{"id":864,"date":"2017-10-09T13:45:08","date_gmt":"2017-10-09T20:45:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/?p=864"},"modified":"2017-10-09T13:48:20","modified_gmt":"2017-10-09T20:48:20","slug":"reverse-engineering-the-walt-whitman-archive-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/2017\/10\/09\/reverse-engineering-the-walt-whitman-archive-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Reverse Engineering: The Walt Whitman Archive"},"content":{"rendered":"

Introduction<\/b><\/p>\n

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The Digital Humanities project that I chose to reverse engineer is the <\/span>Walt Whitman Archive<\/span><\/i><\/a>.\u00a0<\/span>I studied Whitman’s works in one of my courses last spring quarter, so I was interested in learning more about him. The <\/span>Walt Whitman Archive <\/span><\/i>serves as a tool for those who want to research America’s most influential poet, from scholars to everyday readers. It aims for consistent growth as more and more of Whitman’s notebooks, manuscripts, and letters are discovered, collected, and studied.<\/span><\/p>\n

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In Whitman’s Hand (Scribal Documents):<\/strong> James Speed to William H. Seward, 21 August 1865<\/em><\/p>\n

Source<\/b><\/p>\n

The project staff is filled with scholars from various universities in the United States, along with others who have made significant contributions, such as editor-scholars, informational professionals, technologists, and students. These individuals have worked to compile Whitman’s writings–including poems, prose essays, fiction, letters, marginalia, notebooks, manuscript fragments, and voluminous journalistic articles. The <\/span>Archive<\/span><\/i>‘s plethora of resources continue to grow as they draw from libraries and collections all around the world. I appreciate the diversity and collaboration of the team to ensure that all of Whitman’s work is gathered and recognized in the\u00a0Archive<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Processing<\/b><\/p>\n

Within the large project of the <\/span>Archive<\/span><\/i>, the staff is dedicated to several ongoing projects. One of the valuable methods of processing data is editing, from Whitman’s poetry manuscripts to his Civil War writings. Another recent project, “Whitman as an Author before <\/span>Leaves of Grass<\/span><\/i>,” focuses on digitizing Whitman’s pre-1855 fiction, journalism, prose, and notebooks. The <\/span>Archive<\/span><\/i> not only provides Whitman’s writings, but there are also images that have been copied and audio recordings that have been produced through collaborations with numerous libraries and collections. For this project, there are multiple methods of processing and analyzing the vastly available data.<\/span><\/p>\n

Presentation<\/b><\/p>\n

The <\/span>Walt Whitman Archive<\/span><\/i> website is simple to navigate and highlights its content over its aesthetics. In this way, it proves to be an effective research and educational tool. Under the section titled, “Technical Summary,” the staff explains its humble beginnings from 1995 to 2000 as a “prototype HTML site aimed at making a large amount of material available to users quickly.” Since then, the <\/span>Archive<\/span><\/i> has added content in the form of more sophisticated, structured data. For instance, XML (Extensible Markup Language) encoding has been incorporated for the textual content. The team behind the website works hard to present Whitman’s work in a way that is simplest and most effective in terms of user experience. Through XML encoding, users will be able to search Whitman’s work more successfully, especially for the sake of research. Their long-term objective is to digitize all of Whitman’s written documents into “faster-loading, high-quality” JPEG images.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Gallery of Images:\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>Whitman in Boston, 1859-1860<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Introduction The Digital Humanities project that I chose to reverse engineer is the Walt Whitman Archive.\u00a0I studied Whitman’s works in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":129,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/129"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/864\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}