Walt Whitman as an Author Before Leaves of Grass

FAIN: RQ-50658-12

University of Nebraska, Lincoln (Lincoln, NE 68503-2427)
Kenneth Price (Project Director: December 2011 to June 2021)
Ed Folsom (Co Project Director: December 2011 to June 2021)

The preparation for online publication of a selection of 19th-century American author Walt Whitman's early published and unpublished writings as part of an existing digital archive devoted to Whitman. (36 months)

The Walt Whitman Archive, a digital archive that makes Whitman's vast work easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers alike, seeks to expand its content to include Whitman-authored materials written before the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. This "foreground" period consists of Whitman's novel, Franklin Evans (1842); his roughly two dozen short stories and vignettes initially published between 1841 and 1848 in news and literary papers; his unpublished pre-1855 prose manuscripts; his pre-Leaves of Grass notebooks; and a significant selection of Whitman's journalism in which he develops a persona across multiple articles. The Whitman Archive proposes to gather, edit, and annotate Whitman's early materials for digital publication and will offer, for the first time, a seamlessly integrated presentation of Whitman's literary contributions in the lead-up to his masterpiece, Leaves of Grass.

Associated Products

“Collecting Walt Whitman, From Past to Present" (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: “Collecting Walt Whitman, From Past to Present"
Author: Nicole Gray
Abstract: In his nine-volume record of conversations with Whitman in the last years of the poet’s life, published as With Walt Whitman in Camden, Horace Traubel and the poet joke about Traubel’s collecting—not just the poet’s words, but also his letters and manuscripts, even retrieving some of the latter out of the trash in Whitman’s house on Mickle Street. Traubel’s volumes have been cited as evidence of Whitman’s responses to a range of topics, from politics to poetry. Lacking from the conversation, however, is a sense of Traubel as collector. In the course of drafting his meticulous notes, Traubel also created an elaborate indexing system, noting at the top of the letters and manuscripts Whitman gave him the locations of corresponding transcriptions in his notes. The Whitman Archive is currently engaged in the first comprehensive effort to publish Whitman’s early prose manuscripts and his incoming correspondence, bringing several of the manuscripts and letters marked by Traubel to light. Traubel’s notes link individual documents to a rich context of conversations between Whitman and Traubel and Traubel’s own efforts to create an archive of documents related to the poet. They also offer an occasion to consider the role of a nineteenth-century collection of manuscripts within a twenty-first century digital archive.
Date: 03/20/2016
Conference Name: C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Conference

"Fish-Shaped Paumanok, and Other Strange Tales of Editing Walt Whitman" (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: "Fish-Shaped Paumanok, and Other Strange Tales of Editing Walt Whitman"
Author: Nicole Gray
Abstract: This talk looks at the idea and the role of the author in relation to a digital editorial project, The Walt Whitman Archive. It offers a discussion of the techniques and concepts involved in editing Whitman’s manuscripts, correspondence, and marginalia, and outlines specific ways that digital methods are changing the ways literary scholars think about texts, archives, and authors.
Date: 03/24/2016
Conference Name: Digital Humanities Faculty Fellows Forum

"Creating a Digital Scholarly Edition of Walt Whitman’s Short Fiction: A Case Study in TEI/XML" (Article)
Title: "Creating a Digital Scholarly Edition of Walt Whitman’s Short Fiction: A Case Study in TEI/XML"
Author: Stephanie Blalock
Abstract: This poster documents the creation of the Walt Whitman Archive's online scholarly edition of Whitman's fiction by examining the process of text encoding or the making of a machine-readable version of the fiction in Extensible Markup Language (XML) using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines. Taking Whitman’s “The Tomb-Blossoms” as a case study, this poster reveals the commonly used markup tags for and the unique challenges of encoding fiction printed in nineteenth-century periodicals.
Year: 2015
Primary URL: http://ir.uiowa.edu/bsides/39/
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: B Sides
Publisher: University of Iowa's School of Library and Information Science

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