Hannah Wren Blog One: A Whitman Scholar’s Dream

As an English major and lover of literature and poetry, I was excited to find Walt Whitman’s name in one of the website selections. The creators of the site assembled almost all of Whitman’s works and put them in one place for scholars to access. They also include original letters that he wrote, manuscripts, commentary, and information about Whitman’s life. They explain how Whitman’s work is difficult for researchers and scholars to find and so it tends to be studied in pieces, at separate times. However, the site allows people to access his work in one place from the comfort of their own homes. Their sources include Whitman’s published works, works written in his own hand (manuscripts and annotations), and letters. They also use secondary Whitman sources to provide more information for their viewers, including, reviews and criticism of Whitman’s work and dates and important events of his life. Next, for processing, they had to organize all of his published works, letters, manuscripts, and commentary on his work and digitize it for people to access through the world wide web. They also had to organize and edit important dates in his life with the corresponding events. In their technical summary they explain how they used HTML as well as XML coding to make the information easily searchable. They also explain how they scanned the material and took pictures themselves when scanning was not possible. They had to “clean and crop” all images. The information is presented in an easily searchable archive, where users can filter by title or date. Users can actually see and interact with Whitman’s handwriting, providing an extremely unique reading experience. They also create a simple timeline of his life to present the dates and events as well images of Whitman and audio recordings to make his work come alive.

In our first reading on digital humanities, the author explained how librarians were some of the first to combine the digital with the humanities by using digital materials to organize texts. By focusing on one specific writer, the creators of “The Walt Whitman Archive” have created an immensely helpful tool for scholars or anyone interested in Whitman to use in their research. However, I think the site could be more interactive. For instance, the timeline is presented in a bland and simple format. The site seems to be more focused on practicality, rather than being aesthetically pleasing like some the projects we looked at earlier in the week.