University of Nebraska, Lincoln (Lincoln, NE 68588-0007)
Kenneth Price (Project Director: December 2019 to present)
RZ-271305-20
Collaborative Research
Research Programs
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Totals:
$249,941 (approved)
$249,941 (awarded)
Grant period:
1/1/2021 – 12/31/2023
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Walt Whitman's Journalism: Finding the Poet in the Brooklyn Daily Times
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.
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