the Walt Whitman Archive call "the most famous frontispiece in literary history."

In preparation for this review of the Walt Whitman Archive, I attempted to determine what I learned of Whitman in my undergraduate survey of American Literature (circa 1995). My notes were not to be found, but the Norton textbook used in the course has sat patiently on my shelf for years. Upon locating Leaves of Grass, I discovered, to my shame, that I had dutifully underlined the words "I celebrate myself" in pencil, and failed to add any further marginalia. I am almost certain, however, that the instructor did not discuss the absence of Whitman's name on the title page, nor the arresting image of him on the frontispiece. Why would he? The Norton was our text, with its fine print and nearly transparent paper.

One joy of using a digital archive, or thematic research collection (pick your descriptive phrase) is in having the luxury to discover the context of an author's work. The Whitman Archive provides perhaps over one hundred encoded contemporary reviews of Whitman's work, giving the Whitman scholar or student, an amazing insight into the cultural responses to Whitman's writing. Reading a slightly petulant description of Whitman's appearance lacks impact without access to the source material of which it speaks. Upon reading Dana's review in the Whitman Archive, I navigated to the Published Works section of the site and located the high resolution images of the 1855 edition and reviewed for myself Whitman's appearance.

The Walt Whitman Archive has no explicit mission statement, but access to a large body of work by and about Whitman appears to be the central aim of the site, elucidated by the first sentence on the About this Archive page:

The Walt Whitman Archive is an electronic research and teaching tool that sets out to make Whitman's vast work, for the first time, easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers.

The archive certainly appears to be vast. The major categories of the site are:

The archive is large, but not yet comprehensive. The editors' biography discusses Whitman's short career as a journalist and his efforts at fiction writing, but neither of these seem to be represented in the archive. Whitman's most important work, however, is accessible, which seems to be a major accomplishment in itself. As Price says in a History of the Archive, "Despite his prominence it has been difficult to study the evolving nature of his work because several of the important editions of Leaves of Grass have been inaccessible unless you happen to teach at a research library with a strong rare book room."

This body of information, though vast, is easy to navigate. The categories of resources on the site (by genre, generally) are clear, and the search is quite robust. The site uses a modified Google search function (see image, right), and provides the option for refinement by categories.

The search function is partly enabled by the encoding choices made by the archive's administrators. The Technical Summary describes how all content on the site is XML-encoded, not just the e-texts. XML is described as the "acid-free paper of the digital age," and is intended to facilitate not only search, but preservation. Preservation is not a stated goal of the site, but it's clearly a consideration. Price has discussed elsewhere the importance of the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS), which enables administrative, descriptive, and structural metadata to aid in preservation and extensibility. Visitors to the site can even view earlier versions of the archive.

An additional stated goal of the Archive is dynamism. Leaves of Grass presents a challenging text for editors of a printed scholarly edition. What began as a thin 95 page book grew over the course of four decades and seven editions (including the 1891-2 "deathbed" impression) to almost 400 pages of prose and poetry. The Norton for my undergraduate literature course provided the 1855 and 1881-2 editions ofLeaves of Grass, but who is to say these are authoritative? These two are logical choices since final authorial intentions are often given stature, and given the cultural impact of the 1855 edition. But this orphans five other editions of the work. The Whitman Archive takes advantage of the digital medium to release Whitman's work from the limitations of print. As Price says:

We're doing this in part because [Whitman's] work defies the constraints of the book. Whitman's work was always being revised, was always in flux, and fixed forms of print do not adequately capture his incessant revisions. Moreover, the economics of print publication have led previous editors to privilege one edition or another of Whitman's writings—usually the first or last version of Leaves of Grass. Our goal is to create a dynamic site that will grow and change over the years.

The digitized editions are all available from the same page (see image, right), and one can easily navigate from one to another, but this page also illustrates what could perhaps be considered the biggest drawback of the site. The site, while presenting a clean, ordered design, is almost entirely composed of text resources. There are photographs, and one 30-second audio file, but in general the site offers very few multimedia resources, and offers only the most traditional modes for interacting with the material. The seven editions of Leaves of Grass, of all the resources, would benefit from some form of comparison tool--something that allows users to view the evolution of certain lines, whole poems, the overall structure, even the format. A specialized tool might not even be necessary; the archive could simply realign the borders that distinguish the seven editions from each other.

The strength and focus of this particular research collection is clearly the seven editions of Leaves of Grass and the growing body of digitized manuscripts. These are the first two categories on the homepage, the first two menu items in the navigation. The contemporary reviews are interesting, but one suspects only the most committed Whitman devotees will be reading these. The focus on texts conforms with the stated goals of the archive, but is likely to hold greater appeal to the first audience mentioned on the About this Archive page: the scholars. It is not necessarily a short-coming of the site, especially not with such impressive texts, but it is tempting to want more out of this site--more multimedia, interaction, or non-text resources. Such resources would likely appeal more to the second and third audiences mentioned: the students and general readers. It's not hard to come to the conclusion that the Whitman Archive is first and foremost a resource for scholars.

References

Folsom, E. & Price, K. M. (n.d.) The Walt Whitman Archive. Accessed September 22, 2008 from http://www.whitmanarchive.org

Price, K. M. (2008). Electronic Scholarly Editions. In R. Siemens and S. Schreibman (Eds.), A Companion to Digital Literary Studies. Retrieved September 4, 2008 from http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405148641/9781405148641.xml&doc.view=content&chunk.id=ss1-6-5&toc.depth=1&brand=9781405148641_brand&anchor.id=0

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