0.19 Civil war washington, the walt whitman archive, and some  (Page 3/12)

The historical moment of the Whitman Archive 's early development shaped the organizational scheme we adopted to achieve the Archive 's goals. Currently our work focuses on developing the first two-way edition of Whitman’s correspondence; on editing his prose writings; and on further developing our work with translations. In many ways our organizational system is familiar to those who have worked in print culture. The Whitman Archive shares many author-centered concerns with the NYUP edition, but we place much greater emphasis on his reception, as seen in our presentation of the contemporary reviews, interviews, a bibliography of criticism and full text of selected critical articles and monographs, and the previously mentioned translations. In editing Whitman, everything depends on how “Whitman” is defined. The NYUP editors believed that “Whitman” resides in the words of the texts he authored; we hold that “Whitman” resides both in his words and in his reception, in what has been made of his words. We differ from the NYUP edition also in stressing the material objects, typically books and manuscripts, that were physical carriers of Whitman’s words. We produce facsimile images of Whitman’s documents because we feel that an important part of their meaning is carried through bibliographic codes. Whitman wasn’t able to finalize the meaning of “Whitman.” That meaning continues to evolve. In our view, Whitman’s solidarity with working people and his language in praise of “comrades” resonated differently after the Bolshevik revolution, just as his accounts of manly attachment take on greater force and dimension in a post-Stonewall era.

What is non-traditional from an editorial perspective about the Walt Whitman Archive is the commitment to open access; the inclusion of tools (both the text-analysis tool TokenX and our integrated finding guide to Whitman’s poetry manuscripts that creates a virtual collection across more than thirty repositories); and the expansiveness that includes photographs, criticism, teaching materials, and extensive documentation of our practices and history. As a digital thematic research collection, the Walt Whitman Archive contains an edition in progress but is much more than that. The Archive is, as it were, a laboratory for studying Whitman, and it begins to approximate an all-purpose resource in its particular domain. We provide some types of contextual information that we consider especially illuminating. We've made the contemporary reviews of his writings available for quite some time, and we include a varying amount of work by his so-called disciples (sometimes Whitman was a ghost co-author of their productions).  Our bibliography of criticism contains 15,000 annotated entries stretching from the earliest commentary on Whitman in the nineteenth century to the current moment. Work is underway on the interviews of Whitman and so on. I would understand if someone said: yes, that's all fine, but that's not the important context for me. Someone might rightly complain that Anne Gilchrist's “A Woman's Estimate of Walt Whitman” is one of the most important nineteenth-century accounts of the poet, and the full text of that essay is not available on the Whitman Archive . And someone else with interests in the literature of the Americas might wonder why we don't yet feature the early responses of Central and South American writers to Whitman. There is of course only so much time and money to accomplish all we'd like to do. Further, the organizational scheme employed carries with it critical and analytical habits that make some of the possible contextual materials more or less likely, and the contextual materials we've prioritized were likely at the time those decisions were made. In part, the Whitman Archive has been shaped by what has seemed most fundable.