 
 
Although there is no evidence of it yet on the site, we have been discussing user-generated content, with an appropriate level of editorial vetting, for a few years now.  We have been slow to move down this avenue not because of any philosophical antagonism or because of technical hurdles but merely because we have been busy meeting grant deadlines.
 
It seems likely that our first experiment with user-generated content may involve a database devoted to Whitman's reading.  There are book-length studies of Mark Twain and Emily Dickinson's reading.  What we imagine is the creation of a simple web form with boxes users could fill in.  They would supply information about what Whitman read, when he read it (if known), the evidence establishing that he read it, and so on.  I imagine that we would set this up so that information wouldn't immediately go "live" but would be first checked and then ordinarily approved.  Similar databases could potentially be developed to advance knowledge of poems speaking back to Whitman, television programs invoking him, advertisements using his image or words, and so on.  If we pursued the Bentham model, we could perhaps accomplish tasks we couldn't imagine completing with our current staff.  Still, setting up the framework to do crowdsourcing properly itself takes time.