Endowment for staff and other costs of managing the digital Walt Whitman Archive.

The year 2005 marks the 150th anniversary of the first publication of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855), a declaration of American literary independence and the founding book of American literary democracy. Whitman gave epic voice to our country, memorable articulation to American ideals, and expressed through his art the crisis of Civil War and the cultural possibilities of democracy. Founding principles of our country--freedom and equality--shaped his free verse style, his vernacular usage, and his subject matter. The 150th anniversary of Leaves of Grass is also the 10th anniversary of the Walt Whitman Archive < http://www.whitmanarchive.org > (1995-present). The Archive is providing a complete record of the "American bard," thus giving the general public and scholars at all levels the opportunity to read and study the work of this central spokesman for America. The Archive has begun the unprecedented process of providing free access, via the world-wide web, to the entire corpus of a writer who deepens and enriches our sense of who we are and of what we can become as Americans. We have accomplished a great deal in our initial ten years of long-term undertaking (a projected thirty years of major editorial work along with concurrent and indefinitely ongoing work to foster the scholarship, teaching, and learning the Whitman Archive makes possible). We have produced a large amount of high quality content, garnered grant support from three different federal agencies and a private foundation; established the infrastructure for our work; and built a talented and cohesive team of scholars, technical experts, and library staff. We need, however, to establish secure financial footing. With the support provided by an NEH Challenge Grant, we will create the first fully realized "born digital" edition of a major American writer.

The addition of 1,400 new documents, updates to the database of Whitman’s reading, and creation of curated theme portals for the Walt Whitman Archive.

America's most famous poet, Walt Whitman, left behind an unusual and extraordinary collection of marginalia and annotations. This hitherto uncollected and largely unpublished set of extraordinarily diverse and sophisticated documents shows America's most famous poet in-the-making. With NEH support, we published 800 pages of these documents in 2015, and for the first time, by way of the freely accessible Walt Whitman Archive, students, scholars, and casual readers are now able to explore Whitman's self-education, through his reactions to the literature, history, science, theology, and art of his time. Having achieved our goals for that grant, we now apply for NEH funding to preserve and give free public electronic access to more of Walt Whitman's manuscript annotations. We apply for two years of implementation funding to publish 1400 more pages of documents, update our database of Whitman's reading, and create curated thematic subsections to draw more attention to the project.

Creation of an online archive of Walt Whitman's manuscript annotations, which would allow users to explore Whitman's reactions to the literature, history, science, theology, and art of his time.

This project aims to preserve and give free electronic access to Walt Whitman's manuscript annotations. This hitherto uncollected and largely unpublished set of documents shows America's most famous poet in-the-making. From classical writings to Tennyson, from Persian poets to phrenological journals, the influences on Whitman's work were manifold. For the first time, students, scholars, and casual readers will be able to explore Whitman's self-education, through his reactions to the literature, history, science, theology, and art of his time. The annotations will be published at the Walt Whitman Archive, allowing us to link these annotated documents to later ones they influenced. We will also offer a database of Whitman's reading. Finally, using a customized search engine and the interface created in this project, we will offer analytical tools for archive users that will help researchers shed new light on Whitman's writing in the broad context of 19th century literature and culture.

Preparation for online publication of 19th-century American author Walt Whitman's first edition of Leaves of Grass, as part of an existing digital archive devoted to Whitman. See website at http://www.whitmanarchive.org.

The Walt Whitman Archive seeks NEH support to edit the first edition of Leaves of Grass and the constellation of draft documents that contributed to it by developing a digital variorum of this edition of Leaves from manuscript and notebook beginnings through its many variations in print. Whitman wrote the poetry, designed the book, and set some of the type, and his first Leaves was stunning both as verse and as a material object. This project will entail careful work on at least ninety-nine manuscripts contributing to the volume. Our goals are to advance understanding of this paradigm-shifting book and to enable future scholarship by drawing on some of the opportunities for representation unique to digital editing.

A comprehensive electronic edition of Walt Whitman's Civil War writings. (36 months)

The Walt Whitman Archive will create a comprehensive edition of the Civil War writings of Walt Whitman, probably the most important literary interpreter of this conflict. Support from the National Endowment for the Humanities will allow us to complete this work by 2011, in time for the observance of the sesquicentennial of the outbreak of the War. The War profoundly shaped Leaves of Grass, the first masterpiece of American poetry, and Whitman extensively depicted and analyzed the Civil War in journals, notebooks, letters, essays, journalism, memoirs, and manuscript drafts. We will electronically edit, arrange, and publish -- often for the first time -- the hundreds of documents that give voice to Whitman's experience of the war. In addition to making these documents freely available, our work will help to model for other scholars best practices in creating, publishing, and sustaining electronic editions.

Computational linguistic research to establish the unattributed journalism of American poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892) at the Brooklyn Daily Times newspaper. (36 months)

Our proposed project will use a tested computational linguistic author attribution model to determine the beginning and end of Walt Whitman's editorial tenure at the Brooklyn Daily Times in the 1850s—a matter of longstanding debate in Whitman studies—as well as to determine which editorials he authored during that span. These editorials will then be transcribed, encoded, annotated, and made freely available on the Whitman Archive site. In addition to bringing clarity to a hazy portion of Whitman's biography and offering access to a new trove of understudied Whitman-authored documents, we hope that our method can bring a new tool to the study of authorship attribution and serve as a model for other scholars or projects confronted with similar cases of uncertain authorship, even when only a relatively small sample size of text is available.