(2808,19,'2012-10-15 17:25:05','2012-10-15 17:25:05','In the following section I would like to reflect on some questions about the nature of digital resources, humanities scholarship and the uses to which such material may be put. One of these is the still-contentious issue of whether the creation of such resources is regarded as scholarship in itself or as a way of facilitating the work of other scholars. Even the most recent studies indicate that opinions still remain sharply divided about whether the creation of digital resources such as the Whitman archive is considered to be scholarship and worthy of being rewarded us such by promotion, tenure or in the UK Research Assessment Exercise.[ref]D. Harley, S.K. Acord, S. Earl-Novell, S. Lawrence, and C.J. King, “Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines” (UC Berkeley: Center for Studies in Higher Education, 2010).[/ref] There is an understandable tendency in digital humanities to regard this as an outrageous undervaluation of what we do, and to wish to advocate for our work to be better understood. Yet if we can resist this temptation, the question at issue is an important one. The argument against granting digital resources scholarly status equivalent to a journal article, monograph or critical edition must surely be that such resources are performing a service, akin to that provided by an archive or library in the analogue world: that of bringing together useful materials for other scholars to use.\r\n\r\nIt has long been the case that as Melissa Terras has argued so eloquently, in order for our digital work to be valued we must publish in traditional media.[ref]M. Terras, “Present, Not Voting: Digital Humanities in the Panopticon Digital Humanities” (plenary presented at Digital Humanities 2010 Conference, Kings College London, 2010). http://melissaterras.blogspot.com/2010/07/dh2010-plenary-present-not-voting.html[/ref] However, this is about to change, at least for some of us. In the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework in the UK, digital resources will be assessed in all subject areas as a comparable output to print. This is a vitally important change, carrying with it the implication of a re-evaluation of the scholarly value of the digital; but it places ever more emphasis on the need for us to consider in a rational, not evangelistic, fashion what may distinguish a digital scholarly work from that which renders a service.\r\n\r\nIn this context, nomenclature is not a useful guide. The Whitman project’s creators chose to call their creation an archive, perhaps because like the Rosetti Archive or Valley of the Shadow it contains a collection of various different types of material. However, McGann himself describes Rosetti as a digital edition.[ref]Jerome McGann, “Electronic Archives and Critical Editing,” <em>Literature Compass</em> 7:10 (2010): 37-42.[/ref] While I do not mean to imply that creating and curating an archive in the analogue world is not an intellectual exercise, it is not in itself something for which scholars gain credit. Thus the metaphor would hold that if scholarship done as the result of the use or creation of a physical archive as opposed to in its curation is recognised, then it should be similar in the digital sphere. But is this really appropriate, and does the name ‘archive’ under value the complex nature of what is being achieved in digital resources such as this? Conversely, why is it then that creating a critical edition, whether print or digital form is considered to be a scholarly activity worthy of credit in its own right?\r\n\r\nIt may be because in the print world editors are called upon to make selections and decisions about the best possible copy text, and which textual variants to include. Yet as Gabler argues, as digital technology progresses, digital editions increasingly try to make as many different texts and variants available to readers as possible, to the point that while we may choose to read a literary text in print, the digital medium is most appropriate for complex comparison and study of variants.[ref]H. W. Gabler “Theorizing the Digital Scholarly Edition,” <em>Literature Compass</em> 7:10 (2010): 43–56.[/ref] The theory of social editions also suggests that the literary text should be presented with reference to its broader social and intellectual milieu.[ref]Jerome McGann, <em>A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism</em> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) and D. F. McKenzie, <em>Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts</em>(London: The British Library, 1986).[/ref]\r\n\r\nThe Whitman archive provides page images and transcriptions of all six printed editions of <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, as well as manuscript material and newspaper copy. It calls itself an archive, yet could as easily be considered an excellent example of the digital social edition, where users are encouraged to become part of the scholarly process by comparing transcribed manuscripts with the page images or making judgements about which version of a given poem to use. So this is this, an edition (scholarly product) or an archive (service for others)? I would argue that this distinction is no longer meaningful in the digital sphere where boundaries between what we consider to be editions and archives have become blurred.\r\n\r\nEven if we assert that this is a resource for others to use, that could as easily describe a scholarly edition. It is also arguable that the value of such a resource as a scholarly product in its own right is in the choices made about what types of different materials should be brought together, and how contextual material about Whitman’s life, work and even disciples should be presented. Once again, these are just the kind of decisions that editors of scholarly editions also make. As all digital humanists are aware, the act of marking up text is in itself one of scholarly interpretation, which is why it is so vital that the full marked up texts are presented here. This, like the decision to present page images alongside transcription is an act of intellectual openness: it allows other scholars to understand, and if necessary question the decisions that have been made in their presentation. Far from being a sub-scholarly process, digital resources such as Whitman achieve a lustration of the decision making processes that are the silent underpinning of the task of editors or literary scholars in general. In this sense, digital humanities is ahead of many other fields. Science is only beginning to discover the potential of using digital technologies to link experimental data to articles written as a result of its analysis, so that other scholars may use such data to replicate the experiments that are reported on.[ref]C. Bizer, T. Heath, and T. Berners-Lee, “Linked Data - The Story So Far,” <em>International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems</em> (IJSWIS), Special Issue on Linked Data, ed. T. Heath, M. Hepp, and C. Bizer, (forthcoming). http://linkeddata.org/docs/ijswis-special-issue[/ref] Yet resources such as the Whitman archive have been providing this kind of functionality for some time. Texts are the primary data of literary scholars after all.\r\n\r\nThere is, it appears, a good case to be made for the scholarly robustness of digital resources, even those which modestly refer to themselves as an archive. The other question we must address, however, in making the case for our discipline is not just whether such resources constitute scholarly activity, but what kind of new types of research they make possible which would not have been achievable in an analogue world. This is surely the main criterion by which digital humanities must be judged. At present this is much less clear.\r\n\r\nWe know that the digital medium presents many new possibilities for editors and resource creators themselves, but we still know too little about whether research and scholarship themselves are changing as a result of their use. Vanhoutte, for example, has argued that most users simply require a reading text despite the fact that digital resources make a deeper kind of scholarly engagement possible.[ref]E. Vanhoutte, “Every Reader His Own Bibliographer – An Absurdity?” in <em>Text Editing, Print and the Digital World</em>, ed. Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland (London: Ashgate, 2002): 99-112.[/ref] Even the most recent study of humanities users of digital resources[ref]C. Madsen, “Communities, Innovation, and Critical Mass: Understanding the Impact of Digitization on Scholarship in the Humanities through the Case of Tibetan and Himalayan Studies” (PhD diss, Oxford University, 2010): Chapters 6-7.[/ref] suggests they still make relatively simple uses of digital resources, which they value as a way to access greater amounts of primary texts without the need to travel, to search them faster, and ultimately, overwhelmingly, to read them. Digital humanists may be using computational analysis or visualisation techniques on huge data sets, (for example Dan Cohen’s recent studies of Google Books[ref]Patricia Cohen, “Analyzing Literature by Words and Numbers,” <em>New York Times</em>, December 3, 2010, <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/04/books/04victorian.html?_r=1&amp;pagewanted=all\">http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/04/books/04victorian.html?_r=1&amp;pagewanted=all</a>[/ref]) but it appears that resources such as the Whitman archive may be more transformative of scholarship from the point of view of their creators than of most of their users. Digital Humanities has have moved on from writing evangelising articles and prescribing more training to writing use cases that, arguably, only the converted digital humanists ever read (for example a recent paper on the Monk project[ref]C. Plaisant, T. Clement, R. Vuillemot, S. Steger, and K. Uszkalo, “Use Cases Driving the Tool Development in the MONK project” (paper presented at the Digital Humanities 2009 conference, University of Maryland, USA, June 22-25, 2009).[/ref]) Yet the results appear the same, such excellent resources as Whitman may find that only a few expert users make best use of the potential of what they are being offered.\r\n\r\nThis may seem rather a depressing vision, but social networking theory may offer a more positive interpretation of this. We know that in most online communities only 10% of the participants post, the others may read, enjoy, but not take part.[ref]B. Nonnecke and J. Preece, “Lurker Demographics: Counting the Silent” in <em>Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems</em> (Proceedings of the SIGCHI, 2000): 73-80. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=332040.332409&amp;type=series [/ref] It is also an often repeated law of software development that 80% of users make use of 20% of a given application’s features. Thus if we apply such metrics to digital humanities it seems perverse that we somehow feel we have failed unless all users are making the most extensive use of every last piece of potential a resource has to offer. This is why it is important that, as I argued above, digital resources should be accessible for the interested amateur as well as the academic expert and why we should not be disappointed if most people search for quotations for their college assignments or print out poems to use to teach a class, or to read when writing an article. Digital resources have different types of user, and to expect them all to be expert is a kind of techie arrogance of the worst kind.\r\n\r\nSocial networking is also relevant in another context when consider digital resources. The possibilities of a very different kind of social edition are only beginning to be explored by projects such as UCL’s own Transcribe Bentham project. Yet the popularity of crowd sourcing has been proven in science, and we know that users will support, explore and exploit more fully resources that they help to create.[ref]Claire Warwick, M. Terras and C. Fisher, “iTrench: A Study of User Reactions to the Use of IT in Field Archaeology” (paper presented at Digital Humanities 2008 conference, University of Oulu, Finland, June 25-29 2008).[/ref] Thus it may be that an alternative way of involving users in digital humanities is not only to consult them about what they would like to do, design resources so that they can do it as well as possible, or suggest ways in which a resources might be used, but also to encourage them to take part in their creation.\r\n\r\nIt can be seen therefore that the metaphysics wrought by the digital transformations inherent in the Whitman archives take us well beyond the limitations of books. We can appreciate the new potential inherent in digital production for the scholars who produce such resources, but further work remains to be done on exactly how such editions or archives may transform the lives of their users. Part of this work will be undertaken in the coming year by researchers from the INKE project, when we will consider digital scholarly editions. However, in a more general sense it will be fascinating to see whether and how far any kind of crowd sourced content may be integrated into serious scholarly resources such as Whitman. Until that experiment is tried in earnest, we are still some way from utilising the potential of the truly social edition.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Warwick 4','In the following section I would like to reflect on some questions about the nature of digital resources, humanities scholarship and the uses to which such material may be put. One of these is the still-contentious issue of whether the creation of such resources is regarded as scholarship in itself or as a way of facilitating the work of other scholars. Even the most recent studies indicate that opinions still remain sharply divided...','inherit','open','open','','127-revision-19','','','2012-10-15 17:25:05','2012-10-15 17:25:05','',127,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/127-revision-19/',0,'revision','',0),(2809,19,'2012-10-15 17:25:05','2012-10-15 17:25:05','It is difficult for me to answer the final question because most of the scholarly material that I need are now available in digital form. As a digital humanist, rather than a literary scholar I have very little need to use original manuscripts or early printed books in my own work. What we know about the research practices of humanity scholars, however, suggests that this resource is extremely well designed for their needs. It does not assume that the digital will replace the need to use physical books and indeed it makes this easier by the inclusion of complex bibliographic data especially about Whitman\'s manuscripts and their whereabouts. It also follows good practice in digital resource creation in that it provides scanned page images of the books and manuscripts thus allowing users to compare the transcriptions provided in digital form to those images of the original analogue text.\r\n\r\nIt is notable that the website provides links to press material and interviews that scholars involved in it have given. This is especially welcome, since we have found that the strongest single correlation between the use of a digital resource and things that its creators do is effective disseminate of information about the project.[ref]Warwick et al., “The Master Builders.”[/ref] The presence of these transcribed interviews shows that its creators have been doing precisely this.\r\n\r\nAnother intriguing potential of the digital medium which the Whitman Archive makes use of is the ability to record the way that a resource has changed and grown. Books of course may have later editions, but few of us compare them in detail in printed form. This resource gives us clear information about its past as well as the way it is changing, since it not only archives two previous versions of the project, but provides a detailed change log, which tells users in detail what has been altered and when. For those of us interested in digital resources, this is an unusual insight into their evolution; for regular users of the material it gives instant information about what has changed since their last visit. Both are very much to be welcomed.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Warwick 3','It is difficult for me to answer the final question because most to the scholarly material that I need are now available in digital form. As a digital humanist, rather than a literary scholar I have very little need to use original manuscripts or early printed books in my own work. What we know about the research practices of humanity scholars, however...','inherit','open','open','','125-revision-20','','','2012-10-15 17:25:05','2012-10-15 17:25:05','',125,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/125-revision-20/',0,'revision','',0),(2810,19,'2012-10-15 17:25:36','2012-10-15 17:25:36','It is genuinely difficult to identify serious weaknesses of the Whitman archive. I might suggest a few relatively minor changes to site design. Some of the content is nested quite deeply within the site and requires several clicks to access it. For example in the Disciples section the user is three clicks away from accessing individual poems. Web log analysis suggests that the more clicks a users is required to make, the less likely they are to use that part of a site.[ref]P. Huntington, D. Nicholas, P. Williams and B. Gunter “Characterising the Health Information Consumer: an Examination of the Health Information Sources used by Digital Television Users,” <em>Libri</em> 52:1 (2002): 16-27[/ref] Thus I would suggest that if at all possible some of the intermediate levels of nesting are removed to allow better access to material.\r\n\r\nI also found it difficult to access the newspaper content, since the page images took a very long time to load, on an average home broadband connection. This will not cause problems for academics using the site on fast campus networks. However it might limit its usefulness and usability of these newspapers for members of the public to high school students who might be accessing them on a slower connection.\r\n\r\nI also had some problems using the search function, or rather understanding the results returned. I typed the words ‘metaphysics’ and ‘books’ into the search box as someone searching for the exact origin of a quotation might do. I would have hoped that the first hit in any general search of the archive might have referred me to published works, but instead it took me to instances of the words in criticism, but it was not clear why this happened, and would, I think be counter intuitive for most users. I then clicked on the top hit of published works, and when I clicked on it, this did indeed take me to Leaves of Grass, but only to the title page. Again this would not be intuitive for users accustomed for example to the functionality of commercial resources such as EEBO who would expect to be taken to the exact hit without a need to use the search function in Firefox to locate it.\r\n\r\nThese are technical problems which should be relatively easily corrected. However, I would also like to point out something which while not exactly being a weakness may more correctly be thought of as an opportunity that has not yet been exploited: that is the possibility of involving users more extensively in the Archive’s activities. At present, apart from leaving comments, it is difficult to see how academic users or members of the public interested in Whitman might be able to get involved in the project.\r\n\r\nThe current model for the Archive seems very much that of conventional publishing whereby the team produces content for its users, in a one-to-many fashion. It may be that this is a deliberate decision on the part of the editors: involving users is not appropriate for every digital project. However, if further content is to be created in future, the Whitman archive may consider taking part in some kind of crowd sourcing project. This is still a somewhat unusual method, but is being used by projects such as Transcribe Bentham at UCL to access crowd sourced transcriptions of page images of manuscripts. The use of crowd sourcing and social networking by memory institutions such as museums, has demonstrated that those outside academia are interested in participating in projects about their heritage and history and it may be that there is a potential new way for the Archive to engage with its user community, and to add further content while doing so.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Warwick 2','It is genuinely difficult to identify serious weaknesses of the Whitman archive.  I might suggest a few relatively minor changes to site design. Some of the content is nested quite deeply within the site and requires several clicks to access it.For example in the Disciples section the user is three clicks away from accessing individual poems.  Web log analysis suggests...','inherit','open','open','','122-revision-19','','','2012-10-15 17:25:36','2012-10-15 17:25:36','',122,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/122-revision-19/',0,'revision','',0),(2811,19,'2012-10-15 17:25:40','2012-10-15 17:25:40','The Whitman archive is an example of excellent practice in the creation of digital scholarly resources. Its layout is simple, clear and easy to understand and navigate. It is obvious to a user where she is in the site, how to return to where she started from and what its various contents are. This might seem basic, but many resources, perhaps particularly those designed by and for academics tend not to pay enough attention to the basics of good design and usability, and can, as a result be confusing and frustrating for users. Since we make decisions about web pages in fractions of a second[ref]G. Lindgaard, C. Dudek, F. Fernandes, and J. Brown, “Attention Web Designers: You Have 50 Milliseconds to Make a Good First Impression,” <em>Behaviour &amp; Information Technology</em> 25 (2005): 115-126.[/ref] and humanities users, in particular, are easily deterred from using a resource that seems untrustworthy to them[ref]Claire Warwick, M. Terras, P. Huntington, and N. Pappa, “If You Build It Will They Come? The LAIRAH Study: Quantifying the Use of Online Resources in the Arts and Humanities through Statistical Analysis of User Log Data,” <em>Literary and Linguistic Computing</em> 23:1 (2008): 85-102.[/ref] it is vital that such simple considerations as the look and functionality of the site should instantly seem comprehensible and comfortable for users.[ref]Dana Wheeles, “Accessibility, Usability and the New Face of NINES” <em>Literary and Linguistic Computing</em> 25:4 (2010). Forthcoming.[/ref]\r\n\r\nOne of the most impressive things about the Whitman archive is that it can be addressed in different ways depending on the level of expertise the user may have: this is by no means common in scholarly digital resources. As someone who was once worked on English, but not American, literature and who now regards herself as a full time Digital Humanist, I know relatively little about Walt Whitman\'s life and career. As a result of using the archive, however, I was able to find a considerable amount of information at an appropriate level. In other words, this was content of a level well beyond the introductory but which was not simply directed at other Whitman scholars and other expert users. This is a surprisingly difficult balance to achieve in any medium but seems especially challenging in the digital one. Many digital scholarly resources tend to assume that their users will be experts in the subject matter. This is not necessarily the case and as a result non-expert users may easily be confused or lose interest.[ref]Warwick et al., “If You Build It.”[/ref] This seems particularly perverse, since digital resources are an excellent way for scholars to engage with those outside academia who share their interests and to encourage those with an interest to become to sufficiently intrigued that they become the experts of the future. If the non-expert user is deterred, how will they make progress to expertise? This is an opportunity that the Whitman archive has fully understood.\r\n\r\nThis does not mean that expert users are neglected, however. The archive has evidently been designed with the needs of its academic users in mind. For example, scholars interested in the language of poetry who may want to run linguistic analysis software on these texts will be particularly please that the full TEI marked up texts are available for downloading from the archive as well as being presented on line. The fact that such texts and detailed markup guidelines are available is an example of excellent practice and also rather unusual. Even some of the best TEI practitioners can seem somewhat nervous of making their markup decisions so public, and many digital humanities resources only make texts available as post-processed XHTML.\r\n\r\nThere is also a clear understanding on the part of the Archive’s creators of the way that scholars prefer to work in digital and physical environments. We know, for example, that however many resources are digitised scholars generally want to see the originals. It is now well known that the more digital resources are available the higher the demand that tends to be for original material. As a result, it is especially welcome that the archive has provided such detailed guidance as to how the original materials may be accessed with full bibliographic records. This means that scholars are able to consult manuscript images and transcriptions before they visit physical archives, which enhances, rather than disrupts their use of archival material. This is a particularly effective use of digital resources to complement physical ones.\r\n\r\nOne of the most impressive features of the Whitman Archive is that documentation about the project is so easy to access. As we recommended in the LAIRAH study[ref]Claire Warwick, I. Galina, M. Terras, P. Huntington, and N. Pappa, “The Master Builders: LAIRAH Research on Good Practice in the Construction of Digital Humanities Projects,” <em>Literary and Linguistic Computing</em> 23:3 (2008): 383-396.[/ref] there is a top level link from the title page to documentation about the project. Under this link are to be found a great variety of very useful documents telling readers and users just about anything they might want to know about the archive in terms of its scholarly principles, history, technical standards and encoding guidelines. It is also clear who its creators are their expertise and how this has been used to take decisions about the creation and direction of the archive. This excellent feature is surprisingly difficult to find in many digital archives, editions or resources. However, it is vital, since users require users require this type of contextual information about the processes used to select and interpret data. In the print medium we have evolved techniques and processes to indicate that a selection and evaluation process has taken place (the footnote, the imprimatur, the authorial biography, the bibliography) In the digital world such things are still developing and the digital still remains, for many academic users in particular, less trustworthy than print.[ref]Warwick et al., “If You Build It.”[/ref]','The Walt Whitman Archive – Warwick 1','The Whitman archive is an example of excellent practice in the creation of digital scholarly resources. Its layout is simple, clear and easy to understand and navigate. It is obvious to a user where she is in the site, how to return to where she started from and what its various contents are. This might seem basic, but many resources, perhaps particularly those designed by and for academics...','inherit','open','open','','117-revision-19','','','2012-10-15 17:25:40','2012-10-15 17:25:40','',117,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/117-revision-19/',0,'revision','',0),(2812,19,'2012-10-15 17:25:45','2012-10-15 17:25:45','At the <em>Whitman Archive</em> we recently have focused on two aspects of Whitman\'s work: 1) what we call his scribal documents—the letters Whitman copied or drafted for others and the notes and summaries he drafted as a clerk in federal government offices; 2) Whitman\'s crossing of international boundaries as seen in translations and in the remaking of “Whitman” as his work is absorbed into other cultural, literary, and political traditions. In what follows I discuss these new developments to illustrate how the <em>Whitman Archive </em>continues to unfold to reveal new layers for development. After more than fifteen years, the <em>Whitman Archive </em>still intrigues me daily—whether it is Whitman’s writings, the people and processes which bring these texts to the public, the way we make them available, or what we (and others) may be able to do with them in the future. I conclude with a consideration of the long-term viability of our project and the crucial matters of funding and open access.\r\n\r\nFor the past two years I have been studying Whitman’s scribal documents and his time in Washington, DC (1863-1873) during and following the Civil War. Whitman worked for the Army Paymaster’s office, for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (part of the Department of the Interior), and for the Attorney General’s office. When I first went to Washington to look for documents in Whitman’s handwriting that might have been preserved in the records of these offices, I hoped to find perhaps a half dozen items in the National Archives; seven trips later, I have found close to 3,000.[ref]This research was prompted in part by the Whitman Archive’s recent grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Historical Publications and Records Commissions to edit Whitman’s literary works and correspondence from the Civil War and Reconstruction era. These documents are now being transcribed and should be fully available within the next two years.[/ref] Thus far, all of the items are from the Attorney General’s Office. These scribal documents are crucial for understanding Whitman’s Washington years, his position in this particular office, and the influence of this work upon his literary development.\r\n\r\nOne document in Whitman’s handwriting, on an envelope of the Attorney General’s Office, says in its entirety:\r\n<blockquote><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Memoranda</span>\r\n\r\n<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">pardon</span> applicants Sept 8-9 -1865\r\n\r\n<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">also</span> the negro-suffrage\r\n\r\n<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">also position</span> of the President</blockquote>\r\nThe stationery might suggest that these are notes Whitman made to himself about work in the Attorney General’s office. But are they, and how can we know? Perhaps they are notes about issues Whitman wanted to consider as he was composing “Democratic Vistas.” After all, anyone who has worked with Whitman manuscripts knows that many of his letters and literary manuscripts were written on this type of office stationery and other repurposed pieces of paper. I draw attention to this document not because it is the most powerful of the scribal documents (if it is one[ref]It may be significant that this document was not found where most of the scribal documents have been discovered, in the National Archives, but instead in the Charles E. Feinberg collection at the Library of Congress.[/ref]). I highlight it, in fact, because of its liminal status: we can not determine whether this is a literary or a scribal document, a document written for Whitman\'s own purposes or for the purposes of others. As such, it challenges in a useful way the boundaries between literary and scribal documents.\r\n\r\nImagining a firm wall dividing these areas of life for Whitman is misleading. At times, Whitman used his office address as his literary postal address, and he worked in the office at night (the heat and lighting were important benefits). Moreover he first gained his clerkship with the help of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who recommended him on literary and patriotic grounds.[ref]See the letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Salmon P. Chase, 10 January 1863 available at http://whitmanarchive.org/biography/correspondence/cw/tei/nar.00002.html[/ref] And it was because Whitman’s Blue Book (his personal and very heavily revised copy of the third edition of <em>Leaves of Grass</em>)<em> </em>was found at his government desk that he lost his job at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. James Harlan, Secretary of the Interior, judged the book to be immoral, though Whitman’s allies staunchly defended it and helped him to secure a new post in the Attorney General’s office. During his Washington years, Whitman\'s literary and clerical lives regularly occurred in the same physical locations and no doubt out of related emotional and psychological circumstances.\r\n\r\nOne of the challenges in studying the scribal documents is to figure out what impact Whitman’s work in a series of low-level government positions had on his creative life. To date, critics have almost entirely ignored his ten years of labor in Washington offices. How should we understand and treat the scribal documents? In most cases Whitman acted not as author but as a conduit for the words and thoughts of others. Thus, it could be argued that these documents should not be featured in an archive centrally concerned with Whitman’s writings. If his intellectual contributions to scribal documents are unclear and likely minimal, perhaps these documents should be excluded altogether from the <em>Whitman Archive</em>, or at least not prioritized.[ref]It is not clear yet—we need more time to study this trove of documents—how exactly the Attorney General’s office functioned. Did Whitman merely transcribe a clean copy from a draft written by someone else? Did he sometimes generate the letter based on an outline of points provided by another, or based on comments made in conversation to him? Certainly some of those who supervised him recognized his intellectual capacities. James Speed, for example, sought Whitman’s aid when he prepared an oration dedicating a bust of Abraham Lincoln.[/ref] It could be further argued that we should concentrate our finite time on making available additional known Whitman-authored documents (e.g., his journalism or short stories or novel, <em>Franklin Evans</em>). On the other hand, the scribal documents are potentially more revealing to scholars than such Whitman-authored documents, both because of the quantity of information and because the scribal documents were previously altogether unknown. Scholars may lack perfect access to Whitman’s journalism, short stories, and novel, but they do have reasonably good access for the time being. The same is not true for the scribal documents, and, if the <em>Whitman Archive </em>does not work on these materials, they are likely to remain buried, unavailable to enrich future biographical and critical studies.\r\n\r\nWhitman\'s experiences in Washington offices have rich implications. In Washington, Whitman was an actor near the epicenter of government efforts to reshape the nation in the aftermath of war. [ref]Rosemary Graham mistakenly argues that “for the most part . . . Whitman spent these postwar years as an observer.” See “Attorney General’s Office, United States,” in <em>Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia</em>, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland, 1998).[/ref] In his day job as an anonymous clerk, he and others in the office of the Attorney General dealt with postwar experiments with civil rights, war crimes, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, battles over land claims in the west, and an assortment of other matters. He treated closely related matters while revising <em>Leaves of Grass</em> and drafting his probing cultural analysis “Democratic Vistas.” His network of friendships in Washington offices also shaped his ability to get government jobs and to advance his literary career. For example, Whitman sent a copy of his “Proud Music of the Sea-Storm,” published in the <em>Atlantic Monthly</em> in February 1869, to an acquaintance named Julius Bing,[ref]Julius Bing (dates unknown) served as the clerk of the Joint Select Committee on Retrenchment in 1867 and 1868 and ghostwrote the 1868 report “Civil Service of the United States” before being appointed diplomatic agent for Crete later that year. A major advocate for reform of the Civil Service, Bing wrote a series of articles on the civil service for the <em>North American Review </em>and <em>Putnam’s Magazine</em> in 1867-1868. For more on Bing, about whom little is known, see Art Hoogenboom, <em>Outlawing the Spoils: A History of the Civil Service Reform Movement 1865-1883</em> (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968), especially 40-49.\r\n\r\nAlthough Whitman must have sent at least one letter to Bing, since Bing thanked Whitman for sending a copy of the <em>Atlantic Monthly</em> that included Whitman’s “Proud Music of the Sea-Storm” (the poem was published in the February 1869 issue of the magazine), no additional correspondence between Bing and Whitman has been identified to date.[/ref] a clerk of the Joint Select Committee on Retrenchment in 1867 and 1868. In response, Bing wrote a lengthy letter urging Whitman to write a poem about the Child Crusades. The poem was attempted by Whitman but never realized as such (Whitman’s notes on the topic and trial lines can be found in the Thomas B. Harned Collection of the Library of Congress). To the best of my knowledge, this aborted poem has not received any critical commentary, but I think it is well worth study because it is a rare instance of Whitman, in effect, collaborating on a poem, and it also shows him addressing an international issue of the remote past, but one with continuing resonance in his time and in our own.\r\n\r\nThe scribal documents also help shed light on Whitman’s increasing interest in international issues in his later writings—his work in the Attorney General’s office meant that he, quite literally, had his hand in international incidents involving Canada, Mexico, Ireland, France, Britain, Spain, China, and many other countries. The <em>Whitman Archive</em> recently has focused increasingly on international issues in more direct ways, too. Since most people in the world first encounter Whitman in a language other than English we are attempting to better serve that audience. We currently provide translations of Whitman\'s work into German, Spanish, and Russian; translations into Ukrainian, Portuguese, and Yiddish are far along in development. In addition, we are in conversation with scholars about expanding our work into Chinese, Polish, Italian and other languages soon. It is fascinating to see what happens to Whitman when he crosses linguistic and cultural borders and becomes absorbed in another milieu. This interaction often illuminates both the hosting cultural tradition as it comes to terms with Whitman as well as the ways that American audiences have interpreted Whitman\'s works.\r\n\r\nOne of the strengths of the <em>Archive</em>, related to the digital nature of our work, is the ever-evolving team that has built and continues to build the project. The <em>Whitman Archive</em> has become a training ground and laboratory for the next generation of literary scholars and digital humanists. The staff of the <em>Whitman Archive</em>—largely made up of graduate students—get hands-on experience and serve as apprentices of sorts. These graduate students serve as assistant editors and often attain positions of considerable responsibility within the project. I have been delighted by the diverse career paths our “alumni” have taken: one has gained a faculty position in a library; another works at the vice-chancellor level at a major university in an information technology role; some have gained tenure track positions at research-oriented institutions; others are employed at digital centers in various roles. Collectively they have demonstrated a range of ways to succeed professionally; their lives offer hope in a time of difficult job prospects in the humanities.\r\n\r\nAlthough the creation of the <em>Whitman Archive</em>—a vast and still rapidly growing resource—has cost a great deal of money, we are able to make it freely available. One of the strengths of the <em>Archive</em>, then, stems from success in garnering local support from several key institutions, a steady stream of grant support from four different federal agencies, and donations from various individuals and private foundations. These fundraising efforts culminated in the creation of a permanent endowment to support ongoing editorial work. We realize that this ongoing work could potentially reach far into the future, and we strive to make our work reusable for later scholars (so they can improve upon it) by documenting our practices and decisions. Having an endowment obliges us to think in longer terms than is common for scholars: we have the burden and advantage of a project that should continue well beyond the lives of anyone now working on the <em>Whitman Archive</em>.\r\n\r\nFor end users a key advantage of the <em>Whitman Archive</em> is that it makes freely available what would otherwise be difficult, costly, or impossible to access. The nature and extent of our audience are changed profoundly because the <em>Whitman Archive</em> is freely available, changes that are all to the good in my view. Instead of working with a small audience of specialist scholars in mind, we now also consider our large, varied, international audience as well. The importance of open access can hardly be overestimated. For us, open access means more than making content freely available for reading and analysis; it means making content freely available for reuse and repurposing. We willingly share files and have people work with them and reuse them in projects as long as those projects also are open, and they cite the <em>Archive</em>.\r\n\r\nDespite what the <em>Walt Whitman Archive</em> has accomplished thus far, we recognize that some features are lacking and that other features should be improved. The current search capability of the <em>Archive </em>is fairly limited and fails to take full advantage of our encoding, a key contribution to Whitman scholarship. Upcoming developments make me optimistic about leveraging the <em>Archive</em>’s rich encoding in more sophisticated ways, however, and experiments in indexing and searching the <em>Archive</em> are ongoing. The text base we’ve developed and continue to develop will lend itself to experimentation—by us and others, and we have rightly spent fifteen years developing the corpus so that it can be read, researched, and used by a variety of audiences employing a range of technologies and methodologies. The <em>Whitman Archive</em> also provides for the study of a new scholarly form, thanks to our documentation including encoding guidelines, history, and essays about the <em>Archive</em>. What seems clear is that the <em>Whitman Archive</em> is one of a group of projects that are demonstrating how the print-based monumental scholarly edition can be reimagined and advanced in the form of an electronic archive.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Price 4','At the Whitman Archive we recently have focused on two aspects of Whitman\'s work: 1) what we call his scribal documents—the letters Whitman copied or drafted for others and the notes and summaries he drafted as a clerk in federal government offices; 2) Whitman\'s crossing of international boundaries as seen in translations and in the remaking of “Whitman” as his work is absorbed into other cultural, literary, and political traditions.','inherit','open','open','','114-revision-21','','','2012-10-15 17:25:45','2012-10-15 17:25:45','',114,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/114-revision-21/',0,'revision','',0);
INSERT INTO `wp_posts_bu` VALUES (2813,19,'2012-10-15 17:25:49','2012-10-15 17:25:49','A comparison of the <em>Whitman Archive</em> to its print predecessor, <em>The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman</em>,[ref]When The New York University Press ceased publishing the Collected Writings in 1984, they had issued twenty-two volumes, many more than were originally projected. Despite the magnitude of what had been accomplished, many of the original objectives of the edition were not met. For example, the poetry manuscripts and periodical printings of Whitman\'s poetry were never collected, and the long-promised journalism, projected to appear in six volumes, never appeared in the NYUP edition. Peter Lang eventually published two volumes of the journalism in 1998 and 2003, though these volumes cover only the period from 1834–1848, leaving Whitman\'s innumerable contributions to periodicals in the final forty-four years of his life still to be edited. The Peter Lang volumes are produced so as to replicate the appearance of the New York University Press edition, though the editors of that series (all now deceased) did not oversee their production. Arguably, the Peter Lang volumes constitute volumes 23 and 24 of the Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, and a 25th volume, treating recently discovered correspondence, edited by Ted Genoways, was published by University of Iowa Press in 2004.[/ref] helps to clarify the advantages and disadvantages of digital and analog forms. Despite the many achievements of the print volumes in the <em>Collected Writings of Walt Whitman</em>, this editorial project ultimately became quite chaotic. Whitman\'s outgoing correspondence, for example, has been the subject of editorial treatment since the 1960s, when Edwin Haviland Miller edited five volumes of Whitman’s correspondence. Miller arranged the volumes chronologically, and with the fifth volume, he published an addendum of sixty-five letters that he uncovered even as the first four volumes appeared. Although this addendum meant that some letters would always be out of order, the complications of working with this single addition or revision were not insurmountable. Nine years later, however, a sixth volume appeared, and it included one hundred additional letters, complicating the organization further. Then, in 1991, Miller published fifty new letters in the <em>Walt Whitman Quarterly Review</em>,<em> </em>and Ted Genoways published third and fourth supplements of nearly one hundred letters in the journal<em> </em>in 2000 and 2002. In 2004, the University of Iowa Press issued a seventh volume of Whitman\'s correspondence, which included all of Whitman\'s letters found since Miller\'s sixth volume. In the end, there were nearly as many supplements as the number of Miller\'s original volumes, and over the last six years, even more letters have surfaced. This one aspect of the <em>Collected Writings</em> illustrates how print editions can devolve into disorder, even when the initial aim is to bring order to the literary record. I am confident that after the <em>Whitman Archive</em> “finishes” work on the correspondence previously unknown or lost letters will surface somewhere. It is a great strength of the digital medium that when this happens, new material can be integrated seamlessly into the collection.\r\n\r\nIn a related way, our “Integrated Guide to Walt Whitman’s Poetry Manuscripts” aggregates facsimile images of all surviving drafts of Whitman’s poems regardless of their geographical dispersion. The digital images and integrated guide bring order to the manuscripts and, for most purposes, erase the need to travel in order to study the manuscripts. (Individual repositories may have labeled an item by its first line or its working title, but we have created an overarching virtual order for all repositories, and we have labeled each individual poetry manuscript with what we call a “work” identifier based on the title of the last published version of the manuscript.) The high quality color facsimiles available on the <em>Archive</em> offer significant advantages for the study of the manuscripts; the images can be manipulated in photo-editing software to help us decipher otherwise illegible handwriting or zoom in on features of the ink, paper, and other characteristics such as pinholes, in order to offer new readings about the manuscripts and their relationships to one another.\r\n\r\nDespite the integrated guide’s utility, however, it remains an under-utilized resource. Indeed, one of our challenges has been how to make sure people find the content and tools most useful for their research questions. Perhaps a downside of bringing together so much material in one place is that doing so can inadvertently re-bury material (in some places, the organizational hierarchy of the <em>Archive</em> is fairly flat or one-dimensional, and in others, it is quite structured). It is hard to get a sense of the magnitude of the <em>Whitman Archive</em> at a glance. The more we enrich the site, the more challenging it becomes to keep the interface simple, straightforward, intuitive, and sufficiently informative.\r\n\r\nBooks are sometimes more convenient in various ways. The failure of a server does not make individual volumes of the <em>Collected Writings</em> temporarily disappear. For most practical purposes, the <em>Collected Writings</em> as a resource stays stable (and carries all the advantages and disadvantages of that condition). Print can rely on nicely developed interface and design that evolved over centuries, but digital conventions are still relatively young and therefore sometimes neither clear nor aesthetically pleasing.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Price 3','A comparison of the Whitman Archive to its print predecessor, The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman,[ref]When The New York University Press ceased publishing the Collected Writings in 1984, they had issued twenty-two volumes, many more than were originally projected. Despite the magnitude of what had been accomplished, many of the original objectives of the edition were not met. ','inherit','open','open','','111-revision-19','','','2012-10-15 17:25:49','2012-10-15 17:25:49','',111,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/111-revision-19/',0,'revision','',0),(2814,19,'2012-10-15 17:25:06','2012-10-15 17:25:06','Some weaknesses of the <em>Whitman Archive</em> are a function of its stage of development. We haven’t had time to accomplish all that we have envisaged. For example, we would like to provide a good introduction to the site, so that users at various levels of knowledge—and our users <em>are</em> quite varied—can get oriented quickly when they first encounter the site. In addition, given our scope, it is not surprising that many content areas are underdeveloped: we provide all known contemporary reviews of Whitman’s writings, but a person could legitimately ask why have we not, then, provided other essays about Whitman from the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, all out of copyright, which might shed even more light on Whitman than do these reviews. Only in the last few months have we made available any of Whitman’s prose, and we have done little thus far with Whitman’s journalism. We value his journalism and have made plans for editing it, but we have not had time yet to see significant results in this area.\r\n\r\nCurrently, the <em>Whitman Archive</em> also lacks sufficient integration of material across the site. For example, if Horace Traubel mentions a specific Whitman poem in <em>With Walt Whitman in Camden</em>, we should offer ready access to that particular version (and possibly also other versions of the poem). We could also link the poem to commentary, including contemporary reviews, books from the University of Iowa Press Whitman series, and articles from the full run of the <em>Walt Whitman Quarterly Review</em>. Individual essays from <em>WWQR</em> currently are linked from citations in the criticism bibliography, and we hope to integrate more fully this journal of record for Whitman studies with the <em>Whitman Archive</em>. This more complete integration of content, like most of the changes I would suggest for the <em>Archive</em>, will be undertaken as time allows.\r\n\r\nWe are also currently investigating the application of Web 2.0 features and functionality for the <em>Archive</em>, in hopes of enabling collaboration and interaction with users of the <em>Archive</em>.<em> </em>Ideally, we would like to harness the enthusiasm and knowledge of our users. As a first step in this direction, <em>Archive </em>staff at the University of Texas at Austin are exploring user accounts for the <em>Archive</em>, accounts which would allow users both to contribute to the <em>Archive</em> as well as to create their own collections of materials. Early work is also under way on a database designed to track the what, when, and how of Whitman’s reading—that is, what did Whitman read, when did he read it, and how do we know that he read a particular text? We believe that our user community could help us populate the database. Similar resources could be integrated into the <em>Whitman Archive</em> and include user-generated information: accounts of Whitman appearances in films, television shows, advertisements, and novels, for example. Users might also participate in attribution studies. Whitman is known to have contributed to the <em>Armory Square Hospital Gazette </em>during the Civil War<em>. </em>No complete run of the newspaper exists, however, and no pieces bear Whitman’s signature. User-collaborators could help us track down scattered issues of this rare paper as well as generate a lively and informative debate about the authorship of unattributed essays in the paper. As a scholarly site, we must strike the right balance between openness and scholarly rigor, and a fundamental question for us is how to encourage participation while insuring that quality control checks remain in place. We also hope to allow users with accounts to work with the texts and data of the <em>Whitman Archive </em>in order to explore their own interpretations. Sophisticated users might access our XML and XSLT files in a work area where they could alter the encoding and stylesheets in order to pursue particular interpretive goals.','360°: The Walt Whitman Archive – Price 2','Some weaknesses of the Whitman Archive are a function of its stage of development.  We haven’t had time to accomplish all that we have envisaged.  For example, we would like to provide a good introduction to the site, so that users at various levels of knowledge—and our users are quite varied—can get oriented quickly when they first encounter the site. In addition, given our scope, it is not surprising that many content areas...','inherit','open','open','','109-revision-17','','','2012-10-15 17:25:06','2012-10-15 17:25:06','',109,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/109-revision-17/',0,'revision','',0),(2815,19,'2012-10-15 17:25:06','2012-10-15 17:25:06','At this time, the <em>Walt Whitman Archive</em> is the single most extensive resource for the study of Whitman, and it<em> </em>has progressed steadily toward its primary goal: “to make Whitman\'s vast work, for the first time, easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers.” We take an expansive view of what is relevant “Whitman” material in a digital thematic research collection,[ref]Carole L. Palmer, \"Thematic Research Collections,\" In <em>A Companion to Digital Humanities</em> (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 348-65.[/ref] so we include both Whitman-authored pieces and incoming correspondence, reviews of his writings, selected recent criticism, and other materials not usually included in \"collected works.\" We aspire to produce the richest possible resource for the study of his writings, life, and reception. Our annotated bibliography, the logical starting point for scholarly work on the poet, includes all known critical writings about Whitman from 1839 to the present day—it comprises over 14,000 entries and continues to grow. The site receives a great deal of traffic: in a typical recent month (February 2010) we had nearly 39,000 visits to our site, more than 30,000 of which were by unique visitors.\r\n\r\nAs a project co-director, I coordinate the ongoing work necessary to build it. (Ed Folsom and I work closely with Elizabeth Lorang, the current project manager, in this capacity.) The site is less <em>used</em> in my work than it regularly <em>constitutes</em> a major part of my work as a scholar. At times, though, I employ the site in much the same manner as other literary scholars, albeit with greater knowledge of the site’s strengths and limitations and with awareness of material now in the pipeline that isn’t currently available to the public. As a literary critic, I appreciate what the <em>Whitman Archive</em> makes newly possible. For example, those of us writing about Whitman can now trace the development of his poetry across multiple versions—in isolated manuscript drafts; in notebooks; in periodical printings; and in various book publications—in a way that was all but unimaginable before the advent of the Web. His manuscripts are dispersed at nearly one hundred repositories around the world. In some cases, what was once a single manuscript has become separated into parts, with different sections of the manuscript held in repositories separated by great distance. Such manuscripts can now be virtually reunited.\r\n\r\nThe <em>Whitman Archive</em> has become fundamental to criticism, but citation of the <em>Archive</em> lags behind its actual use. A recent study by Lisa Spiro and Jane Segal indicates that many people use major American literature web sites, including the <em>Whitman Archive</em>, only to then cite print sources.[ref]“The Impact of Digital Resources on Humanities Research” available at\r\nhttp://library.rice.edu/services/dmc/about/projects/the-impact-of-digital-resources-on-humanities-research\r\n[/ref] This ill-conceived practice needs to change in order for digital humanities to get its due. To enable people to reference individual parts of the <em>Whitman Archive</em> more easily, all <em>Archive </em>pages will soon include additional metadata for use with Zotero and other reference management software<em>.</em> In my own scholarly practice, I have cited the <em>Whitman Archive</em> many times, and when Susan Belasco, Ed Folsom, and I compiled the collection <em>Leaves of Grass: The Sesquicentennial Essays</em> (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), we advised all contributors to cite the <em>Whitman Archive</em> when referring to Whitman texts.','360°: The Walt Whitman Archive – Price 1','At this time, the Walt Whitman Archive is the single most extensive resource for the study of Whitman, and it has progressed steadily toward its primary goal: “to make Whitman\'s vast work, for the first time, easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers.” We take an expansive view of what is relevant “Whitman” material in a digital thematic research collection...','inherit','open','open','','107-revision-20','','','2012-10-15 17:25:06','2012-10-15 17:25:06','',107,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/107-revision-20/',0,'revision','',0),(2816,19,'2012-10-15 17:25:06','2012-10-15 17:25:06','There are some fascinating strengths of this archive behind or beyond its more obvious assets. The more obvious include: a) bringing together in one “place” historical sources whose originals are widely scattered geographically; b) providing scans of sufficient density and size to permit scholars to examine at least some aspects of the original paper and photographic emulsion, a degree of quality that most digital archives do not have sufficient wherewithal to capture and maintain; c) producing an edited “publication” of Whitman’s papers in such a manner that researchers gain access to gradually increasing content rather than having to wait until the entirety of a printed volume is produced; d) “free” access from anywhere, rather than the purchase or travel expense to use a print edition or to visit various repositories.\r\n\r\nSome of the less obvious strong points can be uncovered only by reading the “About the Archive” sections exhaustively, something I suspect relatively few site visitors do. For example, in Matt Cohen’s “Transgenic Deformation: Literary Translation and the Digital Archive” (2006),<strong> </strong>the author identifies a subtle but important parallel between the increasing understanding within the archival profession that archivists’ work can no longer pretend to be objective, neutral, and invisible and the necessity from an editorial standpoint of “articulating stylesheets and XML markup [to users]…. In turn, translation seems to demand that archives explain their interface designs along with their markup strategies.”[ref]From The Walt Whitman Archive website (hereafter TWWA), <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00165.html\">http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00165.html</a>. For those not familiar with the parallel archival concerns, particularly as they relate to arrangement, description, and cataloging, please see Michelle Light and Tom Hyry: “Colophons and Annotations: New Directions for the Finding Aid,” American Archivist 65 (Fall/Winter 2002): 216-230.[/ref]\r\n\r\nCohen’s article also represents a broader strong point of the archive, which is the extensive “about” section, including more effort at self-analysis, elucidation of goals and values, lessons learned and challenges faced than the vast majority of other sites I’ve visited. Moreover, in the “Articles and Interviews” subsection the pieces contain an admirable blend of technical discussions,[ref]For example, Brett Barney and Kenneth M. Price, <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00006.html\">\"\'What I Assume You Shall Assume\': The <em>Whitman Archive</em> and the Challenge of Integrating Different Open Standards,\"</a> <em>TWWA</em> (2004).[/ref] more traditional scholarship, [ref]For example, Geoffrey Saunders Schramm, <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00007.html\">\"Whitman\'s Lifelong Endeavor: <em>Leaves of Grass</em> at 150,\"</a> <em>TWWA</em> (2005).[/ref] and what I think of as philosophical musings.[ref]For example, Kenneth M. Price, <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00346.html\">\"Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What\'s in a Name?</a>” <em>TWWA</em> (2009).[/ref]The simple fact that there are 12 years worth of articles and interviews relating to the archive gives a glimpse into the evolution of technology, priorities, and philosophies.[ref]Compare, for example, the Cohen article already cited to an earlier analysis of textual markup in the <em>Archive</em>, Brett Barney, <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00002.html\">\"\'Each Part and Tag of Me is a Miracle\': Reflections after Tagging the 1867 <em>Leaves of Grass,</em>\"</a> <em>TWWA</em> (2001).[/ref] This relatively rich context to the project and the archive is increasingly necessary, I believe, not only because of the increasing imperative for archivists, particularly, to make their work transparent to their users, but also to spread the value of such projects as far beyond the particular scholarly community being served as possible.','360°: The Walt Whitman Archive – Greene 1','There are some fascinating strengths of this archive behind or beyond its more obvious assets.  The more obvious include:  a) bringing together in one “place” historical sources whose originals are widely scattered geographically; b) providing scans of sufficient density and size to permit scholars to examine at least some aspects of the original paper and photographic emulsion...','inherit','open','open','','83-revision-27','','','2012-10-15 17:25:06','2012-10-15 17:25:06','',83,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/83-revision-27/',0,'revision','',0),(2817,19,'2012-10-15 17:25:06','2012-10-15 17:25:06','The weaknesses I have noticed in the <em>Archive</em> are not unique to this site. One problem is the site’s misunderstanding—and thus its improper assertion—of copyrights.[ref]I am a founding member of the Society of American Archivists’ Intellectual Property Working Group.[/ref] Specifically the site asserts the existence of copyright in the transcripts and facsimiles and more broadly in Whitman’s writings—because transcripts and facsimiles are “slavish copies” neither is entitled to copyright protection;[ref]The term is from the U.S. Second District Court of New York’s decision in <em>Bridgeman Art Library Ltd v. Corel Corporation</em>, 1998.[/ref]published or unpublished anything written by Whitman is in the public domain.[ref]See “<a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/conditions.html\">Conditions of Use</a>,” <em>TWWA</em>. Unpublished works are public domain for authors deceased prior to 1940; published works for everything published prior to 1923. For an authoritative source, see Peter Hirtle, “Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States: 1 January 2010,” online at <a href=\"http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm\">http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm</a>.[/ref] Only original contributions of editors are copyrightable at this late date.[ref]Such mistakes are not unique to <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em>, certainly. Copyright statements for the <em>In the Valley of the Shadow</em> Civil War project (<a href=\"http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/VoS/usingvalley/copyright.html\">http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/VoS/usingvalley/copyright.html</a>) and the <em>Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition</em> site (<a href=\"http://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/read/?_xmlsrc=lc.privacy.xml&amp;_xslsrc=LCstyles.xsl\">http://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/read/?_xmlsrc=lc.privacy.xml&amp;_xslsrc=LCstyles.xsl</a>) are much more egregious.[/ref] What distresses me about the inaccuracies is they suggest that there are limits to use of the main site content by researchers—notwithstanding frequent assertions that the purpose of the archive is “to make Whitman\'s vast work electronically accessible” to all.[ref]Katherine L. Walter and Kenneth M. Price, <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00001.html\">\"An Online Guide to Walt Whitman\'s Dispersed Manuscripts,\"</a> <em>TWWA</em> (2004).[/ref] Making the archive accessible but incorrectly claiming limitations on actual use is paradoxical at best.\r\n\r\nThere are other issues causing me unease, for example the inadequacy of site use data. The site does not regularly report use statistics, and what statistics it does provide—average daily hits in 2007[ref]Ed Folsom, <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00142.html\">\"Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives,\"</a> <em>TWWA</em> (2007).[/ref]--are of dubious value even when current.[ref]Google Analytics: “the number of hits a website receives is not a valid popularity gauge, but rather is an indication of server use and loading” (<a href=\"http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&amp;answer=33026\">http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&amp;answer=33026</a>). Better measures are unique visitors or page views, coupled with visits’ duration.[/ref] In addition there is little similar data at similar websites to compare to (though to their credit one of the site editors did gather some parallel data in 2008).[ref]The data, from the <em>Willa Cather Archive</em> and the <em>Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition,</em> is<em> </em>presented in Kenneth M. Price,<strong> </strong><a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00267.html\">\"Electronic Scholarly Editions,\"</a> <em>TWWA</em> (2008).[/ref] Thus this is an endemic weakness of major “archive” sites, a weakness related to a broader disinterest in the economics and sustainability of such sites.[ref]And of bricks and mortar archival operations, though this is beginning to change, as suggested by the questions—“Does the level of onsite use of special collections justify the resources being expended? What are the most appropriate measures by which to evaluate use?”—in Jackie M. Dooley and Katherine Luce, <em>Taking Our Pulse: The OCLC Research Survey of Special Collections and Archives</em> (OCLC, 2010), 34-36, online at <a href=\"http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2010/2010-11.pdf\">http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2010/2010-11.pdf</a>.[/ref] The greater viability of websites such as <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em> is ultimately the $64,000 question and the focus of my essay for Part II of this roundtable.','360°: The Walt Whitman Archive – Greene 2','The weaknesses I have noticed in the Archive are not unique to this site.  One problem is the site’s misunderstanding—and thus its improper assertion—of copyrights. Specifically the site asserts the existence of copyright in the transcripts and facsimiles and more broadly in Whitman’s writings—because transcripts and facsimiles are “slavish copies” neither is entitled to copyright protection...','inherit','open','open','','88-revision-24','','','2012-10-15 17:25:06','2012-10-15 17:25:06','',88,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/88-revision-24/',0,'revision','',0),(2818,19,'2012-10-15 17:25:06','2012-10-15 17:25:06','The digital form highlights a question faced by every project or repository working to build online digital collections from analog originals. The digital form permits creation of extremely high density and equally high quality facsimiles,[ref]Scanning requirements are in “<a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/technical_summary.html\">Technical Summary</a>,” <em>TWWA</em>.[/ref] making it possible to determine physical characteristics of the original impossible to consider during the era of microfilm or photocopying. For example, project transcribers can apparently discern\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>ink blots, smudges, and stray pen marks;</li>\r\n	<li>pin holes;</li>\r\n	<li>embossing;</li>\r\n	<li>variations in ink, pencil, or paper;</li>\r\n	<li>distinctions between single and multiple overstrikes[ref]From “<a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/mediawiki/index.php/Whitman_Encoding_Guidelines#What_Not_to_Encode\">5.9.1 What Not to Encode</a>,” <em>TWWA</em>.[/ref]</li>\r\n</ul>\r\nWhile these are “what not to encode,” they denote the expectation that facsimiles supplied to the transcribers are capable of producing such details. As an extra measure of quality, “project staff <em>examine each digital image</em> [when creating JPEGs from original TIFF files] <em>cleaned and cropped</em> for web delivery.”[ref]“Technical Summary,” emphases added.[/ref] The intricate encoding guidelines themselves are also part of making high quality facsimiles accessible.\r\n\r\nThe opportunity cost of demanding extremely high standards encompasses both a slow pace of making facsimiles accessible to users and the ability to create a complete archive of Whitman material—this latter price due to the inevitable (though not supportable) decision by some repositories to decline participation if it requires public accessibility to such high quality scans.[ref]See “<a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/history.html\">History of the Project</a>,” <em>TWWA</em>, for brief discussion of some libraries’ requirement to limit user access to 72 dpi facsimiles.[/ref] There is nothing inherently logical about sacrificing a complete collection for highest-quality facsimiles. Nor is there innate reason for choosing quality over quantity, particularly since one can structure a project whereby “inferior” facsimiles are placed online relatively quickly while higher-quality facsimiles are posted, gradually, later. The question of whether (and which) users are best served by large quantity rather than high quality is one accurately answered only by asking users themselves. Surveys or focus groups for gathering user input have not been employed by <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em> it appears—but neither have they been used by the vast majority of projects and repositories creating online collections.\r\n\r\nFor a decade now I have been actively involved in projects to increase the quantity of archival material accessible to users at the expense of traditional notions of quality. What began as an effort to speed processing of large modern manuscript (hidden) collections has evolved into jeremiads on trading speed for precision in most other aspects of archives administration as well—including the creation, description, and mounting of digital facsimiles online.[ref]See, particularly, Mark A. Greene and Dennis Meissner, “More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing,” <em>American Archivist</em>, 68:2 (Fall/Winter 2005), 208-263 and Mark A. Greene, “MPLP: It’s Not Just for Processing Anymore,” <em>American Archivist</em> 73:1 (Spring/Summer 2010), 175-203.[/ref] In some cases, including processing and digitization, there is direct evidence that some users prefer “more” over “better” at a ratio of about two-to-one. Far more research is required, certainly, and we should never assume that what holds true for one project/repository and its audience holds equally true for all. But we should certainly be more anxious to determine the answers than we have been heretofore.','360°: The Walt Whitman Archive – Greene 3','The digital form highlights a question faced by every project or repository working to build online digital collections from analog originals.  The digital form permits creation of extremely high density and equally high quality facsimiles, making it possible to determine physical characteristics of the original impossible to consider during the era of microfilm or photocopying...','inherit','open','open','','90-revision-33','','','2012-10-15 17:25:06','2012-10-15 17:25:06','',90,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/90-revision-33/',0,'revision','',0),(2819,19,'2012-10-15 17:25:21','2012-10-15 17:25:21','I give a great credit to <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em> co-director Kenneth Price for taking a critical look at the costs associated with an endeavor such as his.\r\n<blockquote>[M]any people, myself included, have described our site as free, yet a considerable amount of resources continue to go into its making. I want to explore that conundrum. … When users visit a deep scholarly archive on the web they are experiencing the (mostly real) benefit of displaced costs. Instead of money being spent by the user at the point of contact, money is spent elsewhere along the line: by universities in the form of faculty time, equipment, graduate student assistance, and internal grants; by external funding agencies; and, in our case, curiously, by more than one publisher. … We might ask: Is what the Whitman archive has done a sustainable model for the production of other full-scale scholarly editions on the web? We have been fortunate with grants, publishers, libraries, and generous universities. But if it requires such a constellation of good fortune to produce an electronic scholarly edition, do we have a sound economic model in place? As the questions imply, I don\'t think we do.[ref]Kenneth M. Price, <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00004.html\">\"Dollars and Sense in Collaborative Digital Scholarship: The Example of the <em>Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive</em>,\"</a> <em>TWWA</em> (2001).[/ref]</blockquote>\r\nYet for all his candor, and the importance of that candor, he does not take the next (and even more difficult) step of analyzing the project’s benefits as well as its costs. Saying such an online archival endeavor is not sustainable is, in part, to say it does not (cannot, I will suggest) provide sufficient benefits to sustain continuing such costs. For me this is part of a larger question about how and why we allocate archival resources. I have no particular bone to pick with the <em>Whitman Archive</em>; I have raised similar concerns about the disproportionate staff and monetary resources devoted by bricks and mortar repositories to literary collections as a genre, congressional papers as a genre,[ref]Mark A. Greene, \"Appraisal of Congressional Papers at the Minnesota Historical Society: A Case Study,\" <em>Archival Issues</em> 19:1 (1994), 31-44.<em> </em>Republished in <em>An American Political Archives Reader,</em> Karen Dawley Paul , Glenn R Gray , and L. Rebecca Johnson Melvin eds. (Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2009), 181-96.[/ref] university records as a genre, state/county/local court records as a genre, and general store records as a genre[ref]Mark A. Greene, “From Village Smithy to Superior Vacuum Technology: Modern Small Business Records and the Collecting Repository,” <em>Archival Issues</em> 23:1 (1998), 41-58.[/ref]—all categories of records I believe are represented disproportionately in repositories and given disproportionate attention by archivists.\r\n\r\nAn argument that resource expenditure is disproportionate requires some comparison. As my then colleague at the Minnesota Historical Society wrote in 1998,\r\n<blockquote>while politics is an important component of Minnesota history, it is at least arguable that its importance is not so great as the resources that the Society has devoted to documenting it. Neither the stack space nor the staff time is sufficient to swallow Congressional collections whole and still be able appropriately to document business, recreation, family life, etc. for Minnesota. We had to ask: ‘Do we really need 116 feet of material to document Congressman Tom Hagedorn’s eight years in office when we keep 110 feet for nearly seventy years of the St. Paul Area United Way?’[ref]Todd J. Daniels-Howell, “Reappraisal of Congressional Records at the Minnesota Historical Society,” <em>Archival Issues </em>23:1 (1998), 36.[/ref]</blockquote>\r\nThis was hardly a precise comparison, to be sure, but it was an early attempt to ask archivists to consider the theretofore reflexive resource allocation required to document congressional service to the nth degree compared to both the opportunity costs and the relative benefit (to a repository’s users) of shifting resources to other acquisition, processing, and preservation goals. It is not that Hagedorn’s congressional tenure was value-<em>less</em> nor that the United Way’s records were objectively more valuable, only that we had never before considered the relative costs and benefits.\r\n\r\nSuch comparison is no easy matter, granted. It might be abstractly valid to ask whether it is a good allocation of resources to develop an exhaustive online archives for Walt Whitman when there are not such efforts underway for, say, Theodore Roosevelt,[ref]At least so far as I can discover, though I did not perform a truly exhaustive search.[/ref] but the fact is we have no mechanism to determine, in any way that is even vaguely acceptable on a wide scale, whether one historical figure is more “deserving” of such a site than another. And even if we did, we don’t have a mechanism for ensuring that the more deserving figure would automatically generate the structure necessary to solicit and manage the resources that might then be available. And if we succeeded in identifying such mechanisms there would still loom the matter of judging relative quantity and quality of use of the sites—use being, I believe, the “end of all archival effort.”[ref]Theodore R. Schellenberg, <em>The Management of Archives</em> (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 108. I have pursued the idea of the centrality of use to archival work most extensively in “’The Surest Proof’: The Use of Business Records and Implications for Appraisal,” <em>Archivaria</em> 45 (Spring 1998), 127-69 and later in Greene and Meissner, “More Product, Less Process.”[/ref]\r\n\r\nSo is this a purely rhetorical exercise? I don’t think so. As difficult as these questions are to answer with precision, they remain necessary questions and there are pieces of answers available once we start asking. My plea is that we do start asking, that we do start expecting to define quantitative and qualitative measure of the costs and benefits of such projects and, by extension, of our bricks and mortar archival endeavors as well. Not only do I think we owe it to our constituents and funders, I also believe it will increasingly be demanded by our administrators.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Greene 4','I give a great credit to The Walt Whitman Archive co-director Kenneth Price for taking a critical look at the costs associated with an endeavor such as his. \"[M]any people, myself included, have described our site as free, yet a considerable amount of resources continue to go into its making. I want to explore that conundrum.\"','inherit','open','open','','104-revision-24','','','2012-10-15 17:25:21','2012-10-15 17:25:21','',104,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/104-revision-24/',0,'revision','',0),(2820,19,'2012-07-18 22:08:57','2012-07-18 22:08:57','<p>The primal scene of archival research takes place in a dreary reading room. A researcher sits at her table, inert. An archivist enters, pushing a cart that bears a dozen dusty gray boxes. (Can we get a close-up of a box, please, to show the label with the long call number? [note type=\'figure\' number=\'1\']<br />\r\n[youtube width=333 height=250]5ykY6moIaDE[/youtube]<br />\r\nA staged archival encounter.[/note]) The archivist unhinges a box, removes a numbered file folder and, placing it at the researcher’s elbow, steps back. The researcher stirs, then sits upright with a mechanical jolt. She turns sharply in the direction of the folder, flips it open and cocks her head towards the flimsy leaves inside; now she is reading. (Zoom in on the eyes as they click into focus.) Now she is reading, and now she truly comes alive; she bends towards the papers, taps her forehead in thought. A sheaf of blank paper and a pencil appear on her table, and she begins taking notes. Her fingers fly—and soon, so do the pages she is writing upon. Caught up in eddies of excitement, they swoop to the ceiling and around the room and down to the floor, where they fall together into perfect piles. Bindings sprout from the outer strata; the pages sew themselves into bright, tight, hard-cover books. These the archivist gathers up and places on the shelves that line the room, next to other books and gray boxes.</p>\r\n<p>I may have it backwards: in other versions of the fantasy, it is the archive that is first animated by the presence of the researcher, a Dr. Coppelius who waves a pencil and sets the dusty boxes to dancing. But either way, the archival imaginary posits a symbiotic relationship between researcher and source, a photogenic pas de deux that leads to a finished scholarly product. This work, in turn, enters the archive for the next generation of researchers; it might even be taken apart again so that its secret ingredients (notes, drafts, letters) can themselves be served up in a series of boxes. Such a strangely private form of publication it creates, the coupling of researcher and source.</p>\r\n<p>What Freudian trauma results from witnessing this sight? Only the harm that myth inflicts. This primal scene is a fiction, a dream of perfect union between researcher and source that ignores, first of all, the full cast of characters. What about the archivist, who is rendered invisible? What about all those within and without the archive, upon whose labor—acquiring, preserving, organizing, reading, cataloging, describing, interpreting, analyzing, debating, teaching, writing, editing, digitizing, referencing and publishing—the current project depends? More a barn dance than a pas de deux: an archival encounter is an enactment of social authorship long before the researcher enters the room. [note number=\'1\']See Jerome McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) on the idea of social authorship, which could be described as “the dialectic between the historically located individual author and the historically developed institutions of literary production” that help create a work, eg, printers, publishers, editors and readers (81).[/note]</p>\r\n<p>But even a barn dance is much too mannered a metaphor. The sketch above misleads us more generally about the experience on the ground. Doing time in an archive is often tedious, uncomfortable and bewildering. For librarians, there is the struggle to promote and simultaneously protect what you have; the difficulty of fitting unruly materials into arrangements and workflows; and worries about space and time—where to put it all, how to address your backlog. For researchers, there is the struggle to locate the archives you need and what matters to you inside them; the uncertainty created by unruly data; and worries about time and space— how to access what you need during your research trip, how to record and organize the information you gather. At both ends, the archival encounter is counter-cinematic and erratic, days of monotonous sifting and dead-ends punctuated by one or two, or maybe zero, hidden moments of vivid, peculiar joy.</p>\r\n<p>So archival research does not fulfill its ideal outline. So what? Who cares? Why dredge up the fantasy? Because the fantasy continues to structure our archival encounters—what we expect and undertake in the reading room, what we allow it to mean. Twenty years ago, Alice Kaplan observed that “conventional academic discourse requires that when you write up the results of your archival work, you tell a story about what you found, but not about how you found it. The less the seams of your findings show, the better your discoveries lend themselves to use by others… tell[ing] these stories breaks their spell and violates the spirit of the archives.” [note number=\'2\']Alice Yaeger Kaplan, “Working in the Archives,” Yale French Studies 77 (1990): 103-116; 103, 107.[/note] With a few word changes, the same could be said about what counts as professional archivist discourse: the impersonal, neutral genre of the finding aid, for example, should say what is in a collection, but should not discuss what is confusing or missing in it, or the problems it posed in processing. [note number=\'3\']See, for example, James M. O’Toole and Richard J. Cox, Understanding Archives and Manuscripts (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2006).[/note] Despite the growing recognition that this sequestration is never completely possible—that the material conditions and social relations of the archive shape the work we do in it—that work continues to be represented in professional and scholarly publications as if it is. Despite the recent call to move to the fore “the backstage of the archives—how they are constructed, policed, experienced, and manipulated” in order to support historiography “not merely [as] a project of fact-retrieval” but as “a set of complex processes of selection, interpretation, and even creative invention,” the “backstage” stays in the background. [note number=\'4\']Antoinette Burton, “Introduction: Archive Fever, Archive Stories,” Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, ed. Burton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 7-8.[/note] Antoinette Burton may be correct that “many if not most historians operate under the assumption that history is a highly interpretive act,” but this belief is not yet reflected in the archival encounter: the ways that researchers (not just historians) and librarians report their experiences with primary sources; the ways that librarians and researchers work together; the ways librarians and researchers regard the involvement of “non specialists.” [note number=\'5\']Burton, 8. Burton notes that “whether historians concede or fully countenance the impact of such contingencies on their work is another question. They rarely speak of them, and even more rarely do they do so in print” (8). Her books recuperates some of those archive stories but this effort, I’ll suggest below, is hampered by other kinds of obligations.[/note] While the advent of digitization and electronic resource sharing has revolutionized the research landscape, making primary sources public in unprecedented ways, there remains in the archive a habitus of secret knowledge—the “spell” that Kaplan is loathe to break. This is not necessarily intentional. It is rather the effect of layering recent shifts in technology, theory and professional definition onto older foundations: petrified conditions, relations, expectations and systems that continue to operate in part through the enduring power of fantasies about research. What we have in the archive is a stratified groundwork that still governs our archival encounters.</p>\r\n<p>But, you will object, the archive has already changed. Now we have the “archival turn”—the scholarly interest in the archive not just as a source of evidence but as an epistemological mode. Surely, this attention to the constructedness of the archive has led to a revealing reconsideration of what actually goes on inside an archive; surely, as a result, those archaic fantasies have diminished. Have they? In what follows, I begin by unearthing one stratum of the archival turn, the decade of the 1990s, as represented by three texts: Kaplan’s essay mentioned above, “Working in the Archives” (1990) [note type=\'figure\' number=\'2\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-2-kaplan.jpg\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-369\" title=\"fig 2 kaplan\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-2-kaplan-300x224.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Photocopy of Alice Yaeger Kaplan’s “Working in the Archives.”[/note]; Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1994/95) [note type=\'figure\' number=\'3\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-3-Derrida.jpg\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-372\" title=\"fig 3 Derrida\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-3-Derrida-300x224.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Print out of Jacque Derrida’s “Archive Fever” from Diacritics.[/note]; and Carolyn Steedman’s Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (2001). [note type=\'figure\' number=\'4\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-4-steedman.jpg\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-373\" title=\"fig 4 steedman\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-4-steedman-300x224.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Library copy of Carolyn Steedman’s Dust.[/note] [note number=\'6\']Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritics 25.2 (Summer 1995): 9-63. Web. 1 Dec. 2010. Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001).[/note] A cross-examination of these three texts reveals a pattern of interests, a set of efforts to defy customary practices—but only, it turns out, “in theory.” While certain practices are challenged in these texts, they leave mostly intact the older strata of archival research fantasies and conventions. Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman do not dislodge the forces that organize the actual archival encounter.</p>\r\n<p>How does this happen? Why is practice so stubborn? We need another take on archival practice: not practice in theory, but practice in action; not the 1990s, but now; not in terms of textual patterns, but in terms that suit the subject: the terms of the archival encounter itself, and the eccentric, anachronistic and even monotonous experience it generates. My second look at practice will take the form of a series of vignettes about a real-life archive, the George Peabody Library in Baltimore. While this narrative structure may seem to recreate the division of labor between theory and practice, my hope is that—by giving practice the last word—we’ll be in a better position to synthesize the two.</p>\r\n<p><!--nextpage--></p>\r\n<p><strong>I. “The library doubles as a detective’s office.” [note number=\'7\']Kaplan, 114.[/note]</strong></p>\r\n<p>The archival turn could be dated to the founding of “scientific” history in the mid-nineteenth century, or to the development a century later of the quantitative methods of the Annales School, or to other evidence-based movements in the history of history, but what is generally meant by this phrase corresponds with the formation of cultural studies and the use of the archive as a conceptual category. That is, the archival turn has to do with the notion of the “figuration” of the archive, a parallel decline in its empirical authority and a related expansion of its relevance within domains that are not exclusively historiographic, like art, literary criticism, textual studies, media studies and information studies. [note number=\'8\']See the use of the term in, for example, Carolyn Hamilton et al, eds., Refiguring the Archive (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), Cheryl Simon, ed., Following the Archival Turn: Photography, the Museum, and the Archive, special issue of Visual Resources: A Journal of Documentation 18.2 (June 2002), and Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). This turn is partially construed as a “move from archive-as-source to archive-as-subject,” but also by the earlier metaphorical interest in “the archive” that goes back to the 1980s (Stoler, 44-45) and by Foucauldian descriptions of archives as “‘monuments to particular configurations of power” (Hamilton, qtd. in Burton, 6).[/note] But it is not irrelevant that a devotion to archival methods precedes by many decades contemporary theories of the archive; if the archival turn lacks a precise origin, this (we will see) is completely in keeping with its own preoccupations.</p>\r\n<p>Kaplan therefore represents in some ways an arbitrary beginning for this cross-examination—clearly the archive as a conceptual category predates 1990—but her article does initiate something new: the recognition that there is something called an “archive story” that must remain hidden in order for the official “results” to function authoritatively. In admitting this bit of professional legerdemain, and in telling her own archive story in a prestigious scholarly journal, Kaplan not only commits the violation she prohibits but also contradicts it. Through its publication, Kaplan’s own archive story is elevated to the status of “results”—a kind of research that shadows conventional academic discourse. Indeed, Kaplan notes, such “fables” of research “can be analyzed like a text,” a “mixed up genre” that combines the “redemptive detective fiction” with the epic and the dime novel. [note number=\'9\']Kaplan, 106, 107.[/note]</p>\r\n<p>Kaplan’s archive story thus marks a distinctive moment in the archival turn—one which gained its most prominent authorization in 1994, with a paper that Jacques Derrida delivered (in English) to a conference sponsored by the Freud Museum, the Courtauld Institute and the Société International d’Histoire de la Psychiatrie et de la Psychoanalyse. Called initially “The Concept of the Archive: A Freudian Impression,” the lecture was revised and published in 1995 as Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne in French; the published English version echoed the French publication with its 1995 title Archive Fever. As Carolyn Steedman points out in Dust: The Archive and Cultural History, however, this work that has been assigned a seminal status in archival studies “for the main part… is not about archives at all, but is rather a sustained contemplation of a work of history, of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (1991),” itself a sustained contemplation of Moses and Monotheism—which (according to Steedman) Yerushalmi examines through Freud’s description of the work as a “‘historical novel,’ or a kind of historical story,” undertaken “in order to understand the period of baroque anti-semitism through which he was living.” [note number=\'10\']Steedman, 3.[/note]</p>\r\n<p>Dizzy yet? Let’s undertake a more careful reading of this splatter pattern of intra-references—or, to stick with the archaeological metaphor, let’s call them groups of potsherds buried in the 1990s layer of the “archival turn.” Digging down to reassemble them reveals a set of interests with special implications for archival practice.</p>\r\n<p>The most prominent group of sherds to note are the fragments of disciplinarity: the inter-, multi- or perhaps simply anti-disciplinarity of the texts, authors and audiences caught up in these three archival addresses. Kaplan, an American scholar of French literature, calls the post-theory exchange between literature and history a “cross-pollination of desire between historians and literary critics” undertaken “with the curiosity and energetic passion of collectors.” [note number=\'11\']Kaplan, 107-108.[/note] Steedman, a British historian, performs this cross-pollinating process without comment: her epigraph to Dust is from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, one chapter treats George Eliot’s Middlemarch in depth… in fact, almost every chapter depends on a literary text. [note number=\'12\']Another chapter invokes Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1848 novel Mary Barton, a third is anchored by W. H. Auden’s poem “Homage to Clio,” and a fourth finds its most eloquent examples in Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend.[/note] Derrida, a French philosopher, produced a work that has been exceptionally mobile across disciplines, forms, languages and professional domains. He gave his initial talk to an audience drawing on three different kinds of institutions; Mal d’Archive was published in book form in both French and English, but also made an intermediate appearance as an essay in the journal diacritics. All of these texts, it seems, respond to the provocations of the archive—to the materials and circumstances of discovery—rather than to the disciplinary distinctions that arguably divide the archive from itself.</p>\r\n<p>Archive Fever has become a founding document even though, as Steedman notes in the very beginning of her book, many in Derrida’s audience “knew the ‘archival turn’ to be [already] well underway” at the time of his talk. [note number=\'13\']Steedman, 2.[/note] As it happens—and this is the second group of sherds I see—these three essays have in common an investment in or a problem with origins, especially with the failure of origins. Derrida, for example, defines archive fever as a kind of Freudian death drive—a drive to fix and preserve which at the same time “works to destroy the archive: on the condition of effacing but also with a view to effacing its own ‘proper’ traces… [it] is above all anarchivic, one could say, or archiviolithic… the archive always works, and a priori, against itself.” [note number=\'14\']Derrida, 14. [/note] If the archival impulse is driven to destroy its own work, then the question of origins ultimately point to the larger question of disorder. [note number=\'15\']The disorder of origins makes frequent appearances in the essay but one example will make the point—in the “Preamble” where he recounts how he titled the talk that he had not yet written and was to give at the Freud Museum. The “Preamble” starts with his reflections on the word “impression,” which has several simultaneous registers of meaning for him. One of these is the “scriptural or typographic” register: that of the graphic impression that marks a substrate. In English, “impression” is phonetically related to “repression” and “suppression,” key words in the Freudian vocabulary, translated respectively from the German Verdrängung and Unterdrückung. English, that is, retains the rhyming relationship of the two German terms, and “impression” in this company comes to have a vaguely Freudian meaning as well. But in French, Verdrängung is “refoulement,” which means something more like expulsion, a driving away. The Freudian sense of the French word “répression” has been reserved for Unterdrückung. So English “repression” defines a phenomenon that must be distinguished from the French “répression.” These translational shifts “directly concern the structures of archivization,” Derrida says, “because they touch on the topic differences and thus on the location of the substrates of traces\" (Derrida, 23). In other words, how do you classify concepts whose meanings shift across languages? Where do you store them in a disciplinary grammar—or in an archive? How do these asymmetrical linguistic structures shape the establishment and extension of a new science? For Derrida, the difference between “repression” and “répression” is “enough to disrupt the tranquil landscape of all historical knowledge, of all historiography, and even of all self-consistent ‘scholarship’” (Derrida, 23).[/note]</p>\r\n<p>Origin failure appears both as deliberate performance and as unintentional oversight in these essays. Derrida stages his own inability to get past “go”; with an introductory section, and subsequent sections sub-titled “Exergue,” “Preamble,” “Foreword,” his essay functions, Steedman notes, like a “primer offering instruction in the principle of deferral.” [note number=\'16\']A short notice called “Priere d’inserer,” published only in the French book version, carried the bulk of an argument for which there was no room in the lecture. Steedman, 7.[/note] For all her insight into Derrida’s titling adventures, however, Steedman’s title is marked by its own origin aporia. While her first chapter is devoted to Archive Fever—a “let’s begin at the beginning” homage to the seminal text—her book’s title, Dust, seems more indebted to the last sentence of Kaplan’s essay, published five years before Derrida’s: “Usually there is no mother lode, no original manuscript to be retrieved—the gold is all in the dust.” [note number=\'17\']Kaplan, 116.[/note] Kaplan, however, is never mentioned. [note number=\'18\']Kaplan also begins her essay with a brief consideration of the “arche,” the Greek and Latin term for the public records office, which is a major starting point for Derrida. Is he borrowing from her, or is she borrowing from him, given that this sort of etymological investigation was an established signature of Deconstruction?[/note]</p>\r\n<p>Kaplan, for her part, unravels her own archive story. She gives us a kind of “whodunit”—her search for the ephemeral sources of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s anti-semitic pamphlet Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937). She uses this account to exemplify her effort to “move through the archival process and recover some of the stories that get deleted in the final scholarly form.” [note number=\'19\']Kaplan, 104. For this reason, perhaps, Kaplan never reveals what she ultimately discovers in her successful search for Celine’s sources. In fact, it’s not entirely clear whether her pre-emptive and truncated treatment of her archive story is deliberate or not. Is this treatment meant to indirectly support her official claim about “results”? Or does the presence of the archive story suggest that telling it is an impulse she can’t quite control? Thanks, Lauren Coats, for helping tease this problem out.[/note] These beginnings are preemptively struck out, however, by what seems to be her main claim: “the passion of the archives must finally be used to eradicate all personal stories in the interests of the dry archival report, fit for a public.” [note number=\'20\']Kaplan, 103.[/note] Only in the “para-text”—a preface, for example—can the archive story appear without “interrupt[ing] or complicat[ing] the narrative so much that no results could ever be understood or perceived.” [note number=\'21\']Kaplan, 104.[/note] Despite this unequivocal assertion, the personal “whodunit” prevails in her essay, especially in the final section set in the Centre du documentation juive contemporain (CDJC). [note type=\'figure\' number=\'5\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/archives-remixed/archeology-of-archival-practice/attachment/fig-5-cdjc-2/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-423\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-423\" title=\"fig 5 cdjc\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-5-cdjc1-333x250.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Website for the Centre de documentation juive contemporain.[/note] It is this library, where Kaplan solves the mystery of Céline’s sources, that “doubles as a detective’s office.”</p>\r\n<p>While Kaplan’s research mystery resolves neatly, the truth about archives is that they are full of gaps, mistakes and excesses: in the words of one of the CDJC librarians, “‘ici on trouve tout’—there’s some of everything here”—but not, one could add, all of anything. [note number=\'22\']Kaplan, 115.[/note] Kaplan’s essay ends by nullifying both her detective story success and her “dry archival report,” by recognizing the disorder on which both of these narratives are unsteadily perched: “The archive is constituted by these errors, these pieces out of place, which are then reintegrated into a story of some kind.” [note number=\'23\']Kaplan, 115.[/note] “A story of some kind”? So much for “results.”</p>\r\n<p>Kaplan sets us up to perceive one final potsherd pattern common to these three essays. If origin-less disorder is the order of the archive, it is a disorder that is generated out of human loss—a disorder that joins the body and the material world. The archive is always predicated on historical violence of some sort, whatever is censored, erased, excluded, trumped up, used up, misplaced, conquered, killed. Moreover, the archival categories that mark both the visible victories and hidden defeats do not stay within their walls; the archive is both a repository of existing schemas and a means of perpetuating them in the world beyond. While we might usually think of this disciplinary activity as a pact between the archive and its political authors, Steedman makes it clear that the dilemmas of order shape the archival body in many ways. For example, she takes literally the provocation of Derrida’s title Archive Fever to investigate the illness that researchers contract on the penultimate day of their trip to the archive: prompted by the anxiety of the task that remains unfinished, they end their research with night-sweats and head-aches. But what seems like a strangely specific malady is transformed by Steedman into a far-reaching social symptom: by relating the researcher’s “archive fever” to the terrible diseases suffered by tanners, skinners and other workers in the trades associated with paper and leather, Steedman expands our sense of who is in the archive—the bodies whose specialized labors populate our libraries with books, the many kinds of expertise the archive consumes.</p>\r\n<p>For Derrida, the relation between the material archive and its human architects focuses on one kind of “graphic mark,” a particular “private inscription”: circumcision as the archival signature that is also the signature of patrimoine, with Freud’s relationship to his father as his main example. [note number=\'24\']Derrida, 19.[/note] It is perhaps not a coincidence that the body in question in both Kaplan’s and Derrida’s archive is Jewish, for that is a body that has come to symbolize the destructive power of classificatory regimes. Despite her contention that the private passions motivating research must be kept secret, Kaplan is fascinated by the “missing person stories” at the CDJC: by the “quantity of people who are there for personal reasons,” the survivors of occupation or deportation or camps, or their descendants, quietly looking up their lost ones or noisily dropping off their memoirs. [note number=\'25\']Kaplan, 113.[/note] This disorganized crowd of dead and living bodies tries to meet up with an equally disorganized crowd of materials—individual letters, trial transcripts, pamphlets, newspapers, first-person accounts, books, photographs, lists. The monumental task of match-making, the librarians’ work, is never complete. More papers are always generated or declassified or discovered, different human questions and needs emerge. The tidy choreography of the research fantasy, where the detective always finds her man, is not so much in evidence; what we have instead is corpora in excess of existing categories.</p>\r\n<p><!--nextpage--></p>\r\n<p>Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman open up the archival body. They show us how paper meets the press of flesh; they make us feel just how intimate it is. [note number=\'26\']This interest in the corporeal dimensions and effects of order, its human and non-human components, has in common with their other gestures—an experimental attitude towards conventional disciplinarity and attention to the priority of disorder—the circumstances of the academic humanities in the 1990s. Since the archival turn came out of the ascent of cultural studies and allied intrigues in the 1970s and ‘80s, the circles in the Venn diagram of these ventures will necessarily overlap. We could also say that the archive took off when it did precisely because it made a clever new container for these preoccupations, thick in the humanities atmosphere at the time, where they were distilled and united. [/note] But for all their revelations about the limits of discipline and the multiplicities of disorder in the archive, these texts do not disclose the specific methods of engagement that led to their existence. While Kaplan offers up her own archival victory and outlines several other such stories, she still insists on their marginalization. [note number=\'27\']“Were the story of how you got the story really to be told inside the book, it would interrupt or complicate the narrative so much that no results could be understood or even perceived. Every story of success in the archives is emotionally charged, for only the most extreme emotions can drive people to the drudgery, to the discomfort, of sitting and sifting through dog-eared documents, manuscripts, microfilms. To reveal those emotions would not only gum up the narrative, it would threaten its credibility, by showing on what thin strands of coincidence, accident, or on what unfair forms of friendship, ownership, geographical proximity, the discoveries were based” (Kaplan, 104).[/note] If these texts are not concerned with actual practices in the archive or changes in its methodologies, what do they tell us?</p>\r\n<p>First, they suggest one reason for the perpetuation of myths about the archive. While Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman are eager to show how archival materials do not conform to disciplinary distinctions—an enthusiasm related to other disruptive tendencies in late twentieth-century humanist scholarship –they seem less cognizant of a related phenomenon: the archive does not obey strict professional divisions, either. In Kaplan’s library-as-detective’s-office metaphor, the scholar is the detective, but does the “Eureka” moment belong only to the scholar who pieces together a narrative? What about the people who prepared those pieces? The archivist is still missing in action. Likewise, these essays do not dwell on missing boxes, illegible papers, neglected citations. There are no descriptions of archival slogging, no admissions that some materials failed to be relevant. And of course, there are no prescriptions for a different order. It is not the main aim of Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman to effect an evolution of practice; archival turnistas are not interested in disorder in order to re-order. But it is worth remembering that it is not in their professional interest as scholars to make their practices more transparent.</p>\r\n<p>Secondly, along the same lines, these texts inform us of the duplicity of speculative practices that reveal but cannot live out the instability of their archival mandates. Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman are put into the position of saying, “Yes, the archive is biased, idiosyncratic and treacherous—but the observations I draw from it are flawless.” [note number=\'28\']Derrida, unlike Kaplan and Steedman, makes no claims to work inside an actual archive, unless we consider Yerushalmi’s book as a kind of archive. But the fact that the essay was written self-consciously for presentation at the Freud Museum suggests that it was made out of an archive indirectly—in its construction, if not in its contents. [/note]</p>\r\n<p>Finally, these texts suggest why archival studies that attempt to be explicit about the messy nature of the archive have become instead “archive studies.” In more recent works like Refiguring the Archive (2002), Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History (2005) and Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2009), the archive appears as a subject in its own right. Although the archival scenarios that are put into play in each of these books incorporate different disciplines—art, history, anthropology, literature, post-colonial studies—they have essentially created a new discipline. “Archive studies” is something we might, in the taxonomy of disciplines, see as the love-child of cultural studies, history and archival methodology. Moreover, this new discipline has in common with other humanities disciplines a complete blindness about its professional investments; it does not register much awareness of the professional investments of librarians, archivists, curators and “non-specialists,” or invite insights from those perspectives. Perhaps this is inevitably what happens when academics must give legitimacy to something new, which in turn reflects the pressures of scholarly communication: a topic must be delineated in conventional terms in order to merit publication. [note number=\'29\']Perhaps this is also the moment to ask why we—I—have been using the term “archive” all along, with its statist resonances, rather than the term “collection,” which has institutional but also personal resonances. Does “archive” bring us closer to recognizably “serious scholarship”?[/note] But it is also true that in these more recent books, which openly investigate the archive’s power-politics, the disorderly drift of the archive and its hybrid corporeality have mostly been bent towards a particular narrative about the archive as an agent of history rather than as a set of ongoing practices. It is as if the historical archive has been assembled in ways that reflect and reiterate power relations, but the contemporary archive has not; it is as if the researcher’s own research travails remain a transparent layer over the body of work that it constructs. [note number=\'30\']Of course, this is precisely what Derrida meant about the “death drive” of the archival impulse. Archive Stories is something of an exception; researchers speak openly here about themselves as researchers. It is interesting, however, that this book—like Steedman’s—doesn’t cite Kaplan’s essay as a precursor text despite the clear titular link.[/note]</p>\r\n<p>Perhaps it would also be fair to note that, if archival studies are now being formulated as an interdisciplinary discipline called “archive studies,” this might be just another stage in the turn. It might be that what comes next reconfigures the premise of disciplinarity and the promise of disorder, with a different approach to the human/non-human interactions that the archive documents and realizes: a more diffuse and multi-vocal set of practices in place of a new field. One way to imagine this approach would be to fully embrace Kaplan’s idea of the archive story as an account of what one hoped for, looked for and found, what one did and did not do, in the archive—an account loosed from the quarantine she advocates. Some very basic genre precedents for the archive story do exist; the bibliographic essay and the methodology statement, for example, have played an important role in many disciplines in the past and still do in some. Instead of a para-textual nod towards that archive story (in Kaplan’s sense), why not create a parallel text written collaboratively by the researcher(s) and the librarian(s), or by one person acting in both professional capacities, that runs alongside the official “results”? Or in a set of expanded notes that address not just the “what” and “where” but the “how” and “why” of sources, which are lifted from their small-type, bottom-of-page basement up into the light? Or—to add yet another layer—parallel texts that also offer room for exchange with other researchers, archivists and even interested “non specialists,” like collectors, bibliophiles and fans?</p>\r\n<p>If it is hasn’t been clear already that I have scrupulously avoided so far the other kind of archive, the digital archive, it will be now. What I am imagining would be far too complicated to produce or consult in print, but would not be at all difficult to organize as a digital object—as an archive in its own right. By avoiding the digital archive up to this point, I have also finessed the fact that our current archival research methods are completely reliant on the digital archive, along with the development of online research tools and electronic instruments of data discovery and organization. Those conditions probably bear the most responsibility for making the archive visible as something that warranted a “turn” in the first place. Even Derrida refers in each version of Archive Fever to the computer on which he is currently composing, predicting that email will not only totally transform the archive as he knows it, but will make his own essay obsolete.</p>\r\n<p>In short, we already have in place both the theory and the media that will make it possible to enact a radical new archival practice. We have in place what we need to integrate the archive story into the archive itself, while making it visible as a new form of “results.”</p>\r\n<p><!--nextpage--></p>\r\n<p><strong>II. The library doubles as a librarian’s office.</strong></p>\r\n<p>I could end here, with a triumphant firing of the starter pistol and a rousing cheer. But that would be a bit disingenuous, given that the starter pistol for both the archival turn and the academic use of the internet actually went off decades ago. So the question remains, what stands in the way of the practical enactment of the archival turn’s speculative insights? I’d like to engage this question by following Kaplan’s example (but not her main claim): through some archive story-telling about the George Peabody Library. These three vignettes, identified as “typical” through conversations with my colleague Paul Espinosa, illustrate the intractable formations that present-day archival encounters come up against.</p>\r\n<p><strong>1. The Perils of Description.</strong></p>\r\n<blockquote><p>A group of Russian speakers visits the Peabody Library. The dozen men and women sit down around the screen that Paul has set up. He narrates a brief slide-show about the Peabody’s history, then leads them to a table where a dozen books from the collection have been laid out in cradles. He tells them about each book: what it is, why it is interesting. Each phrase of his presentation is painstakingly translated by the group’s leader into Russian.</p></blockquote>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>When academic and community groups visit the Peabody, my colleagues and I draw upon a standard tour-guide’s repertoire to describe it. We explain that George Peabody was a tradesman cum financier cum philanthropist who decided in 1857 that Baltimore needed a cultural institution to support the arts and learning. We talk about the evolution of the Peabody Institute, the four-part athenaeum that resulted, with its art gallery, lecture series, conservatory and free, public, non-circulating library. We discuss the model of philanthropy that George Peabody initiated and its wide-ranging influence. We point out the signal features of the awe-inspiring architecture of the current library, built to accommodate a rapidly growing collection in 1878. But when it comes to the library itself, as a collection, it is hard to know what to say. How to accurately translate the library’s holdings into a succinct and memorable statement that conveys an appropriate level of detail to different audiences? While it poses specific challenges, the Peabody also exemplifies more general problems of collection description.</p>\r\n<p>We do not lack evidence for the evolving contents of the Peabody. We have the two-volume printed list of “desiderata” drawn up by the Peabody’s first librarian, John G. Morris. [note number=\'31\']Alphabetical Catalogue of Books to be Purchased for the Library of the Peabody Institute, Baltimore, Vols. 1 and 2 (Baltimore: John D. Toy, 1861, 1863).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'6\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/archives-remixed/archeology-of-archival-practice/attachment/fig-6-alpha-index-2/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-395\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-395\" title=\"fig 6 alpha index\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-6-alpha-index1-336x484.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"484\" /></a>Alphabetical index from Alphabetical Catalouge (“desiderata”).[/note] We have the collections register for several decades’-worth of acquisitions, recording bibliographic information and accession numbers that can still be found on the inside front end papers of many of the books in the collection. We have the librarians’ annual reports to the library trustees. [note number=\'32\']The Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore: The Founder’s Letters and the Papers Relating to its Dedication and History, Up to the 1st January, 1868 (Baltimore: William K. Boyle, 1868); and subsequent Annual Reports, 1869, etc.[/note] We have the library’s first printed catalogue, an unsurpassed achievement when first published in 1883, which listed 100,000 volumes by author and title. [note number=\'33\']Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore, Vols. 1-5 (Baltimore: Isaac Friedenwald, 1883; reprinted Boston: G. K. Hall, [1961?]; also on googlebooks), and Second Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore, Including the Additions Made Since 1882, Vols. 1-8 (Baltimore: Deutsch Lithographic and Printing, 1896; reprinted Boston: G. K. Hall, 1961).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'7\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/archives-remixed/archeology-of-archival-practice/attachment/fig-7-print-cat/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-396\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-396\" title=\"fig 7 print cat\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-7-print-cat-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Reprinted volumes of the Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute (1883).[/note] We have the cards from the Dewey decimal system card catalogue, which replaced the printed catalogue in the 1910s. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'8\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/archives-remixed/archeology-of-archival-practice/attachment/fig-8-card-cat/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-397\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-397\" title=\"fig 8 card cat\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-8-card-cat.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"448\" /></a>One of two card catalogues in the Peabody.[/note] Now, of course, the library’s collections are represented in an online catalogue that integrates them with other collections in the Hopkins library system.</p>\r\n<p>These markers of the collection, however, fail to satisfy some contemporary research queries for reasons that are both practical and philosophical. The transfer of the printed index, organized by author, to the Dewey decimal system, organized by topic, represented a major epistemological shift that facilitated browsing by subject category. But of course, those categories are embedded in historically-bound notions about the subjects and structures of knowledge: Dewey was invented in the 1870s, and the 22 revisions it has undergone since then cannot overcome its essential organizational distortions. For example, the literature range—the 800s—offers only 10% of its categorical space to literatures in languages other than English, Germanic and Romance languages, Greek and Latin.</p>\r\n<p>In the case of the Peabody, the Dewey arrangements overlay even older systems of knowledge hierarchy. Should we continue to offer, for example, a description of the Peabody’s “voyages and travels” books? This category represents a Renaissance schematic that was still in service in the mid-nineteenth century; while actual “voyages and travels” were extended by colonial ventures, the category was eventually disbanded. Dewey combined it with geography to make a sub-category of “history.” In keeping active the old-fashioned phrase “voyages and travels,” we are participating in a centuries-long project of euphemism about the material aims and actual activities of colonialism; we are privileging an early phase of the Peabody’s evolution over later phases; we may even be confusing modern researchers. And yet, as one of the topics in Morris’s “desiderata,” a considerable portion of the Peabody’s collection was acquired with the aim of fleshing out that descriptor. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'9\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/archives-remixed/archeology-of-archival-practice/attachment/fig-9-index-detail/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-398\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-398\" title=\"fig 9 index detail\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-9-index-detail-336x274.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"274\" /></a>Detail of subject index from Alphabetical Catalouge No. 2 (“desiderata”).[/note]</p>\r\n<p>Yet another classificatory dilemma is expressed by George Peabody’s original statement of the library’s purpose: that it “be furnished in every department of knowledge, with the most approved literature… It should consist on the best works on every subject… to satisfy the researches of students who may be engaged in the pursuit of knowledge not ordinarily attainable in the private libraries of the country.” [note number=\'34\']“Letters from George Peabody, Esq.: Baltimore, February 12th, 1857,” in Founder’s Letters, 7.[/note] The Peabody was founded as a cultural institution for the people of Baltimore, but from the first, this democratic ambition was in conflict with the intellectual aspirations of the first librarians and their desire to facilitate civic “self-improvement.” Morris (a doctor of divinity), his successor Nathaniel Holmes Morison (a schoolmaster and poet), and Morison’s assistant and successor Philip Uhler (who had trained as an entomologist) were all devoted to the nineteenth-century idea of the scholar-librarian. Morison wrote in one annual report that “Education always proceeds from the above downward, from the best to the common minds, from the leaders of the people to the people themselves. Furnish... the foundations of intelligence and thought, and they will... stimulate and improve the whole community.\" [note number=\'35\']Qtd. in Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker, “PIB Ref. Library. 8-Morison\'s Philosophy of Excellence,” in George Peabody (1795-1869): A-Z Handbook of the Massachusetts-Born Merchant in the South, London-Based Banker, and Philanthropist\'s Life, Influence, and Related People, Places, Events, and Institutions. . 11 Mar. 2011.[/note] When the Johns Hopkins University was founded in 1876 in close proximity to the Peabody—in large part to take advantage of the library—the tendency of the librarians to address scholarly needs and “approved literature” over popular desires was given additional momentum. In keeping with these ideas, the Peabody’s librarians kept careful track of their readers’ choices, noting with special caution the numbers of novels that were requested. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'10\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/archives-remixed/archeology-of-archival-practice/attachment/fig-10-annual-report-detail/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-399\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-399\" title=\"fig 10 annual report detail\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-10-annual-report-detail-336x452.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"452\" /></a>Detail from First Annual Report showing chart of books read, with special mention of fiction.[/note] This schism at the heart of the library’s collecting paradigm was not unique to the Peabody; the question of reading matter—should it offer leisure for the masses or the means of social uplift?—was central to the public library movement of the second half of the nineteenth century. [note number=\'36\']See, for example, Alexis McCrossen, “’One Cathedral More’ or ‘Mere Lounging Places for Bummers’? The Cultural Politics of Leisure and the Public Library in Gilded Age America,” Libraries &amp; Culture 41.2 (2006): 169-188; Paul Sturges, “The Public Library and Reading by the Masses: Historical Perspectives on the USA and Britain 1850-1900,”; Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston, Upon the Objects to be Attained by the Establishment of a Public Library, 12 Dec. 2010.[/note]</p>\r\n<p>Finally, the Peabody’s “desiderata” acquisitions and librarians’ selections were supplemented by book donations from local elites—bibliophiles with extensive private collections that included incunabula, classical authors in Renaissance editions, expensive illustrated atlases. At the same time, book donations came in from more plebian sources. The Peabody’s growth overlapped with the decline of the local social libraries, and it eventually absorbed some of the books from the Library Company of Baltimore, Robinson’s Circulating Library and several small professional and mechanics’ libraries. And I haven’t even touched on the Peabody’s twentieth-century fate.</p>\r\n<p>The variety of philanthropic impulses, resource streams and classification philosophies that have fed the Peabody over the 150 years of its existence has led to a collection that does not so much map the nineteenth-century mind as signal its odd amalgam of popular and scholarly investments. The Peabody’s collection effectively evades succinct description—at least, any kind of description that pretends to be coherent, that is not perforated by its stakes in local history, library history, book history. But more importantly, it suggests the degree to which accident and opportunity and prejudice and wealth and the changing winds of cataloguing rules shape any archive. Description, which should be the most fundamental tool of communication between librarians and researchers, turns out to be utterly elusive. Yet we do not know what to replace them with, these inadequate descriptions, these exercises in stilted and partial translation.</p>\r\n<p><!--nextpage--></p>\r\n<p><strong>2. The Researcher’s Progress.</strong></p>\r\n<blockquote><p>I am preparing for my class about women and nineteenth-century print culture, which meets in the Peabody; we have reached the part of the syllabus where we look at gift books and annuals. I want students to examine several examples of these literary miscellanies, offering some illustration of their variety, and I have a list of such items that I have used in the past. But since I also want to show the students new acquisitions, I need to refresh my list. I will start with “gift book” as a keyword in the online catalogue.</p></blockquote>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>In place of perfect and commensurate description—not possible—what we have are cataloguing systems that indexically represent collections through data and metadata that are, as I have already suggested, historically marked and inevitably inconsistent. In the case of the Peabody, these records are further compromised: Dewey cards developed from a nineteenth-century print index do not offer Library of Congress subject terms or detailed tables of contents; they also frequently lack other kinds of information. [note number=\'37\']Many of the electronic records for Peabody books have been copy-cataloged, that is, developed from records for identical books in other libraries. But these records might also be incomplete or inconsistent, given that many are quite old. The expense of original cataloging prevents our staff from creating full, new records for every item in the Peabody’s collection of over 300,000 titles.[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'11\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/archives-remixed/archeology-of-archival-practice/attachment/fig-11-ddc-cards/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-400\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-400\" title=\"fig 11 ddc cards\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-11-ddc-cards-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Dewey cards for “gift books.”[/note] My search for “gift book” will turn up bequests—the term “gift book” is often attached to these donations—and it will miss many of the nineteenth-century gift books and annuals in our collection whose records lack subject classifications, or whose subject classifications reference the book’s contents, not its format. For example, the 1848 Rough and Ready Annual: or, Military Souvenir published by Appleton’s has been assigned the subject “Mexican War, 1846-1848—Anecdotes.” [note number=\'38\']Rough and Ready Annual (New York: D. Appleton; Philadelphia: G.S. Appleton, 1848).[/note]</p>\r\n<p>The problem of finding is perhaps only a sub-set of the problem of description, but I want to give it special attention because it introduces another variable: the physical space of the object. My search for gift books in the Peabody also entails the privilege of retrieving the books from the stacks. There are two search processes, the intellectual and the physical, that I must navigate. The intellectual search in this case requires a variety of keyword/date range combinations, and ultimately, recourse to my prepared bibliography—a holdover from pre-catalogue research methods. Now the second search begins.</p>\r\n<p>The Rough and Ready Annual is at 973.62 A5121, in the “general history of North America; United States” category. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'12\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/archives-remixed/archeology-of-archival-practice/attachment/fig-12-rr/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-401\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-401\" title=\"fig 12 r&amp;r\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-12-rr-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>The Rough and Ready Annual in the stacks.[/note] This call number range is on the second floor, west side. Other items on my list are in very different parts of the library. Orange Blossoms: A Gift Book for All Who Have Worn, Are Wearing, Or are Likely to Wear Them, edited by the temperance writer T. S. Arthur and published in London, has been given the call number 813 A7910 duodecimo—fourth floor east, in the “American literature in English, fiction” section. [note number=\'39\']Orange Blossoms: A Gift Book for All Who Have Worn, Are Wearing, Or are Likely to Wear Them (London: Knight &amp; Co., [1857]). This title does not appear in at least one Arthur bibliography; see Donald A Koch, \"Timothy Shay Arthur,\" Antebellum Writers in New York and the South, ed. Joel Myerson (Detroit: Gale Research, 1979), from Literature Resource Center. Web. 19 Feb. 2011. To check on this, I need Mitchell Sharpe Jr.’s A Bibliography of the Published Books of Timothy Shay Arthur (Atlanta: Emory University, 1954), a typewritten quarto at 012 A791S, but it seems to be missing.[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'13\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/archives-remixed/archeology-of-archival-practice/attachment/fig-13-orange/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-402\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-402\" title=\"fig 13 orange\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-13-orange-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Orange Blossoms in the stacks.[/note] Arthur shows up again as co-editor of The Baltimore Book: A Christmas and New-Year\'s Present, which has received more extensive description as it contains the first printing of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Siope.” [note number=\'40\']The Baltimore Book: A Christmas and New-Year\'s Present (Baltimore: Bayly and Burns, [1838]).[/note] We have two copies of this very genteel little gift book, one at 808.83 B2175 (rhetoric &amp; collections of literature), and one at 810.8 C297 (American literature in English). The New Casket: A Gift Book for All Seasons is in the rare book room at the south end of the third floor. [note number=\'41\']The New Casket: A Gift Book for All Seasons (London: The Religious Tract Society, ca. 1850).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'14\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/archives-remixed/archeology-of-archival-practice/attachment/fig-14-rbr/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-403\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-403\" title=\"fig 14 rbr\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-14-rbr-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>The rare book room.[/note] In this case, the book’s rarity has to do with a lovely fore-edge painting. It has been assigned to 820.8 N42017 (general books about literature). On the other end of the “rare” continuum is The Family Circle and Parlor Annual, volume 5 in a series, which is shelved up on the sixth floor with the periodicals at 051 F198 (serials in American English). [note number=\'42\']The Family Circle and Parlor Annual (New York: Comstock, 1847).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'15\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/archives-remixed/archeology-of-archival-practice/attachment/fig-15-parlor/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-404\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-404\" title=\"fig 15 parlor\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-15-parlor-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>The Parlor Annual in the stacks.[/note]</p>\r\n<p>I’ll fill out call slips for each book, stick the slips into red flags, and put the flags in an order that will help me chart a logical course through the stacks. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'16\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/archives-remixed/archeology-of-archival-practice/attachment/fig-16-slips/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-405\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-405\" title=\"fig 16 slips\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-16-slips-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Call slips and flags.[/note] It’s easiest to start on the sixth floor and work one’s way down, picking up books along the way. Usually I find other interesting items as I go, so I carry a batch of blank call slips and extra flags. (On this occasion, for example, I find The New American Reader: Containing Choice Pieces, in Prose and Verse; published in 1813 and inscribed by its owner in 1817, it pre-dates by several years the official beginning of the gift book phenomenon. It might be more of a “literary almanac.” [note number=\'43\']The New American Reader: Containing Choice Pieces, in Prose and Verse (Philadelphia: David Hogan, 1813).[/note] [note type=\'figure\' number=\'17\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/archives-remixed/archeology-of-archival-practice/attachment/fig-17-new-reader/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-406\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-406\" title=\"fig 17 new reader\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-17-new-reader-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Inscription in The New American Reader.[/note]) Usually I am also unable to locate at least one of the books I have set out to find. Most likely the book has been misshelved, so I’ll check the quartos and folios, which are shelved separately; then I’ll check the rare book room’s octavo, duodecimo and quarto shelving areas. It used to astonish me that books were still shelved by format in the Peabody, but it does save space. At the same time, this shelving system—along with the multiple distinct areas within the library where books may reside, eg the rare book room, the reference section, the genealogy books, the Limited Editions Club, and several discrete named collections—means that retrieving a few books can take quite a long time, as I traipse up and down the six floors of the library, thread through stacks, open secured doors with multiple keys, turn lights on and off, and maneuver a book truck in and out of a tiny service elevator built in the 1920s. By the end of the journey, the library and I will have exchanged dust; I’ll take on a few streaks of red rot, and the library will have taken in particles from my body as well.</p>\r\n<p>While the Peabody is unique, these conditions are not in the end very unusual. In terms of the intellectual search, the absence of “gift book” from many of the catalogue records is no less egregious than the absence of other information—the names of all the contributors; the subjects of the illustrations. The metadata is potentially infinite. The “gift book” only exists as a category because of scholars who teased out this cultural phenomenon; it would be very difficult to define its absolute borders. In terms of the physical search, the Peabody might be messier than, say, a rare book library that has assigned current LC call numbers to all its contents and houses them in compact shelving, but it exemplifies the general on-the-ground situation. As I wind my way through the Peabody stacks, I remember how much more difficult it is to gather research materials from several different institutions.</p>\r\n<p>The fact is, for scholars who rely on archives, research is something you do only after you have already undertaken a rigorous search. It is the search that provides you with the foundational sense of your subject. But the search is rarely acknowledged or accredited; even the foot-soldier craft of bibliography, the link between “librarianship” and “scholarship,” has largely lost its scholarly status.</p>\r\n<p><!--nextpage--></p>\r\n<p><strong>3. An Architecture of Disctinction.</strong></p>\r\n<blockquote><p>A non-affiliate researcher contacts the Peabody about our H. L. Mencken collections. Since she will bring a couple of graduate students with her, I set up a group work space in one of the library alcoves where the three of them can share materials and talk without disturbing other readers. I pull the requested volumes with the help of some students and set the cart up within easy reach of the alcove. When the researchers arrive, I show them the Mencken collections on the ground floor. Then I lead them to their group work space and leave them, returning to the glassed-in office behind the reading room, the vantage point that allows me to monitor the otherwise empty reading room.</p></blockquote>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>In “The Silence of the Library: Environment, Situational Norm, and Social Behavior,” a team of Dutch sociologists investigates the library as a space that is strongly marked by situational norms—“knowledge-based beliefs about how to behave in particular situations that are shaped by social influence.” [note number=\'44\']Henk Aarts and Ap Dijksterhuis, “The Silence of the Library: Environment, Situational Norm, and Social Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84.1 (2003), 19.[/note] Their research leads them to argue, however, that such norms do not require direct social influences to be triggered; in fact, “the situation can activate mental representations of normative behaviors automatically. And once activated, these representations provide the knowledge necessary for guiding one’s own situationally appropriate behavior.” [note number=\'45\']Aarts and Dijksterhuis, 19.[/note] Physical environments do not necessarily prompt these behaviors; rather, the behavior “depend[s] on whether the environment is of immediate behavioral relevance.” [note number=\'46\']Aarts and Dijksterhuis, 20.[/note] Talking in a quiet voice in the library, a normative behavior, is only activated for those who plan to visit the library.</p>\r\n<p>Ten years ago, when the research for this article was conducted, the “silence of the library” was still a widespread norm. While the situation is now often reversed—in our main campus library, we must designate specific quiet areas because otherwise a sociable undergraduate din would take over—the norm of silence does continue to preside at the Peabody. Because it is off campus, the Peabody is often attractively under-populated compared to the crowded main library; it is mostly used by advanced researchers and those who seek a quiet place to study. The large central open area catches and amplifies even the smallest noises. The shelf-lined alcoves on either side of this central area offer the appearance of privacy, but in fact are little echo chambers. Visitors immediately detect these acoustics, and—except for the periodic tour groups—most spend their time in the Peabody in silence. But it is not just the physics of sound that shape behaviors here, as the Dutch researchers show; the social expectations of the space prefigure those behaviors.</p>\r\n<p>In setting up a group work space for the Mencken researchers, I have quite deliberately contravened the usual norm of silence. Clearly, I am not inviting them to shout, and by putting them in an alcove in back, I have taken measures to protect any quiet-seeking visitors who might arrive. But in accordance with new ideas about the use of library space, my colleagues and I have decided that we must accommodate group study even if it might occasionally disrupt the silence desired by others. As it happens, the Mencken researchers’ conversation is eventually interrupted by a tour group, and the two activities play out side by side.</p>\r\n<p>I must admit that at moments I have mixed feelings about the tour groups and even the study cohorts. While my pedagogical instincts tend towards cheerful hub-bub, there is a part of me that is still in awe of the sanctuary-like atmosphere of the Peabody. John Morris called the library a “cathedral of books,” and clearly that’s what architect Edmund G. Lind had in mind. The central area with its grand skylight and the alcoves on its sides is like a nave bordered with chapels. Lind didn’t need a psychological study of environment-based situational norms to tell him that he might activate different behaviors within his building. The great central space inspires reverence—your eye is drawn to the skylight the way it would be drawn to the rose windows of Chartres, and on its way up catches row upon solemn row of books stowed behind gilded railings, a testament to the accumulated wisdom of the ages. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'18\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/archives-remixed/archeology-of-archival-practice/attachment/fig-18-skylight/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-407\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-407\" title=\"fig 18 skylight\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-18-skylight.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"448\" /></a>The skylight in the George Peabody Library.[/note] But step into an alcove, especially on the ground floor where each is filled with an immense wooden table, and you instantly feel something else, something no less grand but more human. The alcoves are study-sized, and once you sit down at one of those dark, gleaming, broad tables, it is like you are the master of your own private library. [note type=\'figure\' number=\'19\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/archives-remixed/archeology-of-archival-practice/attachment/fig-19-alcove/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-408\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-408\" title=\"fig 19 alcove\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-19-alcove-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Alcove in the George Peabody Library.[/note]</p>\r\n<p>Ironically, the Peabody’s architecture was out-dated by the time it was completed. With the professionalization of librarianship and the evolution of library science in the late nineteenth century, librarians like William Frederick Poole advocated for a functional rather than decorative design of interior library space. [note number=\'47\']See William Frederick Poole, Remarks on Library Construction (Chicago: Jansen, McClurg, 1884).[/note] Moreover, the actual use of space in the Peabody in the late nineteenth century was at odds with its symbolic appeal. The main library was known as the “stack room”; readers were seated in a comparatively plain reading room on the other side of the main doors. In this arrangement, the librarians reigned inside the gorgeous “cathedral of books,” but the building’s potential to civilize the masses was lost.</p>\r\n<p>Now, of course, we do not send readers outside. Inside the “stack room,” we explicitly call visitors’ attention to its beauty to explain the connections between the library’s architecture and its collections—how both speak eloquently of Victorian values. At the same time, we who staff the library have relegated ourselves to its periphery. We work in the glassed-in room at one end that serves as a monitoring point and occasional classroom; the official “librarian’s office” in one corner—its luxurious proportions suggesting something like a sacristy and something like a robber baron’s lair—is now shared work-space stuffed with several desks and laden book trucks. There is another monitoring station near the main doors. I often do my work at the photography station, in the back of one of the alcoves [note type=\'figure\' number=\'20\']<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/archives-remixed/archeology-of-archival-practice/attachment/fig-20-station/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-409\"><img class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-409\" title=\"fig 20 station\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-20-station-336x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\" /></a>Photography station in the George Peabody Library.[/note]. It offers some privacy but is close enough to the central reading tables to be accessible to readers.</p>\r\n<p>The space of the Peabody initiates other situational behaviors besides the norm of silence, and our work-station arrangements testify to this. The spatial re-centralizing of readers and marginalization of staff is not merely practical; it is a reflection of the modern office of librarianship. We are there to be of service, in a para-textual position. Consequently, our work should be out of sight; it should be separate from and secondary to the work that readers do. Our locations call upon us, in other words, to support the scholar’s effort to hide the “seams of [her] findings” by hiding the ways we contribute to that work—by the ways we sometimes do that work.</p>\r\n<p>I think about these complications as I escort the Mencken researchers to their table and walk back to the glassed-in office, where there is nothing pressing for me to do. I’d rather spend more time talking with them. I’d like to learn about their research and introduce them to some underappreciated parts of the collection. I’d like to share with them what I learned curating an exhibition of Mencken-related magazines and writing about one of those magazines. But I don’t want to get in their way; it’s likely that they are ready to get on with work that they don’t see as connected to mine. The professional norms of the archive are strong, and although I know how to talk about my research in many contexts—in presentations, interviews, hotel elevators—I haven’t figured out how to mix my scholarly role with the curatorial role I am supposed to play here, in the Peabody. In the end, I say nothing. Professional segregation is another kind of silence in the library.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>We cannot change the archaeological record beneath our feet, but we can rearrange the fossils we dig up to create new narratives. We can tell different kinds of archive stories, including the story of what research in the archive was and is. Is it too idealistic to expect that dissolving the entrenched fantasies about archival research will make room for new methods? Is it naïve to imagine a space that, in putting into practice the archival turn’s preliminary insights about disciplinary and disorder, can support experimentation, facilitate connection across professions and disciplines, and enable new discoveries?</p>\r\n','Disciplinarity and Disorder','The primal scene of archival research takes place in a dreary reading room.  A researcher sits at her table, inert.  An archivist enters, pushing a cart that bears a dozen dusty gray boxes.  (Can we get a close-up of a box, please, to show the label with the long call number?)  The archivist unhinges a box, removes a numbered file folder and, placing it at the researcher’s elbow, steps back.  The researcher stirs, then sits upright with a mechanical jolt.  She turns sharply in the direction of the folder, flips it open and cocks her head towards the flimsy leaves inside; now she is reading.  (Zoom in on the eyes as they click into focus.)','inherit','open','open','','345-revision-96','','','2012-07-18 22:08:57','2012-07-18 22:08:57','',345,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/345-revision-96/',0,'revision','',0),(2821,19,'2012-10-15 16:38:12','2012-10-15 16:38:12','In this issue, five contributors address how hands-on work with archives has been incorporated into undergraduate education.  They each answer a series of five questions to report on what they have done, what worked or not, and what value bringing archives into the classroom, or the classroom into the archive, has.  We invite you to read through the responses by author or by question.','Undergraduates in the Archives','','inherit','open','open','','1500-revision-51','','','2012-10-15 16:38:12','2012-10-15 16:38:12','',1500,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1500-revision-51/',0,'revision','',0),(2822,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:35','2012-10-15 17:51:35','I have only recently begun experimenting with using archival materials in the classroom, so I am still learning how to achieve the best results.  Initially, I began by limiting student involvement to 2-3 weeks of the semester.  I found that, practically, the students did much better when they worked in groups, in part because of the potential that some students are more engaged than others, and in part because the students enjoyed being part of a team.  Penn, of course, is home to the Wharton School of Business and I often have a few Wharton students in class.  These students helpfully pointed out that many Wharton classes are designed such that students are assigned to a team in order to better prepare them for the private sector.  This also allows the students to divide up the work according to the skill sets of each individual student.  I have found the team oriented approach—with all of the teams working together as one larger team devoted to producing a quality product for Native American clients—to work very well in the highly professionalized culture of Penn (this culture is double edged, for it also makes it difficult to attract pre-professional students to courses on Native American studies, which is not a program or a department at Penn).\r\n\r\nAs I became more comfortable and was able to prepare more quickly for the semester, I found that I could make more materials available to the students.  I try to balance the students’ exposure to the originals by providing them with digital surrogates and also having them visit the Penn Museum and the APS.  This can prove a challenge since the APS is not set up for student visits and, therefore, it is only because of my position as Director of Native American projects that I am able to arrange a classroom to view original documents.  The Penn Museum, on the other hand, actively encourages professors to bring their classes and provides access to the storage facilities.  This planning paid off, however, when, to my surprise, the students asked to have more time to work on their projects.  Last semester, one suggested that the entire semester should be devoted to creating the exhibits for the class project.  We talked about this together and the students also felt their work with archival materials would be more meaningful if they learned more about the historical and cultural background from which the materials emerged.  The best students had done this research on their own, but I realized that the early part of the course could be structured to teach the students a great deal more about the cultural context of the archival materials and that this would result in them being able to understand the materials better and to do a better job of .  So this coming semester, that is what I am going to try to accomplish.  The APS recently acquired more than 500 hours of audio recordings related to Ojibwe culture in northern Canada (the acquisition was an outcome of the Pimachiowin Aki collaboration).  The first five weeks of the class will be devoted to teaching the students the religious background necessary to understand the Ojibwe ceremonies being discussed, the ethics of working with religious materials in terms of what can or cannot be placed on the web, and basic archival skills so that the students can create a database and tags to make this new material more accessible to scholars and the Ojibwe communities where the material originated.  All of the students’ work will be donated to those communities and the database will be housed at the APS.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Powell 5','I have only recently begun experimenting with using archival materials in the classroom, so I am still learning how to achieve the best results.  Initially, I began by limiting student involvement to 2-3 weeks of the semester.  I found that, practically, the students did much better when they worked in groups, in part because of the potential that some students are more engaged than others, and in part because the students enjoyed being part of a team.','inherit','open','open','','1589-revision-14','','','2012-10-15 17:51:35','2012-10-15 17:51:35','',1589,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1589-revision-14/',0,'revision','',0),(2823,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:35','2012-10-15 17:51:35','The biggest challenge by far is the preliminary work, which must be completed before the semester begins.  In order to work with either the APS or Penn Museum collections, a good deal of paperwork must be filled out securing permission from the curatorial staff.  Because this material is rarely used by students designing digital exhibits for the web, this can require creating new forms and convincing very conservative curators that the material will be used for educational purposes.  I find that it is essential, too, to communicate openly and honestly with institutional administrators at every level to help them understand that such projects are mutually beneficial to the archive, the students, and the indigenous communities.  Having done so, the next challenge is to locate enough relevant material to keep the students occupied for a month and to ensure that the resulting exhibit is of high enough quality that it will be valuable to the Native American communities, and the general public.  In addition, contacts must be set up in the Native American communities and visits to the APS for the Native American scholars program must be coordinated with Penn’s semester schedule to create an opportunity for the elders to speak to the class (this is not always possible, but has worked on occasion).\r\n\r\nPedagogically, it takes at least a month to provide the students with enough historical, anthropological, religious, and cultural background so that they can identify primary important materials.  Because some of the material is considered to be sacred, students must also be taught protocols about culturally sensitive objects.  This is made even more difficult because the Society of American Archivists has delayed issuing protocols concerning Native American cultural sensitivities.  A recent Mellon grant to the APS to digitize more than 3000 hours of audio recordings related to Native American cultures allowed for the creation of a Native American advisory board to address this issue.  This is cutting edge work that interests some of the students, and I currently have two independent study students working on documenting and implementing protocols for cultural sensitivity at the APS.\r\n\r\nIt can also be difficult to teach the students to be respectful of how Native people see their own culture.  The idea, for example, that museum artifacts are considered animate objects—or living beings— is sometimes beyond the intellectual reach of certain students.  The success of the projects, therefore, often depends on the students’ respect for and intellectual understanding of the culture.  The performance of the students is very uneven, with some students going on to win grants to pursue further work in the area and others sitting quietly in the corner.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Powell 4','The biggest challenge by far is the preliminary work, which must be completed before the semester begins.  In order to work with either the APS or Penn Museum collections, a good deal of paperwork must be filled out securing permission from the curatorial staff.  Because this material is rarely used by students designing digital exhibits for the web, this can require creating new forms and convincing very conservative curators that the material will be used for educational purposes.','inherit','open','open','','1586-revision-12','','','2012-10-15 17:51:35','2012-10-15 17:51:35','',1586,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1586-revision-12/',0,'revision','',0),(2824,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:35','2012-10-15 17:51:35','There have been many exciting outcomes from the students’ interactions with archival materials. In the spring of 2010, the class project was to design a digital exhibit that would bring together Penn anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell’s Ojibwe photographs from the American Philosophical Society and Ojibwe artifacts from the Penn Museum, all of which were collected in the 1930s. (See Figure 1)\r\n\r\n<a title=\"Bandolier Bag\" href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/powell_1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2625\" title=\"Ojibwe Bandolier Bag\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/powell_1-333x147.jpg\" alt=\"\'Ojibwe Bandolier Bag,\' Penn Museum, photograph by David McDonald, DMcD Productions.\" width=\"333\" height=\"147\" /></a>\r\n\r\nNot long before the semester started, I had been contacted by Gord Jones, the project manager of Pimachiowin Aki Corporation, who is working on submitting a UNESCO World Heritage Site grant application to preserve 40,000 square kilometers of boreal forest and the cultural landscape of five Ojibwe First Nations. One challenge of the grant is to define a “cultural landscape.” A number of scholars associated with the Pimachiowin Aki project had come to the APS and digitized material from the Hallowell collection. Hallowell had worked in Ojibwe First Nation communities in northern Manitoba and Ontario for ten years, so there was a large amount of material related to this very small, remote place. The students photographed and documented the objects from the Hallowell collection at the Penn Museum and presented them to Ojibwe representatives of the Pimachiowin Aki project at a conference held at the APS shortly after the semester ended. The students’ material is now part of a historic project, the first UNESCO World Heritage Site application ever submitted by the Canadian government on behalf of First Nations.\r\n\r\nLast semester my students worked in groups to curate an exhibit entitled <em>Cherokee Stickball</em>, based on the research of Frank Speck, a highly distinguished anthropologist. Speck taught at Penn for half a century, collecting more than forty stickball sticks for the Penn Museum and depositing photographs of Cherokee stickball games at the APS. (See Figure 2.)\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/powell_2.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2609\" title=\"Powell 2, Cherokee Stickball\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/powell_2-217x250.jpg\" alt=\"\'Cherokee Stickball\', American Philosophical Society, Frank Speck collection.\" width=\"217\" height=\"250\" /></a>\r\n\r\nIn the 1930s, Speck worked with a Cherokee Medicine Man named Will West Long, who provided Speck with a rich ethnographic description of the spiritual dimensions of the game. Will West’s grand nephew, T.J. Holland, came to the APS conference in the spring of 2010, and I had the opportunity to interview him along with another very knowledgeable elder, Tom Belt. The students created Quick Time videos that combined Speck’s photographs taken in the 1930s with the contemporary oral histories. They also photographed all of the sticks in the Penn Museum’s collection and created a database of descriptive materials. One of the students won a Mellon grant through Penn to take the digital materials to the Eastern Band of the Cherokee in North Carolina. Today, Cherokee craftsman are recreating the older sticks based on the students’ photographs, and the videos will be used in a museum exhibit that will be displayed at the tribally owned Junaluska Museum, located in Robbinsville, North Carolina.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Powell 3','There have been many exciting outcomes from the students’ interactions with archival materials.  In the spring of 2010, the class project was to integrate the photography and artifact collections of noted Penn anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell, whose photographs are housed at the APS, and whose artifacts are stored at the Penn Museum.  ','inherit','open','open','','1583-revision-34','','','2012-10-15 17:51:35','2012-10-15 17:51:35','',1583,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1583-revision-34/',0,'revision','',0),(2825,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:35','2012-10-15 17:51:35','The most obvious benefit to Penn students is an opportunity to work on a project designed to be used by Native American community members and to hear the voices of elders. Penn, unfortunately, has no Native American faculty working in the field of American Indian studies, and the state of Pennsylvania has no Indian reservations. As a result, students generally have no contact with the people they are studying. Because many have never met a Native American, they are prone to thinking of Indians as being extinct. By getting students to look at archival materials from an indigenous perspective, they learn to think about such basic terms as “American,” “history,” “literature,” “intelligence,” and “writing” in new ways. Even if the students do not major in American Indian studies, the intellectual experience of understanding a very different cultural epistemology and ontology is inherently valuable.\r\n\r\nFrom a pedagogical perspective, the students learn research skills in archives that will serve them well no matter what their chose careers. In my experience, most undergraduates do not have the opportunity to work with archival or museum collections. Many students seem to enjoy the courses more once they have been to the American Philosophical Society and seen Thomas Jefferson’s hand written draft of the Declaration of Independence or held a drum owned by Sitting Bull in their hands. It makes history and culture come alive in a way that textbooks rarely achieve. I find that it requires a lot of preliminary work—selecting and skimming documents, scanning photographs, etc.—to prepare a class for doing research in the archives. This semester my students will be going through hundreds of pages of oral history transcripts about an Ojibwe Medicine Man to try to match them to historical documents and photographs in order to make them more useful to the community where the recordings were originally made more than 75 years ago. I find that the students’ work is more thoughtful and more inspired when they realize that their work will be shared with community members, rather than writing a paper that will be read by one person. Me.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Powell 2','The most obvious benefit to Penn students is an opportunity to work on a project designed to be used by Native American community members and to hear the voices of elders. Penn, unfortunately, has no Native American faculty working in the field of American Indian studies, and the state of Pennsylvania has no Indian reservations. ','inherit','open','open','','1580-revision-12','','','2012-10-15 17:51:35','2012-10-15 17:51:35','',1580,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1580-revision-12/',0,'revision','',0),(2826,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:35','2012-10-15 17:51:35','Because I teach at Penn, am a Contributing Scholar at the Penn Museum, and Director of Native American Projects at the American Philosophical Society (APS), I am in a unique position to provide my students access to a wide variety of archival materials, many of which are linked in surprising ways.  For most of the 20<sup>th</sup> century, Penn was home to some of the greatest anthropologists—Frank Speck, A. Irving Hallowell, Anthony F.C. Wallace and Dell Hymes.  All of these scholars gave their papers to the APS, while Speck and Hallowell also donated artifacts to the Penn Museum.  The collections fit together very nicely, even though the institutions have rarely worked cooperatively.  Students have a plethora of opportunities to connect the two collections in a variety of interesting ways.  I have also directed three large grant projects at the APS to digitize images and audio recordings related to Native American culture.  I am thus intimately familiar with the collection and, now that they are have been digitized, the material is much more accessible to students.\r\n\r\nMuch of my work involves outreach to Native American communities, so I am constantly writing grants that focus on returning digital surrogates of archival materials to their community of origin.  In 2005, I started a website entitled <em><a href=\"http://gibagadinamaagoom.info/\">Gibagadinamaagoom: An Ojibwe Digital Archive</a></em> that houses digital materials and is used by Ojibwe high school and tribal college students throughout the state of Minnesota.  Several years later, I started a sister site, entitled <em><a href=\"http://gibagadinamaagoom.info/\">Digital Partnerships with Indian Communities</a></em>, that allows the students to “publish” their work.  When their work is polished enough (this usually entails some substantive editing) it is then made available to Native communities via the <em>Digital Partnerships</em> website.  Both sites are designed with the Drupal content management system and are maintained by the School of Arts and Sciences Computing at Penn.  This provides long-term sustainability.  Because Drupal is so flexible, students can learn how to design digital exhibits on the website that incorporate highlights of the archival materials, thus making them more accessible to Native communities.  This requires training and an outstanding student, many of whom receive grant support from Penn or other sources to work with me on these projects.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Powell 1','Because I teach at Penn, am a Contributing Scholar at the Penn Museum, and Director of Native American Projects at the American Philosophical Society (APS), I am in a unique position to provide my students access to a wide variety of archival materials, many of which are linked in surprising ways.  ','inherit','open','open','','1577-revision-11','','','2012-10-15 17:51:35','2012-10-15 17:51:35','',1577,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1577-revision-11/',0,'revision','',0),(2827,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:35','2012-10-15 17:51:35','Archival work <strong>is</strong> my curriculum.  Integrating it into the broader University curriculum has been a long term project.  The year I started at Wesleyan, I began an intensive, perhaps even aggressive, approach to bringing classes into SC&amp;A.  The first step was to find a close connection between our holdings and Wesleyan’s curriculum.  To do this, I studied the course catalogue carefully and matched holdings to what was being taught.  I wrote detailed letters to each faculty member whose course seemed to connect well to our holdings.  And although I used the same basic form for each letter, I tailored each one with a specific list of items I would show to the class if they would come in for a visit.  (At the time, a letter still had more impact than an email message.)  In the first year alone, this effort resulted in twenty-four class sessions for nineteen different courses and a total of 276 students.  As the program has grown, certain trends have emerged.  Perhaps not surprisingly, the largest number of requests for class sessions come from the American Studies, English, and History departments.  Faculty in African American Studies; Astronomy; Classical Studies; Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Music; Romance Languages and Literatures; Science in Society; and Studio Art are regular participants as well.  We have also hosted classes in atomic theory, computer science, dance, German, government, and sociology.  By now, I’ve worked with upwards of one hundred different faculty members (including visitors and non-tenure track faculty) to bring classes to Special Collections &amp; Archives.  This often includes helping them to design assignments that reinforce or build on the visit to SC&amp;A, while enhancing the pedagogical goals of the course and promoting the use of our collections.  At this point, the program needs very little advertising to sustain itself, although I do still send reminders to some faculty to schedule a class visit, and I encourage new faculty to consider the possibility when our holdings are a good match for their courses.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Taraba 5','','inherit','open','open','','1571-revision-8','','','2012-10-15 17:51:35','2012-10-15 17:51:35','',1571,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1571-revision-8/',0,'revision','',0),(2828,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:35','2012-10-15 17:51:35','The single biggest challenge my program faces is one of supply and demand.  Demand for class sessions in SC&amp;A is increasing— all to the good!— but the supply of time for teaching is not.  In this sense, we are the victims of our own success.  More staff to share the teaching load would help.  Increased use of digitized sources and online tutorials can help as well, and many institutions, both large and small, are exploring these options, some with considerable success.  Digitization can help make our holdings more readily accessible to larger numbers of students.  Naturally, care and preservation of materials that are heavily used is always a concern.  Digitization helps to protect the originals from being damaged in the service of learning and scholarship, but the experience of using digital surrogates isn’t really the same as that of using the “real thing.”  Best, of course, is when the original and a digital surrogate can be used in tandem.\r\n\r\nFaculty often find it difficult to squeeze a visit to Special Collections &amp; Archives into an already full syllabus, even when it’s pedagogically desirable.  Scheduling extra sessions outside of regular class meetings can be complex in the extreme, since students are extraordinarily busy with academic and extracurricular commitments.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Taraba 4','','inherit','open','open','','1568-revision-9','','','2012-10-15 17:51:35','2012-10-15 17:51:35','',1568,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1568-revision-9/',0,'revision','',0),(2829,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:35','2012-10-15 17:51:35','From 50,000 feet up, my greatest success is the development of our program of outreach and teaching, and sustaining it over nearly fifteen years.  In 1997/98, seven classes visited Special Collections &amp; Archives.  Last semester, I taught thirty-one class sessions.  The numbers document the growth of faculty interest in bringing their classes to SC&amp;A and the success of our outreach.  The value and enrichment to the curriculum and the students are, of course, harder to quantify.\r\n\r\nThe best, most rewarding experiences for me personally are those in which I can see the collections really come alive for students, when they come back to use our materials even when not required to do so, when their enthusiasm for archives and special collections is clearly evident.  There are many examples.  At the most basic level, I know that students are engaged when they show up with their parents during our open house at Homecoming/Family Weekend, and they tell their families enthusiastically about their visit with an introductory astronomy class in which they saw, among other items, some of Einstein’s manuscripts and artists’ books with astronomical themes.  This is a perfect example of how even the “dog and pony show” can reach students and provide a memorable experience.  At the other end of the spectrum, some students find materials first encountered in a class visit so intriguing that they spend a full year (or sometimes more) researching them as the focus of a senior thesis.  In recent years, we’ve had excellent theses centered on a 16<sup>th</sup> century German prayer book, a Shakespeare folio with 18<sup>th</sup> century annotations, Civil War letters written by a Wesleyan alumnus, and the papers of a faculty member from the 1930s-1950s, to name a few.  In all of these cases, students have done high level, truly original research that was sparked during a visit to Special Collections &amp; Archives.\r\n\r\nThere are non-curricular peak experiences as well.  From time to time, students use the University Archives to research family members who attended Wesleyan in the past.  These projects are often exciting in a deeply personal way for both the students and their families.  Perhaps the most memorable search for a Wesleyan ancestor ended up with a student weeping in our reading room, having found yearbook pictures and evidence of a vibrant social and intellectual life of a grandfather she had never known because he had committed suicide before she was born.  It’s hard for me to imagine an archival experience more moving than this.  Still, there have been many times over the years when students’ connections with our holdings, intellectual or emotional connections or both, have been deeply gratifying to me.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Taraba 3','','inherit','open','open','','1565-revision-9','','','2012-10-15 17:51:35','2012-10-15 17:51:35','',1565,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1565-revision-9/',0,'revision','',0),(2830,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:35','2012-10-15 17:51:35','Engagement is a clear benefit.  Many students are visibly excited, even awed, by their first visit to our Davison Rare Book Room, where the class sessions take place.  The room is itself beautiful, echoing an 18<sup>th</sup> century English gentleman’s library with glass fronted bookcases and walnut paneling.  The setting, combined with the intriguing materials presented, often inspires students to focus especially closely on the objects on display.  The “wow” factor helps to make the experience memorable.  While the visit to SC&amp;A and attendant procedures (such as signing in, using pencils only, stowing bags, etc.) could easily be intimidating for some students, we work hard to ensure that the department is welcoming and friendly so that students feel encouraged to return on their own.\r\n\r\nPedagogically and intellectually, first hand encounters with special collections and archives facilitate students’ thinking outside the box as they identify and pursue research topics.  Direct contact with primary sources can fuel students’ interests, and many students find captivating the detective work involved in teasing out meanings from unedited and unglossed documents.  Learning about the history and technology of the book opens students’ eyes to aspects of texts that can be far less evident with the ubiquitous electronic sources and secondary readings that fuel so much of their research.  Through studying rare books and other special collections, students begin to understand that marginalia, provenance, typography, design, binding, illustrations—all the physical aspects of specific copies of a book—offer avenues for viewing the book in the context of its own time.  They begin to appreciate the many people beside the author who helped create the physical book.  Often the study of these aspects of books help to frame the text in such a way that students can step outside themselves to evaluate it and analyze it not just from a 21<sup>st</sup> century point of view, but within the intellectual and historical context of its own time.\r\n\r\nOf course the active use of Special Collections &amp; Archives by undergraduates benefits the department and the library as well.  The deep integration of SC&amp;A into Wesleyan’s curriculum helps to ensure that we are not marginalized, that we are truly part of the University’s academic community, and that are materials are well (albeit carefully) used.  As circulating collections and electronic resources in academic libraries become more homogenous, the strengths of archives and special collections holdings are often what distinguish an academic library from its peers at other institutions.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Taraba 2','','inherit','open','open','','1562-revision-10','','','2012-10-15 17:51:35','2012-10-15 17:51:35','',1562,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1562-revision-10/',0,'revision','',0),(2831,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:35','2012-10-15 17:51:35','Since I came to Wesleyan nearly fifteen years ago, a key focus of my job has been outreach to the faculty, and thus the undergraduates, through the curriculum.  To this end, I teach thirty-five to fifty class sessions each academic year in Special Collections &amp; Archives (SC&amp;A).  Disciplines range from Astronomy to Writing, and just about everything in between.\r\n\r\nThough all class sessions have the common goal of raising undergraduate awareness of and interest in the holdings of SC&amp;A, each class presentation is different, based on both the subject of the course and the pedagogical purpose for which the materials will be used.  Some sessions take a classic “dog and pony show” approach, in which I—or sometimes the professor and I—present a group of interesting materials from our collections and talk briefly about each item, how it connects to the course, and/or how it might be used in the students’ research.  In other sessions, students take a more active role by doing an in-class assignment.  One such assignment we often use is the “mystery book exercise” that a history of science faculty member and I developed together.  “Mystery book” is a fun, fast-paced exercise that trains students to evaluate an unfamiliar source quickly and teaches information literacy skills using books or documents connected to the subject of the course.  After spending a few minutes looking at a book they haven’t seen before, students answer ten questions, which range from the (usually) easy identification of the author to more complex considerations of how the mystery book might inform their research.  Still other classes use the visit to SC&amp;A as preparation for an in-depth paper or project that requires, or at least strongly encourages, the use of materials in Special Collections &amp; Archives.  These longer assignments are as varied as the classes, and they include traditional term papers, documentary editing projects, artists’ books, and creative writing based on primary sources, among others.  For the full list of mystery book questions, other assignments, and comments from Wesleyan professors who use Special Collections &amp; Archives in teaching, see the online exhibition, <em><a href=\"http://oldbooks.site.wesleyan.edu/\">Old Books, New Pedagogy: Special Collections and Archives in the Curriculum</a></em>.\r\n\r\nOf course, not all the work I do with undergraduates is teaching them about archives and special collections in class settings.  Often class visits spark students’ use of SC&amp;A for other courses, senior theses or essays, co-curricular activities, or just simple personal interest.  In many of these cases, I work one-on-one with the students to help them identify relevant materials, focus topics, find related books or documents, understand the context – all typical functions of reference and instruction librarians.\r\n\r\nMuch of my recent professional activity has focused on teaching undergraduates using archives and special collections.  I’ve just completed co-editing a volume of case studies on this topic, entitled <em>Past or Portal? Enhancing Undergraduate Learning through Special Collections and Archives</em>.  The book, recently published by the the Association of College and Research Libraries, contains nearly fifty real-life examples of undergraduate curricular use of archives and special collections in a wide variety of institutions.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Taraba 1','','inherit','open','open','','1558-revision-13','','','2012-10-15 17:51:35','2012-10-15 17:51:35','',1558,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1558-revision-13/',0,'revision','',0),(2832,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:35','2012-10-15 17:51:35','I have addressed this above. I will just add that if you want to add archival work into your courses, you need to work closely with your librarians. Before you assume that students can have access to any rare materials, or that they can take notes on a rare book, or compare multiple manuscripts, check to see what the policies are of your special collections. And before you assume that your library does or does not have material relevant to your course, talk with the librarians. You might be surprised to learn that some books are too fragile to be handled, for instance, or that there’s a large number of books relevant to the history of science in the 1700s. No one knows a special collection better than its librarians, and they are your first resource and your first ally in making archival work relevant to your curriculum.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Werner 5','','inherit','open','open','','1553-revision-9','','','2012-10-15 17:51:35','2012-10-15 17:51:35','',1553,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1553-revision-9/',0,'revision','',0),(2833,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:35','2012-10-15 17:51:35','The first set of challenges is logistical: bringing students into the Library changed some of the Library’s usual operating procedures and has necessitated adjusting some of my own habits of teaching. The Undergraduate Program was the first time the Library allowed undergrads into the Library to conduct research in any sort of ongoing basis. (There has long been a fellowship for Amherst students that brings two or three students down to do research at the Library for a couple of weeks each year, but the intense use of rare materials and the duration of the fellowship are significantly different from the structure of the Undergraduate Seminars.) Even though the Library was supportive of my program and eager to help adjust policy, there was understandably some concern about how needy the students would be: Would they require a lot of supervision? Would they be asking for lots of assistance? Would they be disruptive to the other readers? (The answer, to all of these, is no: in part because of the intensive training they receive in the classroom about how to handle books and how to find the resources they need, the students are in many ways better prepared to work in the Reading Rooms than many others!) There were also procedural questions that needed to be resolved: before my program, rare materials were not routinely brought into the Library’s classrooms and were never handled by non-staff members in classrooms. Putting together a new policy on classroom use (how many items, how they could and could not be handled, the number of staff members necessary to supervise, etc.) was vital. It also wasn’t difficult, with the supportive curatorial staff. I did have to adjust my own teaching style. My preference is to decide what I’m going to do in any given class as I go along—I might decide to try a particular approach the day before class, if my sense of how the class is proceeding suggests it. But I cannot decide at the last minute to bring a set of rare books into this seminar room: rare materials need to be vetted by the curators in advance. That’s not a big obstacle, but just something I’ve needed to adjust to.\r\n\r\nA bigger challenge has been getting used to not having all the answers. My students come from a wide range of majors—English and History, to be sure, but I’ve also taught majors in French, Theology, Art History, Music, Drama, Medieval Studies, and Economics. And because I let them choose any work that was printed before 1700 for their research project, students often choose works that I’ve never heard of. What this means is that I need to learn along with them. A student working on <em>Utopia</em> is fairly easy; a student working on a Czech herbal is a lot harder to offer guidance. But this is also a challenge that’s fun and that is beneficial to both me and my students; if I knew everything, it would be boring for me and wouldn’t allow students room for discovery.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Werner 4','','inherit','open','open','','1550-revision-9','','','2012-10-15 17:51:35','2012-10-15 17:51:35','',1550,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1550-revision-9/',0,'revision','',0),(2834,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:36','2012-10-15 17:51:36','Oh my, this is a hard one to answer. Without intending to sound unbearably sappy, there are nearly too many moments of success for me to count! My favorite moments are those that come outside the seminar—when a student makes a connection between what we’ve been discussing and what another class of hers is doing, when a professor tells me that a former student has been teaching them all to pay attention to the textual history of a poem they’re reading, or when a former student sends me an email to point out a newspaper article about books they found interesting. All those moments mean that the lessons they’ve learned in our seminar are living on for them in other contexts.\r\n\r\nOther favorite moments have been when students have found something out about a book that is news to the Library’s catalogers. Given how tremendous the Folger catalogers are, that’s a hard one to do! But, for instance, one student was working on <em>The essayes of a prentise</em>, a book that had been written by King James in 1594, when he was James VI of Scotland and not yet James I of England. The student’s reading of the book was that it was deeply embedded in James as a Scottish monarch and an aspirant to the English throne, especially since the book was bound as a presentation copy to Lord Burghley. But the catalog record for the book, following standard name authority rules, listed the author as James I. Given the student’s research, however, the book’s record now includes a notes clarifying the nature of James’s title when it was written. (You can see a blog post I wrote about the book and this issue <a href=\"http://sarahwerner.net/blog/index.php/2009/09/essayes-of-a-prentise/\">here</a>; the catalog record for it is <a href=\"http://shakespeare.folger.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=163210\">here</a>.)\r\n\r\nAnother student was working on James Smith’s <em>The generall historie of Virginia</em> (1624) and was struck by its odd binding, in which one armorial device was stamped on top of another. The Folger’s catalog identified one of them as James I’s, but it took some joint sleuthing for her and I to work out that the stamp on top of James’s was that of George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham. As far as I can work out, no one else has noticed that, not the previous owners or booksellers nor the Library’s catalogers. (That record still doesn’t include the additional information about the binding because I haven’t yet brought it to their attention. But you can read about the book and see some pictures of the binding <a href=\"http://sarahwerner.net/blog/index.php/2011/04/an-armorial-binding-mystery/\">here</a>; the catalog record is <a href=\"http://shakespeare.folger.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=164134\">here</a>.)','Undergraduates in the Archives - Werner 3','','inherit','open','open','','1547-revision-8','','','2012-10-15 17:51:36','2012-10-15 17:51:36','',1547,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1547-revision-8/',0,'revision','',0),(2835,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:36','2012-10-15 17:51:36','I think the biggest benefit of bringing students into special collections through this course is that students own the process of discovery. In many undergraduate humanities courses, students learn about a subject through reading about it and, sometimes, conducting research on a topic of their choosing. But their research is rarely significant in terms of discovering new knowledge or generating a new perspective on something. Anyone who has taught a Shakespeare course can attest to the fact that even the best student papers don’t often contribute something new to the field of Shakespeare studies—they might be interesting, and insightful, and they might be genuinely exciting to the student, but they aren’t new. But when students work with primary materials in special collections, they can be working with something that no one else has considered before. Sure, lots of people have written about More’s <em>Utopia</em>, but no one else may have produced a history of the particular copy of the third English edition of his book that can now be found at the Folger with the call number STC 18096 Copy 1. More importantly, I have not done that either. In creating the biographies of their books, students are on their own, doing utterly original research. I can provide guidance, and so can generations of scholars before them, but students are not going to have that sinking feeling of realizing that somebody else has already written what they want to say, and has written it better.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nThat ownership of their research shifts how students see themselves as scholars. They are each experts on their own book, and everyone teaches everyone else when it comes to sharing insights into the nature of the book trade or the shape of authorship or the variety of book use. Students produce long research papers on their final biographies, having revised earlier drafts, rethought their assumptions, and spending countless hours in the library and at home on working through their books’ stories. It’s a consistent level of engagement with the material that I have not seen in other advanced-level seminars I’ve taught. Their papers routinely go above and beyond the expectations I have set for the projects; I’ve learned to suggest word limits as minimum expectations, not maximum cut-offs, since when I ask for a 3000-word paper, there are always students who have produced such rich research that they need 5000 words to do it justice.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nI suppose some might wonder what the scholarly benefit is of pouring all that energy into one copy of one edition of one book. But by limiting their attention to one copy, students have the room to fully explore the range of connections and complications for that book, and with that knowledge, students are able to extrapolate to the production of other books and to the ways in which knowledge passes from one generation to the next. The history of who read and collected the 1597 English <em>Utopia</em> over the centuries sheds light on our reading and use of the text today. More importantly, the skills students learn to explore that one book can be used to explore any book, even a book made after the hand-press period. And because students are genuinely excited by the sense of discovery, they absorb and retain those ideas, bringing them to their other courses and to their post-undergraduate lives. Being able to discover and being able to be real scholars as undergraduates opens up doors to them long after our class is done.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Werner 2','','inherit','open','open','','1544-revision-8','','','2012-10-15 17:51:36','2012-10-15 17:51:36','',1544,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1544-revision-8/',0,'revision','',0),(2836,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:36','2012-10-15 17:51:36','I am the director of the Undergraduate Program at the Folger Shakespeare Library, a program I created five years ago. It consists of two semester-long seminars in which students from universities in the D.C. area come to the Library to study book history and early modern culture. The goal of the seminars is for students to expand their knowledge of the period and their research skills by working hands-on with rare materials in the context of book history. The course is divided into three thematic concerns: books as physical objects (descriptive bibliography), books’ relationship to cultural forces (print culture), and books as vehicles for text (editorial theory and practice). By moving from how books are made to the economics of authorship and readers’ uses of books to how their manifestation in print affects books’ meanings, the course models different approaches to studying the histories of books and strives to explore how each approach is related to others. The class as a whole reads secondary sources in common (Darnton, McKenzie, McLeod, Sherman, Lesser) and class discussions make frequent use of rare materials brought into the classroom. When we discuss how books are printed, for instance, I will bring into class books that illustrate moments where the printing went askew—a misfoliated book, perhaps—in order to learn what the evidence of these mistakes can teach us about the process of making a book. Or we will devote a session to looking at bibles from the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries in order to see how their physical appearance changes, to explore how physical characteristics suggest different ways to read and use the bibles, and to examine what they might reveal about cultural and religious battles.\r\n\r\nAt the same time the class works together on these discussions, each student is studying one book that they have chosen to focus on. With their own book, they research who its makers were (both authors/translators/compilers and printers/publishers/booksellers), who its intended audience was, and who later users and collectors might have been. At the end of the semester, each student produces a biography of their book, using their primary research and the book’s physical characteristics to tell the story of the book’s life, from inception through its afterlife as both text and object.\r\n\r\nIn both of these ways, working with rare materials is integral to the course and to the students’ learning experience. Students in the class are Readers at the Library on the same terms that any other scholar given a Reader’s Card is: they can use any of the modern and rare materials in our collections that are not normally restricted. They come to the Library weekly for the seminar and return to the Library regularly to conduct their research for the class. Their Reader’s Cards are good for twelve months, so students can return to the Library after the seminar is done to carry on their own research. In other words, through the Undergraduate Seminar, students learn not only to use rare materials in their studies, but to be citizens of rare materials libraries.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Werner 1','','inherit','open','open','','1541-revision-9','','','2012-10-15 17:51:36','2012-10-15 17:51:36','',1541,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1541-revision-9/',0,'revision','',0),(2837,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:36','2012-10-15 17:51:36','As an undergraduate, I felt like the archive primed me to search for pristine differences between the past and present, as if the past is a foreign country I was visiting while in the archive and must be translated into a more modern language. Yet the evidence I worked with was rarely so easily explained on the page. Similarities across time were often differences in addition. There was also the logistical challenge of gauging the depth of a semester-long archival project. I had the classic Goldilocks problem of finding a research question that was neither too big nor too small.\r\n\r\nThe added obstacle is that undergraduates rarely devote their time to academics as faithfully as graduate students and faculty do. As an undergraduate, I was juggling internships, part-time jobs, and community service with my class work. Before I started my undergraduate archival work, I usually resolved the logistical tangles by relegating reading and writing to the wee morning hours. When I needed to start visiting collections around New York City, this wasn’t so easy. I started setting aside time to commute uptown to the New York Public Library, for example, while giving myself enough time to grab lunch and get back downtown for class.\r\n\r\nThe challenge was manageable on a practical level, but also on a conceptual one. Undergraduates – and I include myself when I was one – tend to think that setting aside business hours for internships will help develop the practical skills necessary for landing the perfect job after graduation. And there’s no denying that internships can be useful in teaching the rigors of the workplace. But when we design courses for undergraduates, requiring them to spend time actively engaged in searching and <em>re</em>-searching, the pace and tenor of undergraduate study changes. In my experience, substituting work done alone late in my apartment for the work of talking with librarians, archivists, and other experts, was a far more meaningful undergraduate experience, and something that was actually easily marketable for a job interview.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Gotkin 5','As an undergraduate, I felt like the archive primed me to search for pristine differences between the past and present, as if the past is a foreign country I was visiting while in the archive and must be translated into a more modern language. Yet the evidence I worked with was rarely so easily explained on the page. ','inherit','open','open','','1536-revision-9','','','2012-10-15 17:51:36','2012-10-15 17:51:36','',1536,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1536-revision-9/',0,'revision','',0),(2838,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:36','2012-10-15 17:51:36','Undergraduate archival work can be like learning to ride a bike without training wheels. In most classes, the readings and discussions act as essential compasses in guiding the student through the semester. In the archive, most—if not all—bets are off: there are rarely already-made tutorials on organizing and making sense of the productive entropy that often marks an archive. How are we to situate a newly discovered text if we haven’t even finished our undergraduate prerequisite courses?\r\n\r\nFor me, the most challenging moments in the archive were the earliest, both because I was adjusting to the demands of archival methods and because I had only a small number of anchoring texts echoing in my head to help me make sense of anything I found. In fact, I probably missed a number of promising leads in the archive because I didn’t know to look for.\r\n\r\nA good friend and I won a small grant at NYU for a research project about marginalia. We were to trace the marginalia of a particular ancient religious text, the Hermes Trismegistus. While I was scouring libraries in Paris for the history of the text’s early translation, my partner was in New York looking for evidence of contemporary readers’ marks on the book. My job was to plot the ancient scribbles, which seemed easy enough before I actually entered the stacks. (FIG. 3) I was looking for the text itself while piecing together others’ accounts of the its migrations. <span class=\"caption right\" style=\"width: 200px; padding-left: 20px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/gotkin_fig3.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2333 \" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\" title=\"gotkin_fig3\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/gotkin_fig3-190x250.jpg\" alt=\"Figure 3\" width=\"190\" height=\"250\" /></a> Figure 3: Depiction of the god Hermes Trismegistus (courtesy of Roanoke College)</span> As it turns out, the Hermes Trismegistus is an enduringly baffling historical object and its ancestry is riddled with gaps. A more experienced researcher would know how to explain this fitful history and perhaps use the inconsistencies and question marks as launching pads for substantive contributions. But since it was my first time in the archive for a sustained and labor-intensive project, they instead weighed on me like chains. Not only did I have trouble tracing the marginalia themselves, I had trouble explaining how I was having trouble.\r\n\r\nI realize now that this situation is not so much overcome with academic training as it is more efficiently handled. That moment of chaos and crisis is in fact a prerequisite to clear thinking, in my experience. As an undergraduate, I was overwhelmed by the disorder of the archival process, but then again, these troubles might have been the best training.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Gotkin 4','Undergraduate archival work can be like learning to ride a bike without training wheels. In most classes, the readings and discussions act as essential compasses in guiding the student through the semester. In the archive, most—if not all—bets are off: there are rarely already-made tutorials on organizing and making sense of the productive entropy that often marks an archive. ','inherit','open','open','','1533-revision-14','','','2012-10-15 17:51:36','2012-10-15 17:51:36','',1533,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1533-revision-14/',0,'revision','',0),(2839,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:36','2012-10-15 17:51:36','In one of my undergraduate courses, a professor handed out a checklist for good archival research. The last item on the list was simply, “Get lucky.” My most meaningful archival work has indeed been the pleasures of spelunking around archives hoping to come upon a hidden gem. In my junior year of college, I studied abroad in Paris where I took a class on global media structures. Like many graduate-level courses, the final paper was an individual research project rather than a paper born of the class readings and discussions. I knew that my home department in New York offered a course called “Hacker Culture &amp; Politics,” which I ended up taking as soon as I returned. In anticipation of that course, I contacted the professor, Biella Coleman, to ask if she had any contacts in Paris who work on hacking. After a series of e-mail introductions through friends of friends, I got in touch with the head of a hacker space just outside of Paris.<span class=\"caption right\" style=\"width: 200px; margin-left: 20px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/gotkin_fig2.png\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2332\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\" title=\"gotkin_fig2\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/gotkin_fig2-199x250.png\" alt=\"Figure 2\" width=\"199\" height=\"250\" /></a> Figure 2: Example of a typical French hacker e-zine c. 1994</span>\r\n\r\nAlthough I originally intended to study a contemporary aspect of hacking, I ended up with a historical project. After talking with a few French hackers on Internet Relay Chat, it became clear that the early French hacker scene was highly ritualized around electronic magazines, e-zines. Ultimately, I wrote the paper in which I drew from about 70 different e-zines sent over digital bulletin board systems and the nascent Internet. (FIG. 2) Getting access to the e-zines was not easy and in the end, I amassed my own archive. Mine was not the image of the archive-as-dungeon, but instead the archive-as-disk-space. Perhaps as difficult to catalog and maintain as any rare book collection (if not more so), the e-ezines I collected were infinitely reproducible and accessible from anywhere, even after I left France.\r\n\r\nArchival practices change when the historical subject is itself born digital. The challenge of marshaling evidence around a research question is no less important, but the dematerialized archive demands new techniques of investigation. What happens, for example, when we can do archival research from a coffee shop? The absence of the physical walls in a traditional archive might become a new figurative challenge. What is archival work without being literally surrounded by material? These are the questions that productively vex my research. The digital archive has become my greatest success because it provided me with a set of substantive and methodological questions that continue to complicate and broaden my research years later.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Gotkin 3','In one of my undergraduate courses, a professor handed out a checklist for good archival research. The last item on the list was simply, “Get lucky.” My most meaningful archival work has indeed been the pleasures of spelunking around archives hoping to come upon a hidden gem.  In my junior year of college, I studied abroad in Paris where I took a class on global media structures. ','inherit','open','open','','1530-revision-12','','','2012-10-15 17:51:36','2012-10-15 17:51:36','',1530,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1530-revision-12/',0,'revision','',0),(2840,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:36','2012-10-15 17:51:36','My experience in the archive directly contributed to my interest in graduate school, which is perhaps unsurprising when you think about the demands of archival work. The move from undergraduate to graduate study shares the guiding principles of archival work. You must first learn what others have said before the foray into the topics that demand further examination. Archival research, in this sense, is the unending game of hide-and-seek with that perfect research subject we yen for in each new project, class, and semester.\r\n\r\nAside from its importance in the training of future scholars, archival work is an important paradigm even for students who have less professional allegiances to the academy. Original research is a principle worth thinking about closely in undergraduate course design, as it signifies the marketable job placement skills that are supposed to be evidence of proper university training. In the 1997 <em>Harper’s Magazine</em> essay “On the Uses of a Liberal Education,” Mark Edmundson suggests undergraduate study has become “lite entertainment for bored college students.” He writes, “University culture, like American culture writ large, is, to put it crudely, ever more devoted to consumption and entertainment, to the using and using up of goods and images.”<a href=\"#_ftn1\">[1]</a> Edmundson goes on to argue that the transactional nature of undergraduate study creates an imbalance between what professors look to put into a syllabus and what students seek to get out of it. But if we think about archival research as a process of skill development, it just may serve as a corrective to the literal and figurative banking concept of education.\r\n\r\nArchival work is often thought to be opposed methodologically to new media research techniques, an unfair corollary being that undergraduates, as “digital natives,” must learn and maintain a skill set in the archive apart from their new media literacy. How, for example, should undergraduates navigate the thick mess of a paper archive when Facebook and Twitter are their daily information grounds? If the job market is increasingly concerned with social media, why should students spend time poring over “dead” technologies? Contrary to the notion that the archive and new media are irreconcilable, we might instead think of them as complementary educational forces. It is no coincidence, for example, that undergraduates in the archive are more likely to be keen and discerning arbiters of information.\r\n<div id=\"_ftn1\" class=\"footnote\">[1] Mark Edmundson, “On the Uses of a Liberal Education: I. As Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students,” <em>Harper’s Magazine</em>, September 1997, 40.</div>','Undergraduates in the Archives - Gotkin 2','My experience in the archive directly contributed to my interest in graduate school, which is perhaps unsurprising when you think about the demands of archival work. The move from undergraduate to graduate study shares the guiding principles of archival work.','inherit','open','open','','1527-revision-18','','','2012-10-15 17:51:36','2012-10-15 17:51:36','',1527,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1527-revision-18/',0,'revision','',0),(2842,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:36','2012-10-15 17:51:36','<em>The Vodou Archive</em> is being unveiled currently (spring of 2012) in my course “Introduction to Haitian Vodou.” On a weekly basis, different parts of the archive will be highlighted and students will be expected to visit the digital library to read or view the assigned materials. In order to stress the importance of <em>The Vodou Archive</em> as a digital library, I will also require that students write essays about some of its components. As Florida has numerous active Vodou communities, students will be encouraged to produce materials for the archive—photographs or recordings from Vodou ceremonies and rituals, for example.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nThe work undertaken in collaboration with undergraduates to produce <em>Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English</em> and <em>The Vodou Archive</em> has been integrated into the curriculum in numerous ways. For example, students are assigned reading materials that spring from the collaboration. Based on the topics selected for essays, students are encouraged to read or examine parts of <em>The Vodou Archive</em>; for example, students who want to write about how Catholic chromolithographs camouflage Vodou <em>lwa</em> (spirits) are encouraged to visit the selection in <em>The Vodou Archive</em> (<a href=\"http://www.dloc.com/AA00008694/allvolumes2\">click here</a>); other students might need photographic data about Vodou (<a href=\"http://www.dloc.com/AA00005507/00001/thumbs\">click here</a>); other students may need to consult important but hard to find works such as Arthur Holly’s (1928) <em>Dra-po</em> (<a href=\"http://www.dloc.com/UF00076958\">click here</a>); finally, some students will want to listen to rare recordings made by Maya Deren held exclusively by <em>The Vodou Archive</em> (<a href=\"http://www.dloc.com/UF00082017\">click here</a>). <em>The Vodou Archive</em> is rich and diverse assemblage of documents; while not all of it can be directly included in the curriculum for all students, individual students are encouraged to branch into the parts of the archive that are relevant to their own work.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nAnother way that I will increase student contributions to <em>The Vodou Archive</em> will be through the creation of <em>The</em> <em>Vodou Journal</em>, a planned dimension of the digital archive: 10 of the students’ best essays will be submitted to <em>The</em> <em>Vodou Journal </em>for peer review and possible publication. I hope that this unique opportunity for undergraduates to make a significant contribution to the scholarship on Vodou and will also stimulate greater attention to writing and also introduce undergraduates to the process of scholarly publishing in general.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Hebblethwaite 5','<em>The Vodou Archive</em> is being unveiled currently (spring of 2012) in my course “Introduction to Haitian Vodou.” On a weekly basis, different parts of the archive will be highlighted and students will be expected to visit the digital library to read or view the assigned materials.  In order to stress the importance of <em>The Vodou Archive</em> as a digital library, I will also require that students write essays about some of its components.','inherit','open','open','','1516-revision-10','','','2012-10-15 17:51:36','2012-10-15 17:51:36','',1516,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1516-revision-10/',0,'revision','',0),(2843,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:36','2012-10-15 17:51:36','The major challenges in writing and editing <em>Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English</em> and <em>The Vodou Archive</em> are the profusion of variant spelling systems found in Haitian Creole until 1980. Most Haitian-Americans I work with at the University of Florida have limited exposure to written Haitian Creole prior to enrolling in my courses. After a year of intermediate Haitian Creole, it is typical to still misspell certain words. Given that the source texts they work from routinely employ spelling conventions that are no longer current, it is also common for undergraduate research assistants to reproduce the outdated spelling, especially in the cases of words that refer to concepts that are unfamiliar to them. The source text in (a) below, taken from scholar Milo Marcelin (1950), illustrates the base from which transcription (b) and translation (c) were produced:\r\n\r\n(a)\r\n\r\n(b) (c)\r\n\r\nDanbala Wèdo se koulèv dlo! Danbala Wèdo is the water snake!\r\n\r\nChèche Danbala, ki bò w a wè li? Look for Danbala, where will you see him?\r\n\r\nPapa Danbala se koulèv dlo, Papa Danbala is the water snake,\r\n\r\nli plonje anba dlo! he dives under water!\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nIn texts like this one, it is common for research assistants to import words like <em>Oueddo </em>uncorrected, or to accidently retain the “c” in <em>coulève </em>instead of writing the official <em>koulèv</em>. This impacted my work as it required that I extensively edit the students’ work and send it back for review and correction; while labor intensive, the feedback provided the students with the opportunity to master the transcription of Haitian Creole and the translation into English. Students will learn from their mistakes if they can see what they are and have the chance to correct them. It is also common for students to import erroneous grammatical analyses by writing “wa” following <em>oua</em> (in line two), a minor confusion in which separate words are conflated. The correct representation of <em>oua </em>is “<em>w a</em>” (‘you will’ or ‘will you,’ when used interrogatively as in the above). As senior editor, I had the challenge of constantly encountering traces of outdated spellings that research assistants had unwittingly imported into their transcription.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nThe quality of the work of the undergraduates varied widely. The nuances of the mythology, the ‘cryptic tricksterism’  of Vodou semantics, and the rich—and obscure—idioms, expressions, and conceptualizations of the Haitian Creole language meant that all the texts required years of refinement through the editorial process which is based upon countless critical re-readings from various points of view. Thus working with undergraduates is rewarding but requires mentoring and patience due to their limited experience.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Hebblethwaite 4','The major challenges in writing and editing <em>Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English</em> and <em>The Vodou Archive</em> are the profusion of variant spelling systems found in Haitian Creole until 1980. Most Haitian-Americans I work with at the University of Florida have limited exposure to written Haitian Creole prior to enrolling in my courses.','inherit','open','open','','1513-revision-9','','','2012-10-15 17:51:36','2012-10-15 17:51:36','',1513,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1513-revision-9/',0,'revision','',0),(2844,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:36','2012-10-15 17:51:36','The positive responses I received from publishers reinforced my sense that this project would be viable.  In addition to this standard measure of academic success, the project itself was very successful as an intellectual and practical collaboration. The undergraduate collaborators worked vigorously and productively, helping to quickly advance the project. Vodou religion itself is a communal phenomenon. Likewise, I want the book and <em>The Vodou Archive</em> to express the unity of our collaboration as a means of ensuring accuracy through multiple voices and perspectives. Plus, as someone who was not raised within Vodou religion, I sensed that my scholarship on Haitian religion and its primary language, Haitian Creole, would benefit from extensive refereeing from a wide variety of informants: from <em>oungan </em>(priests), <em>manbo </em>(priestesses), <em>bòkò </em>(diviners), <em>ounsi</em> (initiates), scholars of all stripes, as well as students in my classes and the students directly involved in the project. As sharp intellectuals in their own right, these students participated in a triangular working methodology (myself, my students, and Vodou practitioners) that helped ensure quality. They lent their talents to the correcting, fashioning, and polishing of the final product. The book and <em>The Vodou Archive</em> are the direct result of sharing texts and ideas through cooperative study, writing, and editing. As several students have native command of Haitian Creole, they were able to bring their deep knowledge and instincts of the language to the tasks I assigned them. Overall, it is the friendship and collegiality of working with people from all the walks of life, and the experience of discovery, that has made, and continues to make, this project a great success for me. Writing and editing for academics is often a solitary activity. The work with undergraduate research assistants transformed the experience into a textual conversation about the nature and design of Vodou religion.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Hebblethwaite 3','The positive responses I received from publishers reinforced my sense that this project would be viable.  In addition to this standard measure of academic success, the project itself was very successful as an intellectual and practical collaboration. The undergraduate collaborators worked vigorously and productively, helping to quickly advance the project. Vodou religion itself is a communal phenomenon. ','inherit','open','open','','1510-revision-8','','','2012-10-15 17:51:36','2012-10-15 17:51:36','',1510,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1510-revision-8/',0,'revision','',0),(2845,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:36','2012-10-15 17:51:36','There were many benefits working with these undergraduates. The undergraduates selected to work for this project were balanced bilinguals who demonstrated robust literacy in English and Haitian Creole, which I was able to assess since they had taken my intermediate Haitian Creole course. The State of Florida has a large Haitian-American population that is second only to New York State; and, positioned at the Flagship University of the State, I instruct a significant number of Haitians and Haitian-Americans who have an advanced command of spoken and written Haitian Creole. Due to this strength, it is only natural to cultivate and tap into these talents for the benefit of their professional development and for the momentum of this project. As Haitian Creole is the third most spoken language in the State of Florida after English and Spanish, developing advanced literacy in the language benefits employment prospects and it empowers individuals to seek out unique  knowledge that exists only in Haitian Creole. Bilingual and biliterate candidates for employment in Florida’s healthcare industry, tourism industry, government, law enforcement and judiciary system, transportation and a host of other industries stand out next to their monolingual peers. Mastery of literacy in two languages is beneficial because knowledge can be acquired and shared via different mediums; individuals with these skills can facilitate communication, accuracy and productivity.\r\n\r\nComplex and large projects like <em>Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English</em> and <em>The Vodou Archive</em>—projects that overlap with specialized aspects of culture and language—are best done, I think, in collaboration with others. Since many of the texts are at first obscure, it is helpful to have several individuals bring unique knowledge and skills to the task of translation and interpretation. Each undergraduate editorial assistant has a unique mastery of Haitian Creole and English. Since material is parsed and analyzed by various editorial assistants, over time the collaboration allows for the emergence of an accurate collective transcription and translation. Given their fluency in Haitian Creole and English, the undergraduates provided outstanding transcriptions and translations of Vodou songs and interviews with Vodou practitioners that I could edit and improve upon for the book or <em>The Vodou Archive</em>.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Hebblethwaite 2','There were many benefits working with these undergraduates. The undergraduates selected to work for this project were balanced bilinguals who demonstrated robust literacy in English and Haitian Creole, which I was able to assess since they had taken my intermediate Haitian Creole course. ','inherit','open','open','','1507-revision-8','','','2012-10-15 17:51:36','2012-10-15 17:51:36','',1507,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1507-revision-8/',0,'revision','',0),(2846,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:36','2012-10-15 17:51:36','<em>The Vodou Archive</em> is a collaborative partnership spearheaded by the University of Florida and Duke University which seeks to improve the understanding of a central Haitian and Haitian-American spiritual tradition by gathering the <strong>audiovisual</strong> and <strong>textual</strong> sources of Vodou communities, by <strong>interpreting</strong> what we collect, by <strong>expanding </strong>the holdings through a <strong>self-submission tool</strong>, and by diffusing the knowledge via an open access digital library.  You can find the current prototype here (<a href=\"http://www.dloc.com/vodou\">http://www.dloc.com/vodou</a>),  hosted within the existing <a href=\"http://dloc.com/\">Digital Library of the Caribbean</a> (dLOC). In addition to the 27 international partners working with the Digital Library of the Caribbean, collaborators from the University of Notre Dame, the University of Miami, the Schrijversvakschool, Florida International University, the Université des Antilles et de la Guyane, and City Lore, among others, will contribute elements to <strong><em>The Vodou Archive</em></strong>. This project belongs to a tradition of scholarly work stretching back to the early 20<sup>th</sup> century that has sought to counter reductionist and racist visions of the religion through ethnography, analysis of culture and music, and an exploration of the role of Vodou in Haiti’s founding revolution. Such work has long turned to the central texts in Haitian Vodou: its <strong>Creole-language songs</strong>.\r\n\r\nBuilding on my <em>Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English</em>,<a href=\"#_ftn1\">[1]</a> <em>The Vodou Archive</em> project makes these songs available in Haitian Creole and English along with substantial interpretative annotations and essays to contextualize the collection. The materials to be edited and curated in <em>The Vodou Archive</em> are of major literary, historical, cultural and religious significance. The vast Vodou corpus stands out because it preserves a wealth of African cultural, ethnological and historical knowledge.<a href=\"#_ftn2\">[2]</a> (Beauvoir 2008b). The oral and textual corpora of songs are comprised of the authentic and living traditions of the Vodou religion. They are primarily the songs that are sung in the context of Vodou worship in public and domestic ceremonies and they constitute the sacred literature of the religion. Vodou songs, a constant in ceremonies, address the mythologies and characteristics of the lwa and they describe their relations with humans. Vodou songs are time capsules that reveal the history and origins of the Haitian people in Africa, their journey to the Americas in the French slave trade, and their lives in the French colony. Due to their sacred nature, they are very well-preserved records of African and Haitian history and culture.<a href=\"#_ftn3\">[3]</a>). Ceremonies and songs preserve African historical (i.e. <em>Bosou</em>, <em>Achade</em>, <em>Legba</em>, <em>Danbala</em>), cultural (i.e. <em>lwa</em>,<em> ounsi</em>, <em>ason</em>,<em> oungan</em>) and geographical (i.e. <em>Rada</em>, <em>Savalou</em>, <em>Boumba</em>) terms in a creolized or blended religious and cultural system.<a href=\"#_ftn4\">[4]</a> <a href=\"#_msocom_1\">[C1]</a> Likewise, there are numerous Vodou ceremonies (rites) classified by the African <em>nanchon </em>(nations/communities) where they originate, i.e. Rada, Petwo, Ginen, Seneka, Ibo, Danwonmen, Nago, Kongo, Kita, etc.<a href=\"#_ftn5\">[5]</a>\r\n\r\nUndergraduates played, and will play, a key role in this archive.  They contributed first drafts of transcriptions and translations of Vodou songs and interviews with Vodou practitioners for the book, <em>Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English</em> (Hebblethwaite 2012). The undergraduate students worked on transcribing and translating interviews that I collected from Vodou priests in Haiti and they also transcribed and translated rare pre-existing published materials.<a href=\"#_ftn6\">[6]</a>   The students, Joanne Bartley, Vanessa Brissault, Kat Warwick, Wilmide Vernet, and Musset Apollon, were either paid hourly through grant funding or they earned credit for an independent study. We worked from manuscripts that employ a range of Haitian Creole spelling systems. The official variety, the “IPN,” named after the <em>Institut Pédagogique National</em>, was adopted for the first time in 1980. Many of our manuscripts predate 1980 and thus transcription required heavy correction and consultation with lexicographical works.<a href=\"#_ftn7\">[7]</a>The students had been exposed to the official variety of Haitian Creole spelling in my intermediate Haitian Creole course. After establishing the Haitian Creole source text, the students next produced the first draft of the English translation. I then corrected the Haitian Creole and English drafts in various cycles as the materials moved towards the finished products, the book or the Vodou Archive.  (See Figure 1, and for the related Vodou Archive digital library, Figures 2 &amp; 3.)<span class=\"caption\" style=\"width: 166px; margin-bottom: 20px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/hebbelthwaite_fig1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2358\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px; margin-right: 10px;\" title=\"hebbelthwaite_fig1\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/hebbelthwaite_fig1-166x250.jpg\" alt=\"Figure 1\" width=\"166\" height=\"250\" /></a> Figure 1: The book cover of Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English.</span>\r\n\r\n<span class=\"caption left\" style=\"margin-right: 20px; width: 266px; clear: none;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/hebbelthwaite_fig2.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-2359\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\" title=\"hebbelthwaite_fig2\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/hebbelthwaite_fig2-333x208.jpg\" alt=\"Figure 2\" width=\"266\" height=\"166\" /></a> Figure 2: The homepage of the Vodou Archive.</span><span class=\"caption left\" style=\"margin-right: 10px; width: 266px; clear: none;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/hebbelthwaite_fig3.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-2360\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px; clear: right;\" title=\"hebbelthwaite_fig3\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/hebbelthwaite_fig3-333x208.jpg\" alt=\"Figure 3\" width=\"266\" height=\"166\" /></a> Figure 3: This screen shot presents the view inside of the Vodou Archive with the filter menu for narrowing results on the left hand side of the screen.</span>\r\n<div class=\"footnotes\"><br clear=\"all\" />\r\n<div id=\"_ftn1\" class=\"footnote\">[1] Benjamin Hebblethwaite and Joanne Bartley, <em>Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English </em> <em>= Chante vodou an kreyòl ayisyen ak angle</em> (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012).</div>\r\n<div id=\"_ftn2\" class=\"footnote\">[2] Max Beauvoir, <em>Le Grand Recueil Sacré ou Répertoire des Chansons du Vodou Haïtien </em>(Port-au-Prince: Edisyon Près Nasyonal d Ayiti, 2008).</div>\r\n<div id=\"_ftn3\" class=\"footnote\">[3] Claudine Michel, “Vodou in Haiti: Way of Life and Mode of Survival,” in <em>Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture: Invisible Powers, </em>ed. Claudine Michel and Patrick Bellegarde-Smith (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 27–37.<em></em></div>\r\n<div id=\"_ftn4\" class=\"footnote\">[4] See Roger Brand, <em>Cultes vodoun et textes oraux des Wéménou du sud Bénin </em>(Munich: Lincom Europa, 2000), 15; Marc Monsia, <em>Religions indigènes et savoir endogène au Bénin </em>(Cotonou, Benin: Les Éditions du Flamboyant, 2003); Gilbert Rouget, <em>La musique et la transe </em>(Paris: Gallimard, 1991 (1980)); and Gilbert Rouget, <em>Initiatique vôdoun, images du rituel: Chants et danses initiatiques pour le culte des vôdoun au Bénin </em>(Saint-Maur, France: Éditions Sépia, 2001), v.</div>\r\n<div id=\"_ftn5\" class=\"footnote\">[5] Max G. Beauvoir, <em>Lapriyè Ginen </em>(Port-au-Prince: Edisyon Près Nasyonal d Ayiti. 2008), 109-110.</div>\r\n<div id=\"_ftn6\" class=\"footnote\">[6] Milo Marcelin, <em>Mythologie Vodou (Rite Arada)</em>,<em> </em>2 vols. (Pétionville: Éditions Canapé Vert, 1950); Laura Boulton, “Laura Boulton’s Songs” (1947), in <em>Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English = Chante vodou an kreyòl ayisyen ak angle</em>, eds. Benjamin Hebblethwaite and Joanne Bartley (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012), 127-145;  J.L., “J.L. Songs,” in <em>Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English</em>,<em> </em>147-184; Harold Courlander, unpublished manuscript (1939–1940), University of Michigan Special Collections Library; Milo Rigaud, <em>La tradition voudoo et le voudoo haïtien: Son temple, ses mystères, sa magie </em>(Paris: Éditions Niclaus, 1953).</div>\r\n<div id=\"_ftn7\" class=\"footnote\">[7] Albert Valdman, Iskra Iskrova, Jacques Pierre, and Nicolas André, <em>Haitian Creole-English Bilingual Dictionary</em> (Bloomington, IN: Creole Institute, 2007); Bryant Freeman and Jowel Laguerre, <em>Haitian-English Dictionary</em>, 5th ed. (Lawrence, KS: Institute of Haitian Studies, 2004).</div>\r\n<div id=\"_msoanchor_1\" class=\"footnote\">[C1] The Brand citation is here. The original reference is: (Brand 2000: 15; Monsia 2003; Rouget 1991, 2001: v).  Which of the two Brand books should be referenced (I chose 2000a, but that could be wrong)?</div>\r\n</div>','Undergraduates in the Archives - Hebblethwaite 1','The Vodou Archive is a collaborative partnership spearheaded by the University of Florida and Duke University which seeks to improve the understanding of a central Haitian and Haitian-American spiritual tradition by gathering the audiovisual and textual sources of Vodou communities, by interpreting what we collect, by expanding the holdings through a self-submission tool, and by diffusing the knowledge via an open access digital library.  ','inherit','open','open','','1504-revision-25','','','2012-10-15 17:51:36','2012-10-15 17:51:36','',1504,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1504-revision-25/',0,'revision','',0),(2847,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:36','2012-10-15 17:51:36','Ed Folsom has written that one of the goals of the Whitman Archive is to “grow the database so that the surprises of searching and juxtaposing will become richer and more frequent.\" Folsom’s vision is that the Whitman Archive will become not only a centralized repository for all of Whitman’s texts, but also a discovery tool for exploring what he calls “the wild and unpredictable intersections of the data that the interface allows us to generate.”[ref]Ed Folsom, “Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives,” <em>PMLA</em> 112.5 (2007): 1609-10.[/ref] The prospect of having the Archive uncover meaningful relationships between texts is, indeed, an exciting one. As Jonathan Freedman notes, the “ability to link heterogeneous subjects and find once-occulted connections and interconnections makes scholarship invigoratingly fun.”[ref]Jonathan Freedman, “Whitman, Database, Information Culture,” <em>PMLA</em> 112.5 (2007): 1597.[/ref] As a frequent user of the Whitman Archive, I’ve experienced this “invigorating fun” first-hand, and I look forward to the Archive including more texts by and about Whitman, and incorporating more discovery tools like Brian Pytlik Zillig’s <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/resources/tools/index.html\">TokenX</a>.\r\n\r\nAs someone working on digital humanities projects of my own, however, I’m as interested in understanding what it takes to create such tools for discovery as I am the end-user experience of having digital tools make “unpredictable” and “invigorating” discoveries on my behalf. For the remainder of this essay, I’m going to share some thoughts on what has to happen on the back end of a digital project in order to make an otherwise rigorously structured digital artifact feel “wild and unpredictable” to its users. I’ll start with Kenneth M. Price’s description of the necessary labor that goes into structuring data such that it will yield surprising results for end users: \"A database is not an undifferentiated sea of information out of which structure emerges,” Price writes. “Argument is always there from the beginning in how those constructing a database choose to categorize information.\"[ref]Price, “Edition.”[/ref] To an end user who searches a database and finds an interesting juxtaposition between a handful of the hundreds (or thousands) of total documents on that database, it can seem as if those documents have emerged out of “an undifferentiated sea of information.” The reality, however, is far different.\r\n\r\nWhen Price alludes to the process that the creators of a database go through as they decide how to “categorize information,” he makes it clear that whenever a user generates a surprising set of juxtapositions between documents it is because someone, somewhere, at some point, has meticulously categorized those documents in such a way that a search engine (or other text analysis tool) will be able to process those documents in a meaningful way. Jerome McGann, who has also commented on the rigorous process of structuring data that is required to create a digital archive, writes that “databases and all digital instruments require the most severe kinds of categorical forms. The power of database—of digital instruments in general—rests in its ability to draw sharp, disambiguated distinctions.”[ref]Jerome McGann, “Database, Interface, and Archival Fever,” <em>PMLA</em> 112.5 (2007): 1590.[/ref] As both Price and McGann indicate, what can feel like a surprising juxtaposition for the end user has, to a certain extent, already been determined in advance through a time- and labor-intensive process of marking-up, encoding, or otherwise categorizing data.\r\n\r\nThis is not to say that those who structure the data for a digital archive have already anticipated every possible search string that users could ever imagine. On the contrary, what interests me as both the user and the creator of digital archives is the effect by which this “sharp, disambiguated” structuring of data can, indeed, produce juxtapositions that archivists could never have predicted. The fundamental preconditions for cultivating such serendipitous discoveries, it seems to me, are a large enough data set and a sufficiently intelligent schema for categorizing that data (not to mention the time, money, software, hardware, human resources, and expertise required to process and categorize the data in the first place).\r\n\r\nAllow me to cite an example from outside the realm of digital archiving to illustrate what’s involved in structuring data that yields serendipitous juxtapositions. Pandora Radio is an Internet music service whose goal is to create customized, online radio stations for its users. This customization is based on the work of the Music Genome Project, which has categorized the musical attributes of thousands of different songs. Taking into consideration “everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and . . . singing and vocal harmony,” the Music Genome Project assigns anywhere between 150 and 400 different descriptors to a single song. These descriptors are based on both objective criteria such as the types of instruments used in the song or whether the song is in a major or a minor key, as well as more subjective criteria such as whether or not a song features “Acoustic Sonority,” “Prevalent Use of Groove,” or a “Wet Recording Sound.\"[ref]“The Music Genome Project,” Pandora Radio, accessed December 2, 2010 <a href=\"http://www.pandora.com/mgp.shtml\">http://www.pandora.com/mgp.shtml</a>.[/ref] (These descriptors are referred to as musical “genes,” but they could just as easily be called metadata or tags.) Visitors to Pandora Radio type in the name of a song that they like, and then based on the attributes that have been pre-assigned to that song, Pandora will play other songs with similar attributes. The promise of Pandora is that once a database of songs is categorized according to a controlled vocabulary capable of being processed by a computer, listeners will be pleasantly surprised to discover songs that they never knew they already liked. (These songs are, of course, available for purchase so that no serendipitous discovery goes un-capitalized.)\r\n\r\nI cite this example within the context of the Whitman Archive not necessarily because Pandora Radio provides a model for digital scholarship of nineteenth-century literature, but because the process of categorizing songs for the Music Genome Project is remarkably similar to the archivist’s effort of structuring data in such a way that it can produce surprising results for the end user. For both Pandora and the Whitman Archive, then, the goal is to reach the tipping point where methodical structuring becomes unexpected discovery, where the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing and structured data takes on forms that the structure-ers never quite imagined. I like to think that this tipping point where structure yields serendipity is similar to the moment in a fractal pattern where geometry becomes art, the moment where a rigorous, mathematically defined structure takes on an aesthetic quality that was never explicitly intended by the mathematical code that undergirds it, but that is nevertheless absolutely dependent upon that code for its very existence.\r\n\r\nMy hope as both the user and creator of digital archives is that we can come to a better understanding of the processes of classification and naming that are involved in these efforts structure data in meaningful ways. Scholars of literature are already comfortable thinking about the power of language to represent—and even create—the world around us. We already have at our disposal a variety of theoretical apparatuses for thinking about the power of language to name and define the world, from the formalism of the New Critics to the semiotics of the Post-Structuralists and even the focus on the materiality of language in Book History scholarship. What we need to add to this list of theories and methodologies is a more sophisticated understanding of taxonomy and categorization. This will not only require an interdisciplinary rendezvous with librarians and scholars of information architecture, but it will also demand that we do the cultural history of such seemingly mundane phenomena as filing cabinets and accounting ledgers. Compared to the work being done by digital humanities scholars in the areas of data visualization, text mining, social networking, and geo-spatial analysis, studying the history of cataloging, sorting, and organizing seems to be the intellectual equivalent of a trip to Target to buy hard-plastic storage bins when you’d rather be at the Apple Store picking up an iPad. Nevertheless, everything that we want digital technology to do to help us better understand literary texts depends upon our ability to properly name, sort, and categorize the information that we put into a computer. We do ourselves a disservice to ignore or even minimize this crucial stage of the process.\r\n\r\nOne of the most frequently quoted statements about the future of digital scholarship in the humanities comes from Jerome McGann, who wrote that “the digital technology used by humanities scholars has focused almost exclusively on methods of sorting, accessing, and disseminating large bodies of materials. In this respect the work has not engaged the central questions and concerns of the [humanities, which is] . . . . the exploration and explanation of aesthetic works.”[ref]Jerome McGann, <em>Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web</em> (New York: Palgrave, 2001), xi-xii.[/ref] I don’t want to make a straw-man out of McGann’s powerful insight, but I can’t help but take issue with his claim that the “sorting” of texts will not aid us in our goal of using digital technology to explore and explain aesthetic works. Before a digital tool of any kind can work with a text in any way, the elements of that text must be sorted, classified, and categorized according to a schema that the computer will understand. This is not to say that scholars in the digital humanities should put aside their text visualization projects and their geo-spatial analyses in order to do the Dewey Decimal system one better, but rather that the foundational tasks of organizing and classifying should more completely theorized and more intimately woven into the fabric of digital scholarship.\r\n\r\nBy attending to the tedium of taxonomy we may begin to feel like nineteenth-century scriveners rather than twenty-first century techies. Like those scriveners of old, we may prefer not to spend our time with such mundane things. Nevertheless, if we wish to generate the kinds of “wild and unpredictable intersections of . . . data” that “makes scholarship invigoratingly fun” we should embrace what actually promises to be a fascinating conversation about the history of taxonomy, structure, classification, and form. This conversation will take us through the Library of Alexandria, the Great Chain of Being, medieval bestiaries, Wunderkammer, the Mundaneum, the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, cryptography, tarot cards, and Vannevar Bush’s Memex. Every time we tag, code, or classify a text for a digital archive, we are participating in the long history of human classification systems. The better able we are to understand that history and to situate ourselves within it, the better understanding we will have of our digital archives and what they can do.','The Walt Whitman Archive - Whitley  4','Ed Folsom has written that one of the goals of the Whitman Archive is to “grow the database so that the surprises of searching and juxtaposing will become richer and more frequent.\" Folsom’s vision is that the Whitman Archive will become not only a centralized repository for all of Whitman’s texts, but also a discovery to...','inherit','open','open','','144-revision-29','','','2012-10-15 17:51:36','2012-10-15 17:51:36','',144,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/144-revision-29/',0,'revision','',0),(2848,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:36','2012-10-15 17:51:36','Archive co-director Ed Folsom once noted that printed editions of Whitman’s works have had the unfortunate tendency of becoming irrelevant the moment that scholars unearth a new letter, manuscript, or biographical fact about the poet. The Whitman Archive, however, has the benefit of being able to change and adapt as often as new discoveries are brought to the attention of the directors. In such an environment, Folsom writes, “All users are potential co-editors.”[ref]Ed Folsom, “Projecting Whitman: The Evolution and Remediation of The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman,” <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em>, accessed December 2, 2010 http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00003.html.[/ref] I love the notion that everyone is a “potential co-editor” of the Whitman Archive, and I\'d like to consider how the Archive could make better use of its digital form as a way to more fully realize this potential. I would never advocate for crowd-sourcing the Archive on the model of sites like Wikipedia, but I would like the Archive directors to take more seriously the implication that “All users are potential co-editors.”\r\n\r\nI have a tremendous amount of respect for how the Archive directors have responded to public criticisms from other scholars. In a 2007 <em>PMLA</em> forum on the Whitman Archive, for example, Meredith McGill took the Archive to task for decontextualizing the poems that Whitman had published in newspapers and magazines by clipping the poems from their original sources and excluding all the other articles, poems, and advertisements that appeared alongside Whitman’s poems.[ref]Meredith L. McGill, “Remediating Whitman,” <em>PMLA</em> 112.5 (2007):1594.[/ref] The Archive promptly responded to this criticism by including the entire page of the periodical where a Whitman poem appeared. But not every user of the Whitman Archive can get the attention of the Archive directors in the pages of <em>PMLA</em>. And even those fortunate enough to do so don\'t have a mechanism for providing additional feedback to the Archive directors regarding their response to suggestions for improvement. I wonder, does McGill think it was sufficient to include the complete newspaper page where a Whitman poem appeared, or would she rather that the Archive include the rest of the issue is well? Or would she even prefer a link to some external site that hosts the entire run of the paper?\r\n\r\nThe Archive could make better use of its digital form by providing “user accounts or other community-hosting capabilities,” as Matt Cohen has recently suggested.[ref]Cohen, “Design and Politics,” 241.[/ref]Integrating Web 2.0 components such as user accounts and a comment section to the Whitman Archive would have considerable implications for the Archive: while a comments section would give scholars such as McGill a much more dynamic venue for engaging with the Archive\'s directors, it would also make the Archive feel less like a scholarly edition of Whitman\'s works and more like a Facebook fan page. Nevertheless, Archive co-director Kenneth M. Price has already said that “scholarly edition” doesn\'t necessarily describe what the Whitman Archive actually is. Instead, Price has characterized the Archive as something more like a workshop, or, as he puts it, a “group of people who are now joined together for a common purpose.”[ref]Kenneth M. Price, \"Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What\'s in a Name?\" <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em>, accessed December 2, 2010 http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00346.html.[/ref] If that group of people could also include the hundreds (if not thousands) of scholars, students, and non-academic readers who visit the Archive every day, it would not only make better use of the digital medium, but it would also go some distance toward fulfilling Folsom\'s claim that “All users are potential co-editors.”','The Walt Whitman Archive - Whitley  3','Archive co-director Ed Folsom once noted that printed editions of Whitman’s works have had the unfortunate tendency of becoming irrelevant the moment that scholars unearth a new letter, manuscript, or biographical fact about the poet. The Whitman Archive, however, has the benefit of being able to change and adapt as often as new discoveries are brought to the attention of the directors.','inherit','open','open','','142-revision-23','','','2012-10-15 17:51:36','2012-10-15 17:51:36','',142,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/142-revision-23/',0,'revision','',0),(2849,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:36','2012-10-15 17:51:36','I would like to see the Whitman Archive make more transparent the choices that go into deciding how texts are marked-up and encoded. Archive co-director Kenneth M. Price has written that the “ongoing decision-making” regarding the mark-up of texts on the Archive is “interpretive rather than mechanical,” and that this interpretive coding “adds intelligence to an electronic text . . . mak[ing] it robust and illuminating as a tool for analysis.”[ref]Kenneth M. Price,\"\'Debris,\' Creative Scatter, and the Challenges of Editing Whitman,\" in <em>Walt Whitman, Where the Future Becomes Present</em>, ed. David Haven Blake and Michael Robertson (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008), 67.[/ref] I admire Price’s forthright admission that marking-up a text for the digital medium is not merely a change in format, but an act of interpretation. As someone who visits the Whitman Archive on a regular basis, I’d like to have a clearer sense of what kinds of decisions—and, therefore, interpretations—are being made as texts are digitally encoded, and, specifically, what those decisions reveal about the textual condition of Whitman’s works.\r\n\r\nThis request is not based in a suspicion of any kind that the Archive directors are placing a biased interpretation onto Whitman’s poetry as they encode it for presentation on the Archive; rather, my request is based in a desire to following along on the process of discovery that Matt Cohen describes as an integral part of digital encoding: “As a student in the 1990s, doing transcription and basic encoding of Whitman documents, I learned a lot about textual structures that I had not encountered in seminars; when discussing these observations with the project directors, sometimes new areas of concern or future development would emerge.”[ref]Matt Cohen, “Design and Politics in Electronic American Literary Archives,” in <em>The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age</em>, ed. Amy Earhart and Andrew Jewell (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 233.[/ref] The Archive is already a valuable resource for gaining access to Whitman’s works; it can also be a resource for learning about how Whitman constructed his texts in manuscript and in print by eavesdropping on the process by which these texts are reconstructed for the digital medium.\r\n\r\nDirectors and editors at the Archive have already begun to provide the kind of running commentary on the encoding process that I would like to see more of. Brett Barney, the Senior Associate Editor of the Archive, has written an insightful essay about his encoding the 1867 edition of <em>Leaves of Grass</em> that is available on the Archive, and both Price and Folsom have published, in a number of different venues, provocative essays that detail the lessons about textuality that they have learned from preparing texts for the Archive.[ref]Brett Barney, \"‘Each Part and Tag of Me is a Miracle: Reflections after Tagging the 1867 Leaves of Grass,” <em>The <em>Walt Whitman Archive, </em></em><em>accessed December 2, 2010 </em><a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00002.html\">http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00002.html</a>. Additional essay by Folsom and Price are also available at http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/index.html.[/ref] Currently, the Whitman Archive makes available the TEI-encoded XML source files for the major texts on the Archive as well as the Archive’s encoding guidelines and related DTD files. As much as I value this peek into the inner workings of the Archive, the process by which these XML files are created—the “ongoing decision-making” Price refers to—is as important as the product itself. The Archive could benefit from more self-reflexive commentaries on the encoding process, perhaps using Barney’s essay as a model. The recently added <a href=\"http://wwa-changelog.blogspot.com/\">WWA-Changelog</a>—a blog connected to the Archive that details the changes that editors make to files once they are posted online—could provide a model for how such commentaries could be more fully integrated into the experience of working with the Archive.','The Walt Whitman Archive - Whitley 2','I would like to see the Whitman Archive make more transparent the choices that go into deciding how texts are marked-up and encoded. Archive co-director Kenneth M. Price has written that the “ongoing decision-making” regarding the mark-up of texts on the Archive is “interpretive rather than mechanical,” and that this interpretive coding...','inherit','open','open','','140-revision-19','','','2012-10-15 17:51:36','2012-10-15 17:51:36','',140,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/140-revision-19/',0,'revision','',0),(2850,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:36','2012-10-15 17:51:36','From my perspective as a scholar, the greatest strength of the Whitman Archive is that it provides free and open access to the essential texts for studying the life and work of Walt Whitman. I’ve consulted the Whitman Archive every time I’ve ever written about Whitman, whether it’s to check the precise wording of a text, to follow the life cycle of a poem as it moves from manuscript to print and on through the various editions of <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, to identify the location of a primary document in a brick-and-mortar archive, to read nineteenth-century reviews of Whitman’s writing, or to search the Archive’s exhaustive database of Whitman scholarship. Using the Whitman Archive is like having immediate access to shelves and shelves worth of valuable (and often expensive) books.\r\n\r\nWhen I was a graduate student I burned through a toner cartridge printing out page images of the antebellum editions of <em>Leaves of Grass</em> from the Whitman Archive. The poems in these early editions went through radical revisions from one edition of <em>Leaves of Grass</em> to the next, and I really needed to get to know these poems in order to make the argument I was making in my dissertation about Whitman’s antebellum period. Being able to access these poems in various states gave me a much better sense of Whitman’s pre-Civil War career than the variorum of <em>Leaves of Grass</em>—with its decontextualized snippets from the antebellum editions—was able to give me.\r\n\r\nI’ve also recently learned that the Whitman Archive is more than just a repository of raw materials that scholars can mine for the resources we need to tell our stories about Whitman’s life and work; rather, the Archive is a storyteller in its own right. Here’s an example: <em>With Walt Whitman in Camden,</em> the multi-volume collection of Whitman’s conversations with his friend Horace Trauble, was not yet available on the Archive when I was writing an essay a few years ago about Elizabeth Porter Gould, the editor of a gift-book edition of Whitman’s poems called <em>Gems from Walt Whitman</em> (1889). Without the benefit of a searchable, digital edition of <em>With Walt Whitman in Camden</em> I had to find references to Gould the old-fashioned way: cribbing from Ed Folsom’s footnotes—and, of course, slogging through the poorly indexed volumes themselves. Since I published the essay, however, I’ve had the opportunity to search for Gould in the Archive’s edition of <em>With Walt Whitman in Camden</em>, and the effect of having the Archive’s search engine generate a list of these references had a remarkable impact on me. The essay that I had written demanded a certain amount of focus in order to make the argument about gender and authorship that I wanted to make, and I was always left with a touch of regret that I never had the chance to unfold the fascinating relationship between Whitman and Gould as fully as I would have liked. Opening up different tabs in my browser to read each of these references on the Whitman Archive, however, allowed me to track the progress of their relationship as they negotiated their competing goals for what <em>Gems from Walt Whitman </em>should be. I’m proud of the story that I was able to tell about Whitman and Gould, but I’m also glad to know that the Whitman Archive can tell that story another way.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Whitley  1','From my perspective as a scholar, the greatest strength of the Whitman Archive is that it provides free and open access to the essential texts for studying the life and work of Walt Whitman. I’ve consulted the Whitman Archive every time I’ve ever written about Whitman, whether it’s to check the precise wording of a text, to follow the life cycle of a poem...','inherit','open','open','','138-revision-21','','','2012-10-15 17:51:36','2012-10-15 17:51:36','',138,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/138-revision-21/',0,'revision','',0),(2851,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:36','2012-10-15 17:51:36','In the Digital Humanist’s tool belt, the database is the trusty stand-by. Robust and indispensable, it has become a basic tool of modern academic research. One of the primary endeavors of the Digital Humanities, however, is to re-focus the perspective on the tools we use, and perhaps to redefine the term “tool” in the process. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “a thing … with which some operation is performed; a means of effecting something.”[ref]<em>Oxford English Dictionary</em>, 2<sup>nd</sup> ed., s.v. “Tool.”[/ref] This definition points plainly toward outcome, the tool’s utility at accomplishing “some operation,” as if it were an extension of the user’s will as a wrench is an extension of his or her hand. But by emphasizing results only, the dictionary neglects a tool’s significant influence over process.\r\n\r\nTools define process as much as they do outcome. When one searches a database, its individual design mediates the experience, filters it, frames it. A sleek database makes the act of use nearly imperceptible—it stays out of the way, as it were, by anticipating the needs and intuitions of the general user in its design. However, the specific user will always be limited by these presuppositions. It is tempting to imagine a database as a neutral container, a kind of Tupperware 2.0, while in fact the tool guides the searches that one can make, the items that they will return, and which will appear prominent. Facets of the design guide what sorts of orderings of information, or narratives, the researcher will construct out of the raw data, such that the database itself can form a subtle argument or narrative claim.\r\n\r\nAcknowledging the skewed nature of any tool that presents information, <em>Walt Whitman Archive</em> co-editor Ed Folsom describes his approach to structuring the database: “Initially, [co-editor Kenneth] Price and I had ideas of how we would control the material in the database, and we knew the narratives we wanted to tell, the frames we wanted to construct. But the details of the database quickly exceeded any narrative we might try to frame the data with. Little roots shot out everywhere and attached to particulars we could not have imagined. Only if we insulated the narrative from the database could the narrative persist.”[ref]Ed Folsom, “Database as Genre: the Epic Transformation of Archives,”<em> The Walt Whitman Archive</em>, accessed November 2010,<em> </em><a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00142.html\">http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00142.html</a>.[/ref] To me, the <em>Walt Whitman Archive</em> is rife with narrative paths for the user. Some of these are micro-narratives, unavoidably emerging from details of the interface. Because the left-hand navigation menu is more visually prominent than the search bar, the user is more strongly guided into a browsing mode of exploration, which encourages him or her to consider Whitman through a compartmentalized view of his life and works. By featuring a simple search bar without advanced specifications or filtration[ref]A notice on the site informs the user that this feature is soon slated to undergo an enhancement, which will include the development of faceted search capabilities.[/ref], the database allows the user to cast a virtual fishing line for an assortment of items but makes it more difficult to conduct a narrowly directed search—thus, one is likely to encounter information that seems scattered rather than tight and contextual.\r\n\r\nApart from these micro-narratives, the database also cradles a deep narrative claim pertaining to Whitman’s corpus: throughout the database there is an open discussion examining the suggestive congruity between Whitman’s work and the digital medium in which it is takes form. The documentation of this resonance begins with observations about Whitman’s language and works, which seem to share characteristics of digital structure. For example, Ed Folsom to the organic networks present in Whitman’s language, an intertextual and burgeoning web of words. He compares this quality to the dense entanglement of leaves and roots that adorn the lettering on the first edition of <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, recalling the rhizome[ref]Defined as “an elongated, usually horizontal, subterranean stem which sends out roots and leafy shoots at intervals along its length.” <em>Oxford English Dictionary</em>, 3rd ed., s.v. \"Rhizome.\"[/ref]—“that subterranean stem that grows every which way and represents the nomadic multiplicity of identity—no central root but an intertwined web of roots.”[ref]Folsom, “Database as Genre.<em>”</em>[/ref] Databases, too, are rhizomorphous, he argues—and this accordance between Whitman’s work and its digital format allows the two to reflect through and off of one another, revealing new permutations of form and language.\r\n\r\nIn a proleptic twist, Whitman’s work predates its own ideal medium. A common observation in the various articles about the database is the fact that the work is perhaps better displayed in digital form that it ever was in print: the digital medium is better equipped to represent the shapes and forms of the Whitman corpus, and flexible enough to accommodate the complex relationship between the many iterations of <em>Leaves of Grass</em>. The database does not privilege one edition over any other, and treats them as autonomous but entwined works rather than pieces of a distinct whole or drafts leading up to a definitive version. The sheer multiplicity of his writing is betrayed by the rigidity of print mediums. “Whitman’s work was always being revised, was always in flux, and fixed forms of print do not adequately capture his incessant revisions,” argues Price.[ref]Kenneth M. Price, “About the <em>Archive</em>: History,” <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em>, accessed November 2010, http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/history.html.[/ref] Whitman himself advocated methods of reading and taking meaning from his texts that today seem almost designed for digital tools. A line from <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, first appearing in the 1881-82 edition, reads “the words of my book nothing, the drift of it every thing.”[ref]Walt Whitman, <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, (Washington, D.C, 1881-82), http://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1871/whole.html.[/ref] Taking long-view of literature, Whitman’s remark resonates with the current practice of distant reading, in which vast quantities of text can be analyzed as an entity using statistical information and visualizations. Predating this practice, Whitman draws the reader away from the individual minutiae of his poetry and towards impressionistic views. If any text was written for a database, this one was.\r\n\r\nThus, the <em>Archive</em> attempts not only to exhibit its contents, but to carry out a vision that Whitman may have offered in the original work. This narrative is present throughout the site primarily via the apparent compatibility between the content and form. The claim is so elegant, so fluid and simple, that the argument almost makes itself.\r\n\r\nThe <em>Walt Whitman Archive</em> is able to transcend its (considerable) utility as a research tool, performing simultaneously as a critical analysis, a new edition of Whitman, and independent artistic work. I imagine four theoretical levels at which a format can manage a text, with increasing involvement: presentation, description, criticism, and artistic response. The sophistication of this particular database is in how it blurs the lines between those acts, seeming to realize all at once and none predominantly, and, further, how it reveals the fact that this multiplicity of function must be true of all databases, however subtly, however unintentionally.\r\n\r\nThis remarkable plurality within a single tool (if tool is still an adequate term) is both fitting, in the context of Whitman, and disruptive to the user’s relationship with the technology. It remains to be addressed how, or whether, the user should adjust his or her approach to such a complex mechanism. At the recent undergraduate digital humanities symposium Re: Humanities, keynote speaker Amanda French advocated for the “rehumaniz[ation of] the inhuman mass of data.”[ref]Amanda French, “Humanities Research Methods from 1860 to 2060” (presentation at Re:Humanities, Haverford, PA, November 11-12, 2010).[/ref] She suggests that scholars who favor distant reading may be losing track of a meaningful element of the text. Rather than conducting interpretive based on massive aggregates of information, why not reacquaint ourselves with an affection for individual pieces of data, find “datum love” among the mass of details? The two methods appear to be mutually exclusive. However, by reconceiving the practice of data mining, it is arguably possible to find personal touches in the thrill of broad claims as well as the nuance of the particular.\r\n\r\nIf each database frames its contents in an array of narrative claims, then each one is specific, disputable, and limited. Rather than markers of failure, however, we might use these idiosyncracies to reawaken us to the particular experience that that tool offers. We could use the fact that a database mediates actively to inject an element of personal interaction into the task of digital research. In the course of achieving proficiency with any tool, one gains an understanding of its particular advantages and limitations through repeated contact and experimentation, returning to the interactive original meaning of “interface.”[ref]Defined as “a means or place of interaction between two systems, organizations, etc.; a meeting-point or common ground between two parties, systems, or disciplines; also, interaction, liaison, dialogue.” <em>Oxford English Dictionary</em>, 2nd ed., s.v. \"Interface.\"[/ref] Here is an opportunity to find a better alternative to the impersonal database experience, an escape from hard vocabulary statistics untempered by readerly love.\r\n\r\nThe management of scale is a challenge that each database must address by determining how the user will navigate between detail and distance. Due to Whitman’s distinctive engagement with matters of scale, especially the fluidity between the individual and the masses, the <em>Walt Whitman Archive</em> may be uniquely able to offer a distant reading that is paradoxically intimate in its connection to the philosophy of the poet. How can a distant reading cheat the humanist if it scrutinizes the work of the man who wrote, exhilarated, “Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations. Here is action untied from strings necessarily blind to particulars and details magnificently moving in vast masses?”[ref]Walt Whitman, <em>Leaves of Grass: 150<sup>th</sup> Anniversary Edition</em>, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), iii.[/ref] Ed Folsom describes Whitman’s “poetic project” as an endeavor “to move from a particular person, period, or place toward an absorptive embrace of all people, periods, and places,”[ref]Folsom, “Database as Genre.”[/ref]emphasizing the blurred distinctions between love of the particular and love of the vast. TokenX, a textual analysis tool that is available through the database, numerically charts the uses of particular words throughout the six editions of <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, giving a visual representation to the exponential growth and organic proliferation of certain words as the poetry burgeoned in its various iterations. Statistical tools such as these, when applied to the work of this particular author, are not reductive but in fact profoundly resonant with the tone and principles of the poetry they describe. Perhaps this is the database to wed tender devotion to individual data and multiplicity.\r\n\r\nFeatured prominently on the home page of the <em>Archive</em> is a striking engraving of Whitman’s face.[ref]William J. Linton, (1870-72), engraving, (http://whitmanarchive.org/multimedia/image044.html?sort=year&amp;order=ascending&amp;page=5).[/ref] The poet appears as if caught in motion, whipping past the viewer with his eddies of hair scattered about his face like sprouts. The beard connotes a general outward drift as it spreads from his face in swells and waves. And then, from somewhere in the profusion of hair and wrinkles emerges an arresting pair of dark eyes: Whitman’s eyes simultaneously confront and confide in the viewer, imparting a personal moment amidst a storm of minutiae.','The Walt Whitman Archive – McGonagill 4','In the Digital Humanist’s tool belt, the database is the trusty stand-by. Robust and indispensable, it has become a basic tool of modern academic research. One of the primary endeavors of the Digital Humanities, however, is to re-focus the perspective on the tools we use, and perhaps to redefine the term “tool” in the process. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “a thing … with which some operation is performed; a means of effecting something.\"','inherit','open','open','','136-revision-26','','','2012-10-15 17:51:36','2012-10-15 17:51:36','',136,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/136-revision-26/',0,'revision','',0),(2852,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:37','2012-10-15 17:51:37','As the <em>Archive</em> is very aware, the Whitman corpus presents a particular set of linguistic challenges to the reader that seem to appeal for a more open and flexible form than what is offered by their original editions of print. Digital forms often work well for such challenging texts because they provide a-linear approaches of exploration and analysis, but in my opinion the <em>Archive </em>has not yet developed into a format that takes full advantage of this possibility. Though I was able to navigate around the site easily from any point with the aid of the menu across the top of the page and the breadcrumb links, my general experience of the Whitman archive was that it remains limited by linear arrangements of data. The structure of the database, which is dominated by a hierarchical folder system, can make it difficult to stir up new configurations of information: the volume of the repository is still impressive, but in this case a physical archive might allow better non-linear entry.\r\n\r\nAnd yet, the hierarchical folders and the linear browsing process they suggest also garnered my praised in an earlier question, due to their “clean” and “intuitive” qualities. While limiting to the agile Whitman scholar, these features are very advantageous in one’s initial foray into the <em>Archive</em> because they present easier options and clear delineations.\r\n\r\nPhysical archives fit well into folder systems while maintaining an element of the random and a-linear because each page is a potential entry-point. Web pages, however, favor top-view and selection rather than the act of flipping through or diving in at a random point. The <em>Walt Whitman Archive </em>has moved past the limitations of print in many ways already; if there was a way to reincorporate some of the random browsability of the physical archive, without sacrificing the intuitive appearance, the experience might benefit. This might be accomplished by exposing more metadata on the surface of the site in order to cut new cross-sections through the repository; for example, making it possible to browse by year rather than type and title of work, or organizing clusters of data by theme or biographical reference. If the editors can find a way to take the information out of its silos across the site, their users might enjoy an even more fluid and organic approach to the text.','The Walt Whitman Archive – McGonagill 3','As the Archive is very aware, the Whitman corpus presents a particular set of linguistic challenges to the reader that seem to appeal for a more open and flexible form than what is offered by their original editions of print. Digital forms often work well for such challenging texts because they provide a-linear approaches of exploration and analysis, but in my opinion the Archive has not yet developed...','inherit','open','open','','134-revision-26','','','2012-10-15 17:51:37','2012-10-15 17:51:37','',134,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/134-revision-26/',0,'revision','',0),(2853,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:37','2012-10-15 17:51:37','While I found the basic navigability of the site to be well-designed, I wish that it was easier to discover new things in the database. The obvious place to begin would be the search tool, which is very limited. While more robust features are promised for the future (according to a notice at the top of the page), the current tool falls short of expectations for a database of this size and quality. Discovery of new material depends upon the possibility of encountering random bits of data and the ability to arrange information in new permutations such that new synchronies arise; currently, the <em>Archive </em>is not well configured for such active contact between the reader and the raw data. In addition to random data, an improved search tool would also better allow the user to conduct specific paths of inquiry. For a hypothetical student with an assignment to follow, it can be important to view thematic cross sections rather than vertical stacks of data under folders.\r\n\r\nThe addition of tagging would help to increase the fluidity of the site. In order to maintain the rigor of its editorship, the <em>Archive</em> might prefer to use tags that are curated by a team rather than a ‘folksonomy’ approach that opens up tag authorship to all users and lets the system grow on its own, minimally governed. The functionality of the search tool might improve, also, by responding to terms that have demonstrated relevance to users rather than random syntax in content.\r\n\r\nNavigation between pages on the <em>Archive </em>is smooth and intuitive; however, it could benefit form the implementation of same-page navigation tools. Many of the pages on the site feature very long texts, which require excessive scrolling and are difficult to read in a non-linear fashion. A hyperlinked table of contents at the top might be a first step, but many of the long critical articles do not have obvious breaking points and would not divide naturally into a table. Eventually, it would be good to see a more sophisticated tool for navigating through content on the same page—as it is, a database that deliberately embraces the fluidity of digital forms traps the reader in a format that is ironically dependent upon rigid sequence and imitated print forms. Reducing this rigidity would greatly improve the user experience.','The Walt Whitman Archive – McGonagill 2','While I found the basic navigability of the site to be well-designed, I wish that it was easier to discover new things in the database. The obvious place to begin would be the search tool, which is very limited. While more robust features are promised for the future (according to a notice at the top of the page), the current tool falls short of expectations for a database of this size and quality.','inherit','open','open','','132-revision-20','','','2012-10-15 17:51:37','2012-10-15 17:51:37','',132,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/132-revision-20/',0,'revision','',0),(2854,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:37','2012-10-15 17:51:37','Though the <em>Walt Whitman Archive</em> seems well designed for researchers at all levels of expertise, it strikes me as particularly well-suited for students or for others who may enter the site with limited knowledge about the author and his works. A significant advantage is the clean and inviting appearance of the layout at all levels of the database. The interface is wonderfully uncluttered, making exploration simple and unintimidating. On the homepage left-hand navigation menu, I found the categories to be intuitive and well-organized. I clarified this assessment with an experiment, in which I browsed manually for items that I already knew existed in the archive. In all cases, I was able to locate the target items with little or no backtracking.\r\n\r\nI found the most valuable feature of the site for the non-expert visitor to be the contextual information that was present on many of the pages in the database. For example, when clicking on any of the major links under the “published works” tab, I was given a short blurb that generally included a preface to the contents of the page, its status of development and coming additions, and any important contextual knowledge that would help me situate it in culture or among Whitman’s other works. It was also extremely helpful to find each of Whitman’s published books (excluding the foreign editions) furnished with a detailed and thoughtful “About” page, which provided enough background and compelling analysis to give me, the student and non-expert, a firm grasp of the material I was about to browse.\r\n\r\nI would feel confident and comfortable investigating a specific topic, browsing for research material, or exploring new content out of curiosity on the <em>Archive</em>. More than a repository, it is well-developed as a learning tool for those who are new to Whitman scholarship.','The Walt Whitman Archive – McGonagill 1','Though the Walt Whitman Archive seems well designed for researchers at all levels of expertise, it strikes me as particularly well-suited for students or for others who may enter the site with limited knowledge about the author and his works. A significant advantage is the clean and inviting appearance of the layout at all levels of the database. The interface is wonderfully uncluttered, making exploration simple and unintimidating.','inherit','open','open','','130-revision-23','','','2012-10-15 17:51:37','2012-10-15 17:51:37','',130,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/130-revision-23/',0,'revision','',0),(2855,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:37','2012-10-15 17:51:37','In the following section I would like to reflect on some questions about the nature of digital resources, humanities scholarship and the uses to which such material may be put. One of these is the still-contentious issue of whether the creation of such resources is regarded as scholarship in itself or as a way of facilitating the work of other scholars. Even the most recent studies indicate that opinions still remain sharply divided about whether the creation of digital resources such as the Whitman archive is considered to be scholarship and worthy of being rewarded us such by promotion, tenure or in the UK Research Assessment Exercise.[ref]D. Harley, S.K. Acord, S. Earl-Novell, S. Lawrence, and C.J. King, “Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines” (UC Berkeley: Center for Studies in Higher Education, 2010).[/ref] There is an understandable tendency in digital humanities to regard this as an outrageous undervaluation of what we do, and to wish to advocate for our work to be better understood. Yet if we can resist this temptation, the question at issue is an important one. The argument against granting digital resources scholarly status equivalent to a journal article, monograph or critical edition must surely be that such resources are performing a service, akin to that provided by an archive or library in the analogue world: that of bringing together useful materials for other scholars to use.\r\n\r\nIt has long been the case that as Melissa Terras has argued so eloquently, in order for our digital work to be valued we must publish in traditional media.[ref]M. Terras, “Present, Not Voting: Digital Humanities in the Panopticon Digital Humanities” (plenary presented at Digital Humanities 2010 Conference, Kings College London, 2010). http://melissaterras.blogspot.com/2010/07/dh2010-plenary-present-not-voting.html[/ref] However, this is about to change, at least for some of us. In the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework in the UK, digital resources will be assessed in all subject areas as a comparable output to print. This is a vitally important change, carrying with it the implication of a re-evaluation of the scholarly value of the digital; but it places ever more emphasis on the need for us to consider in a rational, not evangelistic, fashion what may distinguish a digital scholarly work from that which renders a service.\r\n\r\nIn this context, nomenclature is not a useful guide. The Whitman project’s creators chose to call their creation an archive, perhaps because like the Rosetti Archive or Valley of the Shadow it contains a collection of various different types of material. However, McGann himself describes Rosetti as a digital edition.[ref]Jerome McGann, “Electronic Archives and Critical Editing,” <em>Literature Compass</em> 7:10 (2010): 37-42.[/ref] While I do not mean to imply that creating and curating an archive in the analogue world is not an intellectual exercise, it is not in itself something for which scholars gain credit. Thus the metaphor would hold that if scholarship done as the result of the use or creation of a physical archive as opposed to in its curation is recognised, then it should be similar in the digital sphere. But is this really appropriate, and does the name ‘archive’ under value the complex nature of what is being achieved in digital resources such as this? Conversely, why is it then that creating a critical edition, whether print or digital form is considered to be a scholarly activity worthy of credit in its own right?\r\n\r\nIt may be because in the print world editors are called upon to make selections and decisions about the best possible copy text, and which textual variants to include. Yet as Gabler argues, as digital technology progresses, digital editions increasingly try to make as many different texts and variants available to readers as possible, to the point that while we may choose to read a literary text in print, the digital medium is most appropriate for complex comparison and study of variants.[ref]H. W. Gabler “Theorizing the Digital Scholarly Edition,” <em>Literature Compass</em> 7:10 (2010): 43–56.[/ref] The theory of social editions also suggests that the literary text should be presented with reference to its broader social and intellectual milieu.[ref]Jerome McGann, <em>A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism</em> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) and D. F. McKenzie, <em>Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts</em>(London: The British Library, 1986).[/ref]\r\n\r\nThe Whitman archive provides page images and transcriptions of all six printed editions of <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, as well as manuscript material and newspaper copy. It calls itself an archive, yet could as easily be considered an excellent example of the digital social edition, where users are encouraged to become part of the scholarly process by comparing transcribed manuscripts with the page images or making judgements about which version of a given poem to use. So this is this, an edition (scholarly product) or an archive (service for others)? I would argue that this distinction is no longer meaningful in the digital sphere where boundaries between what we consider to be editions and archives have become blurred.\r\n\r\nEven if we assert that this is a resource for others to use, that could as easily describe a scholarly edition. It is also arguable that the value of such a resource as a scholarly product in its own right is in the choices made about what types of different materials should be brought together, and how contextual material about Whitman’s life, work and even disciples should be presented. Once again, these are just the kind of decisions that editors of scholarly editions also make. As all digital humanists are aware, the act of marking up text is in itself one of scholarly interpretation, which is why it is so vital that the full marked up texts are presented here. This, like the decision to present page images alongside transcription is an act of intellectual openness: it allows other scholars to understand, and if necessary question the decisions that have been made in their presentation. Far from being a sub-scholarly process, digital resources such as Whitman achieve a lustration of the decision making processes that are the silent underpinning of the task of editors or literary scholars in general. In this sense, digital humanities is ahead of many other fields. Science is only beginning to discover the potential of using digital technologies to link experimental data to articles written as a result of its analysis, so that other scholars may use such data to replicate the experiments that are reported on.[ref]C. Bizer, T. Heath, and T. Berners-Lee, “Linked Data - The Story So Far,” <em>International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems</em> (IJSWIS), Special Issue on Linked Data, ed. T. Heath, M. Hepp, and C. Bizer, (forthcoming). http://linkeddata.org/docs/ijswis-special-issue[/ref] Yet resources such as the Whitman archive have been providing this kind of functionality for some time. Texts are the primary data of literary scholars after all.\r\n\r\nThere is, it appears, a good case to be made for the scholarly robustness of digital resources, even those which modestly refer to themselves as an archive. The other question we must address, however, in making the case for our discipline is not just whether such resources constitute scholarly activity, but what kind of new types of research they make possible which would not have been achievable in an analogue world. This is surely the main criterion by which digital humanities must be judged. At present this is much less clear.\r\n\r\nWe know that the digital medium presents many new possibilities for editors and resource creators themselves, but we still know too little about whether research and scholarship themselves are changing as a result of their use. Vanhoutte, for example, has argued that most users simply require a reading text despite the fact that digital resources make a deeper kind of scholarly engagement possible.[ref]E. Vanhoutte, “Every Reader His Own Bibliographer – An Absurdity?” in <em>Text Editing, Print and the Digital World</em>, ed. Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland (London: Ashgate, 2002): 99-112.[/ref] Even the most recent study of humanities users of digital resources[ref]C. Madsen, “Communities, Innovation, and Critical Mass: Understanding the Impact of Digitization on Scholarship in the Humanities through the Case of Tibetan and Himalayan Studies” (PhD diss, Oxford University, 2010): Chapters 6-7.[/ref] suggests they still make relatively simple uses of digital resources, which they value as a way to access greater amounts of primary texts without the need to travel, to search them faster, and ultimately, overwhelmingly, to read them. Digital humanists may be using computational analysis or visualisation techniques on huge data sets, (for example Dan Cohen’s recent studies of Google Books[ref]Patricia Cohen, “Analyzing Literature by Words and Numbers,” <em>New York Times</em>, December 3, 2010, <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/04/books/04victorian.html?_r=1&amp;pagewanted=all\">http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/04/books/04victorian.html?_r=1&amp;pagewanted=all</a>[/ref]) but it appears that resources such as the Whitman archive may be more transformative of scholarship from the point of view of their creators than of most of their users. Digital Humanities has have moved on from writing evangelising articles and prescribing more training to writing use cases that, arguably, only the converted digital humanists ever read (for example a recent paper on the Monk project[ref]C. Plaisant, T. Clement, R. Vuillemot, S. Steger, and K. Uszkalo, “Use Cases Driving the Tool Development in the MONK project” (paper presented at the Digital Humanities 2009 conference, University of Maryland, USA, June 22-25, 2009).[/ref]) Yet the results appear the same, such excellent resources as Whitman may find that only a few expert users make best use of the potential of what they are being offered.\r\n\r\nThis may seem rather a depressing vision, but social networking theory may offer a more positive interpretation of this. We know that in most online communities only 10% of the participants post, the others may read, enjoy, but not take part.[ref]B. Nonnecke and J. Preece, “Lurker Demographics: Counting the Silent” in <em>Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems</em> (Proceedings of the SIGCHI, 2000): 73-80. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=332040.332409&amp;type=series [/ref] It is also an often repeated law of software development that 80% of users make use of 20% of a given application’s features. Thus if we apply such metrics to digital humanities it seems perverse that we somehow feel we have failed unless all users are making the most extensive use of every last piece of potential a resource has to offer. This is why it is important that, as I argued above, digital resources should be accessible for the interested amateur as well as the academic expert and why we should not be disappointed if most people search for quotations for their college assignments or print out poems to use to teach a class, or to read when writing an article. Digital resources have different types of user, and to expect them all to be expert is a kind of techie arrogance of the worst kind.\r\n\r\nSocial networking is also relevant in another context when consider digital resources. The possibilities of a very different kind of social edition are only beginning to be explored by projects such as UCL’s own Transcribe Bentham project. Yet the popularity of crowd sourcing has been proven in science, and we know that users will support, explore and exploit more fully resources that they help to create.[ref]Claire Warwick, M. Terras and C. Fisher, “iTrench: A Study of User Reactions to the Use of IT in Field Archaeology” (paper presented at Digital Humanities 2008 conference, University of Oulu, Finland, June 25-29 2008).[/ref] Thus it may be that an alternative way of involving users in digital humanities is not only to consult them about what they would like to do, design resources so that they can do it as well as possible, or suggest ways in which a resources might be used, but also to encourage them to take part in their creation.\r\n\r\nIt can be seen therefore that the metaphysics wrought by the digital transformations inherent in the Whitman archives take us well beyond the limitations of books. We can appreciate the new potential inherent in digital production for the scholars who produce such resources, but further work remains to be done on exactly how such editions or archives may transform the lives of their users. Part of this work will be undertaken in the coming year by researchers from the INKE project, when we will consider digital scholarly editions. However, in a more general sense it will be fascinating to see whether and how far any kind of crowd sourced content may be integrated into serious scholarly resources such as Whitman. Until that experiment is tried in earnest, we are still some way from utilising the potential of the truly social edition.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Warwick 4','In the following section I would like to reflect on some questions about the nature of digital resources, humanities scholarship and the uses to which such material may be put. One of these is the still-contentious issue of whether the creation of such resources is regarded as scholarship in itself or as a way of facilitating the work of other scholars. Even the most recent studies indicate that opinions still remain sharply divided...','inherit','open','open','','127-revision-20','','','2012-10-15 17:51:37','2012-10-15 17:51:37','',127,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/127-revision-20/',0,'revision','',0),(2856,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:37','2012-10-15 17:51:37','It is difficult for me to answer the final question because most of the scholarly material that I need are now available in digital form. As a digital humanist, rather than a literary scholar I have very little need to use original manuscripts or early printed books in my own work. What we know about the research practices of humanity scholars, however, suggests that this resource is extremely well designed for their needs. It does not assume that the digital will replace the need to use physical books and indeed it makes this easier by the inclusion of complex bibliographic data especially about Whitman\'s manuscripts and their whereabouts. It also follows good practice in digital resource creation in that it provides scanned page images of the books and manuscripts thus allowing users to compare the transcriptions provided in digital form to those images of the original analogue text.\r\n\r\nIt is notable that the website provides links to press material and interviews that scholars involved in it have given. This is especially welcome, since we have found that the strongest single correlation between the use of a digital resource and things that its creators do is effective disseminate of information about the project.[ref]Warwick et al., “The Master Builders.”[/ref] The presence of these transcribed interviews shows that its creators have been doing precisely this.\r\n\r\nAnother intriguing potential of the digital medium which the Whitman Archive makes use of is the ability to record the way that a resource has changed and grown. Books of course may have later editions, but few of us compare them in detail in printed form. This resource gives us clear information about its past as well as the way it is changing, since it not only archives two previous versions of the project, but provides a detailed change log, which tells users in detail what has been altered and when. For those of us interested in digital resources, this is an unusual insight into their evolution; for regular users of the material it gives instant information about what has changed since their last visit. Both are very much to be welcomed.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Warwick 3','It is difficult for me to answer the final question because most to the scholarly material that I need are now available in digital form. As a digital humanist, rather than a literary scholar I have very little need to use original manuscripts or early printed books in my own work. What we know about the research practices of humanity scholars, however...','inherit','open','open','','125-revision-21','','','2012-10-15 17:51:37','2012-10-15 17:51:37','',125,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/125-revision-21/',0,'revision','',0),(2857,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:37','2012-10-15 17:51:37','It is genuinely difficult to identify serious weaknesses of the Whitman archive. I might suggest a few relatively minor changes to site design. Some of the content is nested quite deeply within the site and requires several clicks to access it. For example in the Disciples section the user is three clicks away from accessing individual poems. Web log analysis suggests that the more clicks a users is required to make, the less likely they are to use that part of a site.[ref]P. Huntington, D. Nicholas, P. Williams and B. Gunter “Characterising the Health Information Consumer: an Examination of the Health Information Sources used by Digital Television Users,” <em>Libri</em> 52:1 (2002): 16-27[/ref] Thus I would suggest that if at all possible some of the intermediate levels of nesting are removed to allow better access to material.\r\n\r\nI also found it difficult to access the newspaper content, since the page images took a very long time to load, on an average home broadband connection. This will not cause problems for academics using the site on fast campus networks. However it might limit its usefulness and usability of these newspapers for members of the public to high school students who might be accessing them on a slower connection.\r\n\r\nI also had some problems using the search function, or rather understanding the results returned. I typed the words ‘metaphysics’ and ‘books’ into the search box as someone searching for the exact origin of a quotation might do. I would have hoped that the first hit in any general search of the archive might have referred me to published works, but instead it took me to instances of the words in criticism, but it was not clear why this happened, and would, I think be counter intuitive for most users. I then clicked on the top hit of published works, and when I clicked on it, this did indeed take me to Leaves of Grass, but only to the title page. Again this would not be intuitive for users accustomed for example to the functionality of commercial resources such as EEBO who would expect to be taken to the exact hit without a need to use the search function in Firefox to locate it.\r\n\r\nThese are technical problems which should be relatively easily corrected. However, I would also like to point out something which while not exactly being a weakness may more correctly be thought of as an opportunity that has not yet been exploited: that is the possibility of involving users more extensively in the Archive’s activities. At present, apart from leaving comments, it is difficult to see how academic users or members of the public interested in Whitman might be able to get involved in the project.\r\n\r\nThe current model for the Archive seems very much that of conventional publishing whereby the team produces content for its users, in a one-to-many fashion. It may be that this is a deliberate decision on the part of the editors: involving users is not appropriate for every digital project. However, if further content is to be created in future, the Whitman archive may consider taking part in some kind of crowd sourcing project. This is still a somewhat unusual method, but is being used by projects such as Transcribe Bentham at UCL to access crowd sourced transcriptions of page images of manuscripts. The use of crowd sourcing and social networking by memory institutions such as museums, has demonstrated that those outside academia are interested in participating in projects about their heritage and history and it may be that there is a potential new way for the Archive to engage with its user community, and to add further content while doing so.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Warwick 2','It is genuinely difficult to identify serious weaknesses of the Whitman archive.  I might suggest a few relatively minor changes to site design. Some of the content is nested quite deeply within the site and requires several clicks to access it.For example in the Disciples section the user is three clicks away from accessing individual poems.  Web log analysis suggests...','inherit','open','open','','122-revision-20','','','2012-10-15 17:51:37','2012-10-15 17:51:37','',122,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/122-revision-20/',0,'revision','',0),(2858,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:37','2012-10-15 17:51:37','The Whitman archive is an example of excellent practice in the creation of digital scholarly resources. Its layout is simple, clear and easy to understand and navigate. It is obvious to a user where she is in the site, how to return to where she started from and what its various contents are. This might seem basic, but many resources, perhaps particularly those designed by and for academics tend not to pay enough attention to the basics of good design and usability, and can, as a result be confusing and frustrating for users. Since we make decisions about web pages in fractions of a second[ref]G. Lindgaard, C. Dudek, F. Fernandes, and J. Brown, “Attention Web Designers: You Have 50 Milliseconds to Make a Good First Impression,” <em>Behaviour &amp; Information Technology</em> 25 (2005): 115-126.[/ref] and humanities users, in particular, are easily deterred from using a resource that seems untrustworthy to them[ref]Claire Warwick, M. Terras, P. Huntington, and N. Pappa, “If You Build It Will They Come? The LAIRAH Study: Quantifying the Use of Online Resources in the Arts and Humanities through Statistical Analysis of User Log Data,” <em>Literary and Linguistic Computing</em> 23:1 (2008): 85-102.[/ref] it is vital that such simple considerations as the look and functionality of the site should instantly seem comprehensible and comfortable for users.[ref]Dana Wheeles, “Accessibility, Usability and the New Face of NINES” <em>Literary and Linguistic Computing</em> 25:4 (2010). Forthcoming.[/ref]\r\n\r\nOne of the most impressive things about the Whitman archive is that it can be addressed in different ways depending on the level of expertise the user may have: this is by no means common in scholarly digital resources. As someone who was once worked on English, but not American, literature and who now regards herself as a full time Digital Humanist, I know relatively little about Walt Whitman\'s life and career. As a result of using the archive, however, I was able to find a considerable amount of information at an appropriate level. In other words, this was content of a level well beyond the introductory but which was not simply directed at other Whitman scholars and other expert users. This is a surprisingly difficult balance to achieve in any medium but seems especially challenging in the digital one. Many digital scholarly resources tend to assume that their users will be experts in the subject matter. This is not necessarily the case and as a result non-expert users may easily be confused or lose interest.[ref]Warwick et al., “If You Build It.”[/ref] This seems particularly perverse, since digital resources are an excellent way for scholars to engage with those outside academia who share their interests and to encourage those with an interest to become to sufficiently intrigued that they become the experts of the future. If the non-expert user is deterred, how will they make progress to expertise? This is an opportunity that the Whitman archive has fully understood.\r\n\r\nThis does not mean that expert users are neglected, however. The archive has evidently been designed with the needs of its academic users in mind. For example, scholars interested in the language of poetry who may want to run linguistic analysis software on these texts will be particularly please that the full TEI marked up texts are available for downloading from the archive as well as being presented on line. The fact that such texts and detailed markup guidelines are available is an example of excellent practice and also rather unusual. Even some of the best TEI practitioners can seem somewhat nervous of making their markup decisions so public, and many digital humanities resources only make texts available as post-processed XHTML.\r\n\r\nThere is also a clear understanding on the part of the Archive’s creators of the way that scholars prefer to work in digital and physical environments. We know, for example, that however many resources are digitised scholars generally want to see the originals. It is now well known that the more digital resources are available the higher the demand that tends to be for original material. As a result, it is especially welcome that the archive has provided such detailed guidance as to how the original materials may be accessed with full bibliographic records. This means that scholars are able to consult manuscript images and transcriptions before they visit physical archives, which enhances, rather than disrupts their use of archival material. This is a particularly effective use of digital resources to complement physical ones.\r\n\r\nOne of the most impressive features of the Whitman Archive is that documentation about the project is so easy to access. As we recommended in the LAIRAH study[ref]Claire Warwick, I. Galina, M. Terras, P. Huntington, and N. Pappa, “The Master Builders: LAIRAH Research on Good Practice in the Construction of Digital Humanities Projects,” <em>Literary and Linguistic Computing</em> 23:3 (2008): 383-396.[/ref] there is a top level link from the title page to documentation about the project. Under this link are to be found a great variety of very useful documents telling readers and users just about anything they might want to know about the archive in terms of its scholarly principles, history, technical standards and encoding guidelines. It is also clear who its creators are their expertise and how this has been used to take decisions about the creation and direction of the archive. This excellent feature is surprisingly difficult to find in many digital archives, editions or resources. However, it is vital, since users require users require this type of contextual information about the processes used to select and interpret data. In the print medium we have evolved techniques and processes to indicate that a selection and evaluation process has taken place (the footnote, the imprimatur, the authorial biography, the bibliography) In the digital world such things are still developing and the digital still remains, for many academic users in particular, less trustworthy than print.[ref]Warwick et al., “If You Build It.”[/ref]','The Walt Whitman Archive – Warwick 1','The Whitman archive is an example of excellent practice in the creation of digital scholarly resources. Its layout is simple, clear and easy to understand and navigate. It is obvious to a user where she is in the site, how to return to where she started from and what its various contents are. This might seem basic, but many resources, perhaps particularly those designed by and for academics...','inherit','open','open','','117-revision-20','','','2012-10-15 17:51:37','2012-10-15 17:51:37','',117,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/117-revision-20/',0,'revision','',0),(2859,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:37','2012-10-15 17:51:37','At the <em>Whitman Archive</em> we recently have focused on two aspects of Whitman\'s work: 1) what we call his scribal documents—the letters Whitman copied or drafted for others and the notes and summaries he drafted as a clerk in federal government offices; 2) Whitman\'s crossing of international boundaries as seen in translations and in the remaking of “Whitman” as his work is absorbed into other cultural, literary, and political traditions. In what follows I discuss these new developments to illustrate how the <em>Whitman Archive </em>continues to unfold to reveal new layers for development. After more than fifteen years, the <em>Whitman Archive </em>still intrigues me daily—whether it is Whitman’s writings, the people and processes which bring these texts to the public, the way we make them available, or what we (and others) may be able to do with them in the future. I conclude with a consideration of the long-term viability of our project and the crucial matters of funding and open access.\r\n\r\nFor the past two years I have been studying Whitman’s scribal documents and his time in Washington, DC (1863-1873) during and following the Civil War. Whitman worked for the Army Paymaster’s office, for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (part of the Department of the Interior), and for the Attorney General’s office. When I first went to Washington to look for documents in Whitman’s handwriting that might have been preserved in the records of these offices, I hoped to find perhaps a half dozen items in the National Archives; seven trips later, I have found close to 3,000.[ref]This research was prompted in part by the Whitman Archive’s recent grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Historical Publications and Records Commissions to edit Whitman’s literary works and correspondence from the Civil War and Reconstruction era. These documents are now being transcribed and should be fully available within the next two years.[/ref] Thus far, all of the items are from the Attorney General’s Office. These scribal documents are crucial for understanding Whitman’s Washington years, his position in this particular office, and the influence of this work upon his literary development.\r\n\r\nOne document in Whitman’s handwriting, on an envelope of the Attorney General’s Office, says in its entirety:\r\n<blockquote><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Memoranda</span>\r\n\r\n<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">pardon</span> applicants Sept 8-9 -1865\r\n\r\n<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">also</span> the negro-suffrage\r\n\r\n<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">also position</span> of the President</blockquote>\r\nThe stationery might suggest that these are notes Whitman made to himself about work in the Attorney General’s office. But are they, and how can we know? Perhaps they are notes about issues Whitman wanted to consider as he was composing “Democratic Vistas.” After all, anyone who has worked with Whitman manuscripts knows that many of his letters and literary manuscripts were written on this type of office stationery and other repurposed pieces of paper. I draw attention to this document not because it is the most powerful of the scribal documents (if it is one[ref]It may be significant that this document was not found where most of the scribal documents have been discovered, in the National Archives, but instead in the Charles E. Feinberg collection at the Library of Congress.[/ref]). I highlight it, in fact, because of its liminal status: we can not determine whether this is a literary or a scribal document, a document written for Whitman\'s own purposes or for the purposes of others. As such, it challenges in a useful way the boundaries between literary and scribal documents.\r\n\r\nImagining a firm wall dividing these areas of life for Whitman is misleading. At times, Whitman used his office address as his literary postal address, and he worked in the office at night (the heat and lighting were important benefits). Moreover he first gained his clerkship with the help of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who recommended him on literary and patriotic grounds.[ref]See the letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Salmon P. Chase, 10 January 1863 available at http://whitmanarchive.org/biography/correspondence/cw/tei/nar.00002.html[/ref] And it was because Whitman’s Blue Book (his personal and very heavily revised copy of the third edition of <em>Leaves of Grass</em>)<em> </em>was found at his government desk that he lost his job at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. James Harlan, Secretary of the Interior, judged the book to be immoral, though Whitman’s allies staunchly defended it and helped him to secure a new post in the Attorney General’s office. During his Washington years, Whitman\'s literary and clerical lives regularly occurred in the same physical locations and no doubt out of related emotional and psychological circumstances.\r\n\r\nOne of the challenges in studying the scribal documents is to figure out what impact Whitman’s work in a series of low-level government positions had on his creative life. To date, critics have almost entirely ignored his ten years of labor in Washington offices. How should we understand and treat the scribal documents? In most cases Whitman acted not as author but as a conduit for the words and thoughts of others. Thus, it could be argued that these documents should not be featured in an archive centrally concerned with Whitman’s writings. If his intellectual contributions to scribal documents are unclear and likely minimal, perhaps these documents should be excluded altogether from the <em>Whitman Archive</em>, or at least not prioritized.[ref]It is not clear yet—we need more time to study this trove of documents—how exactly the Attorney General’s office functioned. Did Whitman merely transcribe a clean copy from a draft written by someone else? Did he sometimes generate the letter based on an outline of points provided by another, or based on comments made in conversation to him? Certainly some of those who supervised him recognized his intellectual capacities. James Speed, for example, sought Whitman’s aid when he prepared an oration dedicating a bust of Abraham Lincoln.[/ref] It could be further argued that we should concentrate our finite time on making available additional known Whitman-authored documents (e.g., his journalism or short stories or novel, <em>Franklin Evans</em>). On the other hand, the scribal documents are potentially more revealing to scholars than such Whitman-authored documents, both because of the quantity of information and because the scribal documents were previously altogether unknown. Scholars may lack perfect access to Whitman’s journalism, short stories, and novel, but they do have reasonably good access for the time being. The same is not true for the scribal documents, and, if the <em>Whitman Archive </em>does not work on these materials, they are likely to remain buried, unavailable to enrich future biographical and critical studies.\r\n\r\nWhitman\'s experiences in Washington offices have rich implications. In Washington, Whitman was an actor near the epicenter of government efforts to reshape the nation in the aftermath of war. [ref]Rosemary Graham mistakenly argues that “for the most part . . . Whitman spent these postwar years as an observer.” See “Attorney General’s Office, United States,” in <em>Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia</em>, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland, 1998).[/ref] In his day job as an anonymous clerk, he and others in the office of the Attorney General dealt with postwar experiments with civil rights, war crimes, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, battles over land claims in the west, and an assortment of other matters. He treated closely related matters while revising <em>Leaves of Grass</em> and drafting his probing cultural analysis “Democratic Vistas.” His network of friendships in Washington offices also shaped his ability to get government jobs and to advance his literary career. For example, Whitman sent a copy of his “Proud Music of the Sea-Storm,” published in the <em>Atlantic Monthly</em> in February 1869, to an acquaintance named Julius Bing,[ref]Julius Bing (dates unknown) served as the clerk of the Joint Select Committee on Retrenchment in 1867 and 1868 and ghostwrote the 1868 report “Civil Service of the United States” before being appointed diplomatic agent for Crete later that year. A major advocate for reform of the Civil Service, Bing wrote a series of articles on the civil service for the <em>North American Review </em>and <em>Putnam’s Magazine</em> in 1867-1868. For more on Bing, about whom little is known, see Art Hoogenboom, <em>Outlawing the Spoils: A History of the Civil Service Reform Movement 1865-1883</em> (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968), especially 40-49.\r\n\r\nAlthough Whitman must have sent at least one letter to Bing, since Bing thanked Whitman for sending a copy of the <em>Atlantic Monthly</em> that included Whitman’s “Proud Music of the Sea-Storm” (the poem was published in the February 1869 issue of the magazine), no additional correspondence between Bing and Whitman has been identified to date.[/ref] a clerk of the Joint Select Committee on Retrenchment in 1867 and 1868. In response, Bing wrote a lengthy letter urging Whitman to write a poem about the Child Crusades. The poem was attempted by Whitman but never realized as such (Whitman’s notes on the topic and trial lines can be found in the Thomas B. Harned Collection of the Library of Congress). To the best of my knowledge, this aborted poem has not received any critical commentary, but I think it is well worth study because it is a rare instance of Whitman, in effect, collaborating on a poem, and it also shows him addressing an international issue of the remote past, but one with continuing resonance in his time and in our own.\r\n\r\nThe scribal documents also help shed light on Whitman’s increasing interest in international issues in his later writings—his work in the Attorney General’s office meant that he, quite literally, had his hand in international incidents involving Canada, Mexico, Ireland, France, Britain, Spain, China, and many other countries. The <em>Whitman Archive</em> recently has focused increasingly on international issues in more direct ways, too. Since most people in the world first encounter Whitman in a language other than English we are attempting to better serve that audience. We currently provide translations of Whitman\'s work into German, Spanish, and Russian; translations into Ukrainian, Portuguese, and Yiddish are far along in development. In addition, we are in conversation with scholars about expanding our work into Chinese, Polish, Italian and other languages soon. It is fascinating to see what happens to Whitman when he crosses linguistic and cultural borders and becomes absorbed in another milieu. This interaction often illuminates both the hosting cultural tradition as it comes to terms with Whitman as well as the ways that American audiences have interpreted Whitman\'s works.\r\n\r\nOne of the strengths of the <em>Archive</em>, related to the digital nature of our work, is the ever-evolving team that has built and continues to build the project. The <em>Whitman Archive</em> has become a training ground and laboratory for the next generation of literary scholars and digital humanists. The staff of the <em>Whitman Archive</em>—largely made up of graduate students—get hands-on experience and serve as apprentices of sorts. These graduate students serve as assistant editors and often attain positions of considerable responsibility within the project. I have been delighted by the diverse career paths our “alumni” have taken: one has gained a faculty position in a library; another works at the vice-chancellor level at a major university in an information technology role; some have gained tenure track positions at research-oriented institutions; others are employed at digital centers in various roles. Collectively they have demonstrated a range of ways to succeed professionally; their lives offer hope in a time of difficult job prospects in the humanities.\r\n\r\nAlthough the creation of the <em>Whitman Archive</em>—a vast and still rapidly growing resource—has cost a great deal of money, we are able to make it freely available. One of the strengths of the <em>Archive</em>, then, stems from success in garnering local support from several key institutions, a steady stream of grant support from four different federal agencies, and donations from various individuals and private foundations. These fundraising efforts culminated in the creation of a permanent endowment to support ongoing editorial work. We realize that this ongoing work could potentially reach far into the future, and we strive to make our work reusable for later scholars (so they can improve upon it) by documenting our practices and decisions. Having an endowment obliges us to think in longer terms than is common for scholars: we have the burden and advantage of a project that should continue well beyond the lives of anyone now working on the <em>Whitman Archive</em>.\r\n\r\nFor end users a key advantage of the <em>Whitman Archive</em> is that it makes freely available what would otherwise be difficult, costly, or impossible to access. The nature and extent of our audience are changed profoundly because the <em>Whitman Archive</em> is freely available, changes that are all to the good in my view. Instead of working with a small audience of specialist scholars in mind, we now also consider our large, varied, international audience as well. The importance of open access can hardly be overestimated. For us, open access means more than making content freely available for reading and analysis; it means making content freely available for reuse and repurposing. We willingly share files and have people work with them and reuse them in projects as long as those projects also are open, and they cite the <em>Archive</em>.\r\n\r\nDespite what the <em>Walt Whitman Archive</em> has accomplished thus far, we recognize that some features are lacking and that other features should be improved. The current search capability of the <em>Archive </em>is fairly limited and fails to take full advantage of our encoding, a key contribution to Whitman scholarship. Upcoming developments make me optimistic about leveraging the <em>Archive</em>’s rich encoding in more sophisticated ways, however, and experiments in indexing and searching the <em>Archive</em> are ongoing. The text base we’ve developed and continue to develop will lend itself to experimentation—by us and others, and we have rightly spent fifteen years developing the corpus so that it can be read, researched, and used by a variety of audiences employing a range of technologies and methodologies. The <em>Whitman Archive</em> also provides for the study of a new scholarly form, thanks to our documentation including encoding guidelines, history, and essays about the <em>Archive</em>. What seems clear is that the <em>Whitman Archive</em> is one of a group of projects that are demonstrating how the print-based monumental scholarly edition can be reimagined and advanced in the form of an electronic archive.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Price 4','At the Whitman Archive we recently have focused on two aspects of Whitman\'s work: 1) what we call his scribal documents—the letters Whitman copied or drafted for others and the notes and summaries he drafted as a clerk in federal government offices; 2) Whitman\'s crossing of international boundaries as seen in translations and in the remaking of “Whitman” as his work is absorbed into other cultural, literary, and political traditions.','inherit','open','open','','114-revision-22','','','2012-10-15 17:51:37','2012-10-15 17:51:37','',114,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/114-revision-22/',0,'revision','',0),(2860,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:37','2012-10-15 17:51:37','A comparison of the <em>Whitman Archive</em> to its print predecessor, <em>The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman</em>,[ref]When The New York University Press ceased publishing the Collected Writings in 1984, they had issued twenty-two volumes, many more than were originally projected. Despite the magnitude of what had been accomplished, many of the original objectives of the edition were not met. For example, the poetry manuscripts and periodical printings of Whitman\'s poetry were never collected, and the long-promised journalism, projected to appear in six volumes, never appeared in the NYUP edition. Peter Lang eventually published two volumes of the journalism in 1998 and 2003, though these volumes cover only the period from 1834–1848, leaving Whitman\'s innumerable contributions to periodicals in the final forty-four years of his life still to be edited. The Peter Lang volumes are produced so as to replicate the appearance of the New York University Press edition, though the editors of that series (all now deceased) did not oversee their production. Arguably, the Peter Lang volumes constitute volumes 23 and 24 of the Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, and a 25th volume, treating recently discovered correspondence, edited by Ted Genoways, was published by University of Iowa Press in 2004.[/ref] helps to clarify the advantages and disadvantages of digital and analog forms. Despite the many achievements of the print volumes in the <em>Collected Writings of Walt Whitman</em>, this editorial project ultimately became quite chaotic. Whitman\'s outgoing correspondence, for example, has been the subject of editorial treatment since the 1960s, when Edwin Haviland Miller edited five volumes of Whitman’s correspondence. Miller arranged the volumes chronologically, and with the fifth volume, he published an addendum of sixty-five letters that he uncovered even as the first four volumes appeared. Although this addendum meant that some letters would always be out of order, the complications of working with this single addition or revision were not insurmountable. Nine years later, however, a sixth volume appeared, and it included one hundred additional letters, complicating the organization further. Then, in 1991, Miller published fifty new letters in the <em>Walt Whitman Quarterly Review</em>,<em> </em>and Ted Genoways published third and fourth supplements of nearly one hundred letters in the journal<em> </em>in 2000 and 2002. In 2004, the University of Iowa Press issued a seventh volume of Whitman\'s correspondence, which included all of Whitman\'s letters found since Miller\'s sixth volume. In the end, there were nearly as many supplements as the number of Miller\'s original volumes, and over the last six years, even more letters have surfaced. This one aspect of the <em>Collected Writings</em> illustrates how print editions can devolve into disorder, even when the initial aim is to bring order to the literary record. I am confident that after the <em>Whitman Archive</em> “finishes” work on the correspondence previously unknown or lost letters will surface somewhere. It is a great strength of the digital medium that when this happens, new material can be integrated seamlessly into the collection.\r\n\r\nIn a related way, our “Integrated Guide to Walt Whitman’s Poetry Manuscripts” aggregates facsimile images of all surviving drafts of Whitman’s poems regardless of their geographical dispersion. The digital images and integrated guide bring order to the manuscripts and, for most purposes, erase the need to travel in order to study the manuscripts. (Individual repositories may have labeled an item by its first line or its working title, but we have created an overarching virtual order for all repositories, and we have labeled each individual poetry manuscript with what we call a “work” identifier based on the title of the last published version of the manuscript.) The high quality color facsimiles available on the <em>Archive</em> offer significant advantages for the study of the manuscripts; the images can be manipulated in photo-editing software to help us decipher otherwise illegible handwriting or zoom in on features of the ink, paper, and other characteristics such as pinholes, in order to offer new readings about the manuscripts and their relationships to one another.\r\n\r\nDespite the integrated guide’s utility, however, it remains an under-utilized resource. Indeed, one of our challenges has been how to make sure people find the content and tools most useful for their research questions. Perhaps a downside of bringing together so much material in one place is that doing so can inadvertently re-bury material (in some places, the organizational hierarchy of the <em>Archive</em> is fairly flat or one-dimensional, and in others, it is quite structured). It is hard to get a sense of the magnitude of the <em>Whitman Archive</em> at a glance. The more we enrich the site, the more challenging it becomes to keep the interface simple, straightforward, intuitive, and sufficiently informative.\r\n\r\nBooks are sometimes more convenient in various ways. The failure of a server does not make individual volumes of the <em>Collected Writings</em> temporarily disappear. For most practical purposes, the <em>Collected Writings</em> as a resource stays stable (and carries all the advantages and disadvantages of that condition). Print can rely on nicely developed interface and design that evolved over centuries, but digital conventions are still relatively young and therefore sometimes neither clear nor aesthetically pleasing.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Price 3','A comparison of the Whitman Archive to its print predecessor, The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman,[ref]When The New York University Press ceased publishing the Collected Writings in 1984, they had issued twenty-two volumes, many more than were originally projected. Despite the magnitude of what had been accomplished, many of the original objectives of the edition were not met. ','inherit','open','open','','111-revision-20','','','2012-10-15 17:51:37','2012-10-15 17:51:37','',111,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/111-revision-20/',0,'revision','',0),(2861,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:37','2012-10-15 17:51:37','Some weaknesses of the <em>Whitman Archive</em> are a function of its stage of development. We haven’t had time to accomplish all that we have envisaged. For example, we would like to provide a good introduction to the site, so that users at various levels of knowledge—and our users <em>are</em> quite varied—can get oriented quickly when they first encounter the site. In addition, given our scope, it is not surprising that many content areas are underdeveloped: we provide all known contemporary reviews of Whitman’s writings, but a person could legitimately ask why have we not, then, provided other essays about Whitman from the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, all out of copyright, which might shed even more light on Whitman than do these reviews. Only in the last few months have we made available any of Whitman’s prose, and we have done little thus far with Whitman’s journalism. We value his journalism and have made plans for editing it, but we have not had time yet to see significant results in this area.\r\n\r\nCurrently, the <em>Whitman Archive</em> also lacks sufficient integration of material across the site. For example, if Horace Traubel mentions a specific Whitman poem in <em>With Walt Whitman in Camden</em>, we should offer ready access to that particular version (and possibly also other versions of the poem). We could also link the poem to commentary, including contemporary reviews, books from the University of Iowa Press Whitman series, and articles from the full run of the <em>Walt Whitman Quarterly Review</em>. Individual essays from <em>WWQR</em> currently are linked from citations in the criticism bibliography, and we hope to integrate more fully this journal of record for Whitman studies with the <em>Whitman Archive</em>. This more complete integration of content, like most of the changes I would suggest for the <em>Archive</em>, will be undertaken as time allows.\r\n\r\nWe are also currently investigating the application of Web 2.0 features and functionality for the <em>Archive</em>, in hopes of enabling collaboration and interaction with users of the <em>Archive</em>.<em> </em>Ideally, we would like to harness the enthusiasm and knowledge of our users. As a first step in this direction, <em>Archive </em>staff at the University of Texas at Austin are exploring user accounts for the <em>Archive</em>, accounts which would allow users both to contribute to the <em>Archive</em> as well as to create their own collections of materials. Early work is also under way on a database designed to track the what, when, and how of Whitman’s reading—that is, what did Whitman read, when did he read it, and how do we know that he read a particular text? We believe that our user community could help us populate the database. Similar resources could be integrated into the <em>Whitman Archive</em> and include user-generated information: accounts of Whitman appearances in films, television shows, advertisements, and novels, for example. Users might also participate in attribution studies. Whitman is known to have contributed to the <em>Armory Square Hospital Gazette </em>during the Civil War<em>. </em>No complete run of the newspaper exists, however, and no pieces bear Whitman’s signature. User-collaborators could help us track down scattered issues of this rare paper as well as generate a lively and informative debate about the authorship of unattributed essays in the paper. As a scholarly site, we must strike the right balance between openness and scholarly rigor, and a fundamental question for us is how to encourage participation while insuring that quality control checks remain in place. We also hope to allow users with accounts to work with the texts and data of the <em>Whitman Archive </em>in order to explore their own interpretations. Sophisticated users might access our XML and XSLT files in a work area where they could alter the encoding and stylesheets in order to pursue particular interpretive goals.','360°: The Walt Whitman Archive – Price 2','Some weaknesses of the Whitman Archive are a function of its stage of development.  We haven’t had time to accomplish all that we have envisaged.  For example, we would like to provide a good introduction to the site, so that users at various levels of knowledge—and our users are quite varied—can get oriented quickly when they first encounter the site. In addition, given our scope, it is not surprising that many content areas...','inherit','open','open','','109-revision-18','','','2012-10-15 17:51:37','2012-10-15 17:51:37','',109,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/109-revision-18/',0,'revision','',0),(2862,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:37','2012-10-15 17:51:37','At this time, the <em>Walt Whitman Archive</em> is the single most extensive resource for the study of Whitman, and it<em> </em>has progressed steadily toward its primary goal: “to make Whitman\'s vast work, for the first time, easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers.” We take an expansive view of what is relevant “Whitman” material in a digital thematic research collection,[ref]Carole L. Palmer, \"Thematic Research Collections,\" In <em>A Companion to Digital Humanities</em> (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 348-65.[/ref] so we include both Whitman-authored pieces and incoming correspondence, reviews of his writings, selected recent criticism, and other materials not usually included in \"collected works.\" We aspire to produce the richest possible resource for the study of his writings, life, and reception. Our annotated bibliography, the logical starting point for scholarly work on the poet, includes all known critical writings about Whitman from 1839 to the present day—it comprises over 14,000 entries and continues to grow. The site receives a great deal of traffic: in a typical recent month (February 2010) we had nearly 39,000 visits to our site, more than 30,000 of which were by unique visitors.\r\n\r\nAs a project co-director, I coordinate the ongoing work necessary to build it. (Ed Folsom and I work closely with Elizabeth Lorang, the current project manager, in this capacity.) The site is less <em>used</em> in my work than it regularly <em>constitutes</em> a major part of my work as a scholar. At times, though, I employ the site in much the same manner as other literary scholars, albeit with greater knowledge of the site’s strengths and limitations and with awareness of material now in the pipeline that isn’t currently available to the public. As a literary critic, I appreciate what the <em>Whitman Archive</em> makes newly possible. For example, those of us writing about Whitman can now trace the development of his poetry across multiple versions—in isolated manuscript drafts; in notebooks; in periodical printings; and in various book publications—in a way that was all but unimaginable before the advent of the Web. His manuscripts are dispersed at nearly one hundred repositories around the world. In some cases, what was once a single manuscript has become separated into parts, with different sections of the manuscript held in repositories separated by great distance. Such manuscripts can now be virtually reunited.\r\n\r\nThe <em>Whitman Archive</em> has become fundamental to criticism, but citation of the <em>Archive</em> lags behind its actual use. A recent study by Lisa Spiro and Jane Segal indicates that many people use major American literature web sites, including the <em>Whitman Archive</em>, only to then cite print sources.[ref]“The Impact of Digital Resources on Humanities Research” available at\r\nhttp://library.rice.edu/services/dmc/about/projects/the-impact-of-digital-resources-on-humanities-research\r\n[/ref] This ill-conceived practice needs to change in order for digital humanities to get its due. To enable people to reference individual parts of the <em>Whitman Archive</em> more easily, all <em>Archive </em>pages will soon include additional metadata for use with Zotero and other reference management software<em>.</em> In my own scholarly practice, I have cited the <em>Whitman Archive</em> many times, and when Susan Belasco, Ed Folsom, and I compiled the collection <em>Leaves of Grass: The Sesquicentennial Essays</em> (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), we advised all contributors to cite the <em>Whitman Archive</em> when referring to Whitman texts.','360°: The Walt Whitman Archive – Price 1','At this time, the Walt Whitman Archive is the single most extensive resource for the study of Whitman, and it has progressed steadily toward its primary goal: “to make Whitman\'s vast work, for the first time, easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers.” We take an expansive view of what is relevant “Whitman” material in a digital thematic research collection...','inherit','open','open','','107-revision-21','','','2012-10-15 17:51:37','2012-10-15 17:51:37','',107,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/107-revision-21/',0,'revision','',0),(2863,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:37','2012-10-15 17:51:37','There are some fascinating strengths of this archive behind or beyond its more obvious assets. The more obvious include: a) bringing together in one “place” historical sources whose originals are widely scattered geographically; b) providing scans of sufficient density and size to permit scholars to examine at least some aspects of the original paper and photographic emulsion, a degree of quality that most digital archives do not have sufficient wherewithal to capture and maintain; c) producing an edited “publication” of Whitman’s papers in such a manner that researchers gain access to gradually increasing content rather than having to wait until the entirety of a printed volume is produced; d) “free” access from anywhere, rather than the purchase or travel expense to use a print edition or to visit various repositories.\r\n\r\nSome of the less obvious strong points can be uncovered only by reading the “About the Archive” sections exhaustively, something I suspect relatively few site visitors do. For example, in Matt Cohen’s “Transgenic Deformation: Literary Translation and the Digital Archive” (2006),<strong> </strong>the author identifies a subtle but important parallel between the increasing understanding within the archival profession that archivists’ work can no longer pretend to be objective, neutral, and invisible and the necessity from an editorial standpoint of “articulating stylesheets and XML markup [to users]…. In turn, translation seems to demand that archives explain their interface designs along with their markup strategies.”[ref]From The Walt Whitman Archive website (hereafter TWWA), <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00165.html\">http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00165.html</a>. For those not familiar with the parallel archival concerns, particularly as they relate to arrangement, description, and cataloging, please see Michelle Light and Tom Hyry: “Colophons and Annotations: New Directions for the Finding Aid,” American Archivist 65 (Fall/Winter 2002): 216-230.[/ref]\r\n\r\nCohen’s article also represents a broader strong point of the archive, which is the extensive “about” section, including more effort at self-analysis, elucidation of goals and values, lessons learned and challenges faced than the vast majority of other sites I’ve visited. Moreover, in the “Articles and Interviews” subsection the pieces contain an admirable blend of technical discussions,[ref]For example, Brett Barney and Kenneth M. Price, <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00006.html\">\"\'What I Assume You Shall Assume\': The <em>Whitman Archive</em> and the Challenge of Integrating Different Open Standards,\"</a> <em>TWWA</em> (2004).[/ref] more traditional scholarship, [ref]For example, Geoffrey Saunders Schramm, <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00007.html\">\"Whitman\'s Lifelong Endeavor: <em>Leaves of Grass</em> at 150,\"</a> <em>TWWA</em> (2005).[/ref] and what I think of as philosophical musings.[ref]For example, Kenneth M. Price, <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00346.html\">\"Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What\'s in a Name?</a>” <em>TWWA</em> (2009).[/ref]The simple fact that there are 12 years worth of articles and interviews relating to the archive gives a glimpse into the evolution of technology, priorities, and philosophies.[ref]Compare, for example, the Cohen article already cited to an earlier analysis of textual markup in the <em>Archive</em>, Brett Barney, <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00002.html\">\"\'Each Part and Tag of Me is a Miracle\': Reflections after Tagging the 1867 <em>Leaves of Grass,</em>\"</a> <em>TWWA</em> (2001).[/ref] This relatively rich context to the project and the archive is increasingly necessary, I believe, not only because of the increasing imperative for archivists, particularly, to make their work transparent to their users, but also to spread the value of such projects as far beyond the particular scholarly community being served as possible.','360°: The Walt Whitman Archive – Greene 1','There are some fascinating strengths of this archive behind or beyond its more obvious assets.  The more obvious include:  a) bringing together in one “place” historical sources whose originals are widely scattered geographically; b) providing scans of sufficient density and size to permit scholars to examine at least some aspects of the original paper and photographic emulsion...','inherit','open','open','','83-revision-28','','','2012-10-15 17:51:37','2012-10-15 17:51:37','',83,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/83-revision-28/',0,'revision','',0),(2864,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:37','2012-10-15 17:51:37','The weaknesses I have noticed in the <em>Archive</em> are not unique to this site. One problem is the site’s misunderstanding—and thus its improper assertion—of copyrights.[ref]I am a founding member of the Society of American Archivists’ Intellectual Property Working Group.[/ref] Specifically the site asserts the existence of copyright in the transcripts and facsimiles and more broadly in Whitman’s writings—because transcripts and facsimiles are “slavish copies” neither is entitled to copyright protection;[ref]The term is from the U.S. Second District Court of New York’s decision in <em>Bridgeman Art Library Ltd v. Corel Corporation</em>, 1998.[/ref]published or unpublished anything written by Whitman is in the public domain.[ref]See “<a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/conditions.html\">Conditions of Use</a>,” <em>TWWA</em>. Unpublished works are public domain for authors deceased prior to 1940; published works for everything published prior to 1923. For an authoritative source, see Peter Hirtle, “Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States: 1 January 2010,” online at <a href=\"http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm\">http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm</a>.[/ref] Only original contributions of editors are copyrightable at this late date.[ref]Such mistakes are not unique to <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em>, certainly. Copyright statements for the <em>In the Valley of the Shadow</em> Civil War project (<a href=\"http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/VoS/usingvalley/copyright.html\">http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/VoS/usingvalley/copyright.html</a>) and the <em>Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition</em> site (<a href=\"http://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/read/?_xmlsrc=lc.privacy.xml&amp;_xslsrc=LCstyles.xsl\">http://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/read/?_xmlsrc=lc.privacy.xml&amp;_xslsrc=LCstyles.xsl</a>) are much more egregious.[/ref] What distresses me about the inaccuracies is they suggest that there are limits to use of the main site content by researchers—notwithstanding frequent assertions that the purpose of the archive is “to make Whitman\'s vast work electronically accessible” to all.[ref]Katherine L. Walter and Kenneth M. Price, <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00001.html\">\"An Online Guide to Walt Whitman\'s Dispersed Manuscripts,\"</a> <em>TWWA</em> (2004).[/ref] Making the archive accessible but incorrectly claiming limitations on actual use is paradoxical at best.\r\n\r\nThere are other issues causing me unease, for example the inadequacy of site use data. The site does not regularly report use statistics, and what statistics it does provide—average daily hits in 2007[ref]Ed Folsom, <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00142.html\">\"Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives,\"</a> <em>TWWA</em> (2007).[/ref]--are of dubious value even when current.[ref]Google Analytics: “the number of hits a website receives is not a valid popularity gauge, but rather is an indication of server use and loading” (<a href=\"http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&amp;answer=33026\">http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&amp;answer=33026</a>). Better measures are unique visitors or page views, coupled with visits’ duration.[/ref] In addition there is little similar data at similar websites to compare to (though to their credit one of the site editors did gather some parallel data in 2008).[ref]The data, from the <em>Willa Cather Archive</em> and the <em>Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition,</em> is<em> </em>presented in Kenneth M. Price,<strong> </strong><a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00267.html\">\"Electronic Scholarly Editions,\"</a> <em>TWWA</em> (2008).[/ref] Thus this is an endemic weakness of major “archive” sites, a weakness related to a broader disinterest in the economics and sustainability of such sites.[ref]And of bricks and mortar archival operations, though this is beginning to change, as suggested by the questions—“Does the level of onsite use of special collections justify the resources being expended? What are the most appropriate measures by which to evaluate use?”—in Jackie M. Dooley and Katherine Luce, <em>Taking Our Pulse: The OCLC Research Survey of Special Collections and Archives</em> (OCLC, 2010), 34-36, online at <a href=\"http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2010/2010-11.pdf\">http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2010/2010-11.pdf</a>.[/ref] The greater viability of websites such as <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em> is ultimately the $64,000 question and the focus of my essay for Part II of this roundtable.','360°: The Walt Whitman Archive – Greene 2','The weaknesses I have noticed in the Archive are not unique to this site.  One problem is the site’s misunderstanding—and thus its improper assertion—of copyrights. Specifically the site asserts the existence of copyright in the transcripts and facsimiles and more broadly in Whitman’s writings—because transcripts and facsimiles are “slavish copies” neither is entitled to copyright protection...','inherit','open','open','','88-revision-25','','','2012-10-15 17:51:37','2012-10-15 17:51:37','',88,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/88-revision-25/',0,'revision','',0),(2865,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:37','2012-10-15 17:51:37','The digital form highlights a question faced by every project or repository working to build online digital collections from analog originals. The digital form permits creation of extremely high density and equally high quality facsimiles,[ref]Scanning requirements are in “<a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/technical_summary.html\">Technical Summary</a>,” <em>TWWA</em>.[/ref] making it possible to determine physical characteristics of the original impossible to consider during the era of microfilm or photocopying. For example, project transcribers can apparently discern\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>ink blots, smudges, and stray pen marks;</li>\r\n	<li>pin holes;</li>\r\n	<li>embossing;</li>\r\n	<li>variations in ink, pencil, or paper;</li>\r\n	<li>distinctions between single and multiple overstrikes[ref]From “<a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/mediawiki/index.php/Whitman_Encoding_Guidelines#What_Not_to_Encode\">5.9.1 What Not to Encode</a>,” <em>TWWA</em>.[/ref]</li>\r\n</ul>\r\nWhile these are “what not to encode,” they denote the expectation that facsimiles supplied to the transcribers are capable of producing such details. As an extra measure of quality, “project staff <em>examine each digital image</em> [when creating JPEGs from original TIFF files] <em>cleaned and cropped</em> for web delivery.”[ref]“Technical Summary,” emphases added.[/ref] The intricate encoding guidelines themselves are also part of making high quality facsimiles accessible.\r\n\r\nThe opportunity cost of demanding extremely high standards encompasses both a slow pace of making facsimiles accessible to users and the ability to create a complete archive of Whitman material—this latter price due to the inevitable (though not supportable) decision by some repositories to decline participation if it requires public accessibility to such high quality scans.[ref]See “<a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/history.html\">History of the Project</a>,” <em>TWWA</em>, for brief discussion of some libraries’ requirement to limit user access to 72 dpi facsimiles.[/ref] There is nothing inherently logical about sacrificing a complete collection for highest-quality facsimiles. Nor is there innate reason for choosing quality over quantity, particularly since one can structure a project whereby “inferior” facsimiles are placed online relatively quickly while higher-quality facsimiles are posted, gradually, later. The question of whether (and which) users are best served by large quantity rather than high quality is one accurately answered only by asking users themselves. Surveys or focus groups for gathering user input have not been employed by <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em> it appears—but neither have they been used by the vast majority of projects and repositories creating online collections.\r\n\r\nFor a decade now I have been actively involved in projects to increase the quantity of archival material accessible to users at the expense of traditional notions of quality. What began as an effort to speed processing of large modern manuscript (hidden) collections has evolved into jeremiads on trading speed for precision in most other aspects of archives administration as well—including the creation, description, and mounting of digital facsimiles online.[ref]See, particularly, Mark A. Greene and Dennis Meissner, “More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing,” <em>American Archivist</em>, 68:2 (Fall/Winter 2005), 208-263 and Mark A. Greene, “MPLP: It’s Not Just for Processing Anymore,” <em>American Archivist</em> 73:1 (Spring/Summer 2010), 175-203.[/ref] In some cases, including processing and digitization, there is direct evidence that some users prefer “more” over “better” at a ratio of about two-to-one. Far more research is required, certainly, and we should never assume that what holds true for one project/repository and its audience holds equally true for all. But we should certainly be more anxious to determine the answers than we have been heretofore.','360°: The Walt Whitman Archive – Greene 3','The digital form highlights a question faced by every project or repository working to build online digital collections from analog originals.  The digital form permits creation of extremely high density and equally high quality facsimiles, making it possible to determine physical characteristics of the original impossible to consider during the era of microfilm or photocopying...','inherit','open','open','','90-revision-34','','','2012-10-15 17:51:37','2012-10-15 17:51:37','',90,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/90-revision-34/',0,'revision','',0),(2866,19,'2012-10-15 17:51:37','2012-10-15 17:51:37','I give a great credit to <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em> co-director Kenneth Price for taking a critical look at the costs associated with an endeavor such as his.\r\n<blockquote>[M]any people, myself included, have described our site as free, yet a considerable amount of resources continue to go into its making. I want to explore that conundrum. … When users visit a deep scholarly archive on the web they are experiencing the (mostly real) benefit of displaced costs. Instead of money being spent by the user at the point of contact, money is spent elsewhere along the line: by universities in the form of faculty time, equipment, graduate student assistance, and internal grants; by external funding agencies; and, in our case, curiously, by more than one publisher. … We might ask: Is what the Whitman archive has done a sustainable model for the production of other full-scale scholarly editions on the web? We have been fortunate with grants, publishers, libraries, and generous universities. But if it requires such a constellation of good fortune to produce an electronic scholarly edition, do we have a sound economic model in place? As the questions imply, I don\'t think we do.[ref]Kenneth M. Price, <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00004.html\">\"Dollars and Sense in Collaborative Digital Scholarship: The Example of the <em>Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive</em>,\"</a> <em>TWWA</em> (2001).[/ref]</blockquote>\r\nYet for all his candor, and the importance of that candor, he does not take the next (and even more difficult) step of analyzing the project’s benefits as well as its costs. Saying such an online archival endeavor is not sustainable is, in part, to say it does not (cannot, I will suggest) provide sufficient benefits to sustain continuing such costs. For me this is part of a larger question about how and why we allocate archival resources. I have no particular bone to pick with the <em>Whitman Archive</em>; I have raised similar concerns about the disproportionate staff and monetary resources devoted by bricks and mortar repositories to literary collections as a genre, congressional papers as a genre,[ref]Mark A. Greene, \"Appraisal of Congressional Papers at the Minnesota Historical Society: A Case Study,\" <em>Archival Issues</em> 19:1 (1994), 31-44.<em> </em>Republished in <em>An American Political Archives Reader,</em> Karen Dawley Paul , Glenn R Gray , and L. Rebecca Johnson Melvin eds. (Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2009), 181-96.[/ref] university records as a genre, state/county/local court records as a genre, and general store records as a genre[ref]Mark A. Greene, “From Village Smithy to Superior Vacuum Technology: Modern Small Business Records and the Collecting Repository,” <em>Archival Issues</em> 23:1 (1998), 41-58.[/ref]—all categories of records I believe are represented disproportionately in repositories and given disproportionate attention by archivists.\r\n\r\nAn argument that resource expenditure is disproportionate requires some comparison. As my then colleague at the Minnesota Historical Society wrote in 1998,\r\n<blockquote>while politics is an important component of Minnesota history, it is at least arguable that its importance is not so great as the resources that the Society has devoted to documenting it. Neither the stack space nor the staff time is sufficient to swallow Congressional collections whole and still be able appropriately to document business, recreation, family life, etc. for Minnesota. We had to ask: ‘Do we really need 116 feet of material to document Congressman Tom Hagedorn’s eight years in office when we keep 110 feet for nearly seventy years of the St. Paul Area United Way?’[ref]Todd J. Daniels-Howell, “Reappraisal of Congressional Records at the Minnesota Historical Society,” <em>Archival Issues </em>23:1 (1998), 36.[/ref]</blockquote>\r\nThis was hardly a precise comparison, to be sure, but it was an early attempt to ask archivists to consider the theretofore reflexive resource allocation required to document congressional service to the nth degree compared to both the opportunity costs and the relative benefit (to a repository’s users) of shifting resources to other acquisition, processing, and preservation goals. It is not that Hagedorn’s congressional tenure was value-<em>less</em> nor that the United Way’s records were objectively more valuable, only that we had never before considered the relative costs and benefits.\r\n\r\nSuch comparison is no easy matter, granted. It might be abstractly valid to ask whether it is a good allocation of resources to develop an exhaustive online archives for Walt Whitman when there are not such efforts underway for, say, Theodore Roosevelt,[ref]At least so far as I can discover, though I did not perform a truly exhaustive search.[/ref] but the fact is we have no mechanism to determine, in any way that is even vaguely acceptable on a wide scale, whether one historical figure is more “deserving” of such a site than another. And even if we did, we don’t have a mechanism for ensuring that the more deserving figure would automatically generate the structure necessary to solicit and manage the resources that might then be available. And if we succeeded in identifying such mechanisms there would still loom the matter of judging relative quantity and quality of use of the sites—use being, I believe, the “end of all archival effort.”[ref]Theodore R. Schellenberg, <em>The Management of Archives</em> (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 108. I have pursued the idea of the centrality of use to archival work most extensively in “’The Surest Proof’: The Use of Business Records and Implications for Appraisal,” <em>Archivaria</em> 45 (Spring 1998), 127-69 and later in Greene and Meissner, “More Product, Less Process.”[/ref]\r\n\r\nSo is this a purely rhetorical exercise? I don’t think so. As difficult as these questions are to answer with precision, they remain necessary questions and there are pieces of answers available once we start asking. My plea is that we do start asking, that we do start expecting to define quantitative and qualitative measure of the costs and benefits of such projects and, by extension, of our bricks and mortar archival endeavors as well. Not only do I think we owe it to our constituents and funders, I also believe it will increasingly be demanded by our administrators.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Greene 4','I give a great credit to The Walt Whitman Archive co-director Kenneth Price for taking a critical look at the costs associated with an endeavor such as his. \"[M]any people, myself included, have described our site as free, yet a considerable amount of resources continue to go into its making. I want to explore that conundrum.\"','inherit','open','open','','104-revision-25','','','2012-10-15 17:51:37','2012-10-15 17:51:37','',104,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/104-revision-25/',0,'revision','',0),(2867,19,'2012-10-15 20:51:05','2012-10-15 20:51:05','There are some fascinating strengths of this archive behind or beyond its more obvious assets. The more obvious include: a) bringing together in one “place” historical sources whose originals are widely scattered geographically; b) providing scans of sufficient density and size to permit scholars to examine at least some aspects of the original paper and photographic emulsion, a degree of quality that most digital archives do not have sufficient wherewithal to capture and maintain; c) producing an edited “publication” of Whitman’s papers in such a manner that researchers gain access to gradually increasing content rather than having to wait until the entirety of a printed volume is produced; d) “free” access from anywhere, rather than the purchase or travel expense to use a print edition or to visit various repositories.\r\n\r\nSome of the less obvious strong points can be uncovered only by reading the “About the Archive” sections exhaustively, something I suspect relatively few site visitors do. For example, in Matt Cohen’s “Transgenic Deformation: Literary Translation and the Digital Archive” (2006),<strong> </strong>the author identifies a subtle but important parallel between the increasing understanding within the archival profession that archivists’ work can no longer pretend to be objective, neutral, and invisible and the necessity from an editorial standpoint of “articulating stylesheets and XML markup [to users]…. In turn, translation seems to demand that archives explain their interface designs along with their markup strategies.”[ref]From The Walt Whitman Archive website (hereafter TWWA), <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00165.html\">http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00165.html</a>. For those not familiar with the parallel archival concerns, particularly as they relate to arrangement, description, and cataloging, please see Michelle Light and Tom Hyry: “Colophons and Annotations: New Directions for the Finding Aid,” American Archivist 65 (Fall/Winter 2002): 216-230.[/ref]\r\n\r\nCohen’s article also represents a broader strong point of the archive, which is the extensive “about” section, including more effort at self-analysis, elucidation of goals and values, lessons learned and challenges faced than the vast majority of other sites I’ve visited. Moreover, in the “Articles and Interviews” subsection the pieces contain an admirable blend of technical discussions,[ref]For example, Brett Barney and Kenneth M. Price, <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00006.html\">\"\'What I Assume You Shall Assume\': The <em>Whitman Archive</em> and the Challenge of Integrating Different Open Standards,\"</a> <em>TWWA</em> (2004).[/ref] more traditional scholarship, [ref]For example, Geoffrey Saunders Schramm, <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00007.html\">\"Whitman\'s Lifelong Endeavor: <em>Leaves of Grass</em> at 150,\"</a> <em>TWWA</em> (2005).[/ref] and what I think of as philosophical musings.[ref]For example, Kenneth M. Price, <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00346.html\">\"Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What\'s in a Name?</a>” <em>TWWA</em> (2009).[/ref]The simple fact that there are 12 years worth of articles and interviews relating to the archive gives a glimpse into the evolution of technology, priorities, and philosophies.[ref]Compare, for example, the Cohen article already cited to an earlier analysis of textual markup in the <em>Archive</em>, Brett Barney, <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00002.html\">\"\'Each Part and Tag of Me is a Miracle\': Reflections after Tagging the 1867 <em>Leaves of Grass,</em>\"</a> <em>TWWA</em> (2001).[/ref] This relatively rich context to the project and the archive is increasingly necessary, I believe, not only because of the increasing imperative for archivists, particularly, to make their work transparent to their users, but also to spread the value of such projects as far beyond the particular scholarly community being served as possible.','360°: The Walt Whitman Archive – Greene 1','There are some fascinating strengths of this archive behind or beyond its more obvious assets.  The more obvious include:  a) bringing together in one “place” historical sources whose originals are widely scattered geographically; b) providing scans of sufficient density and size to permit scholars to examine at least some aspects of the original paper and photographic emulsion...','inherit','open','open','','83-revision-29','','','2012-10-15 20:51:05','2012-10-15 20:51:05','',83,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/83-revision-29/',0,'revision','',0),(2868,19,'2012-10-15 20:54:05','2012-10-15 20:54:05','There are some fascinating strengths of this archive behind or beyond its more obvious assets. The more obvious include: a) bringing together in one “place” historical sources whose originals are widely scattered geographically; b) providing scans of sufficient density and size to permit scholars to examine at least some aspects of the original paper and photographic emulsion, a degree of quality that most digital archives do not have sufficient wherewithal to capture and maintain; c) producing an edited “publication” of Whitman’s papers in such a manner that researchers gain access to gradually increasing content rather than having to wait until the entirety of a printed volume is produced; d) “free” access from anywhere, rather than the purchase or travel expense to use a print edition or to visit various repositories.\r\n\r\nSome of the less obvious strong points can be uncovered only by reading the “About the Archive” sections exhaustively, something I suspect relatively few site visitors do. For example, in Matt Cohen’s “Transgenic Deformation: Literary Translation and the Digital Archive” (2006),<strong> </strong>the author identifies a subtle but important parallel between the increasing understanding within the archival profession that archivists’ work can no longer pretend to be objective, neutral, and invisible and the necessity from an editorial standpoint of “articulating stylesheets and XML markup [to users]…. In turn, translation seems to demand that archives explain their interface designs along with their markup strategies.”[ref]From The Walt Whitman Archive website (hereafter TWWA), <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00165.html\">http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00165.html</a>. For those not familiar with the parallel archival concerns, particularly as they relate to arrangement, description, and cataloging, please see Michelle Light and Tom Hyry: “Colophons and Annotations: New Directions for the Finding Aid,” American Archivist 65 (Fall/Winter 2002): 216-230.[/ref]\r\n\r\nCohen’s article also represents a broader strong point of the archive, which is the extensive “about” section, including more effort at self-analysis, elucidation of goals and values, lessons learned and challenges faced than the vast majority of other sites I’ve visited. Moreover, in the “Articles and Interviews” subsection the pieces contain an admirable blend of technical discussions,[ref]For example, Brett Barney and Kenneth M. Price, <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00006.html\">\"\'What I Assume You Shall Assume\': The <em>Whitman Archive</em> and the Challenge of Integrating Different Open Standards,\"</a> <em>TWWA</em> (2004).[/ref] more traditional scholarship, [ref]For example, Geoffrey Saunders Schramm, <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00007.html\">\"Whitman\'s Lifelong Endeavor: <em>Leaves of Grass</em> at 150,\"</a> <em>TWWA</em> (2005).[/ref] and what I think of as philosophical musings.[ref]For example, Kenneth M. Price, <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00346.html\">\"Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What\'s in a Name?</a>” <em>TWWA</em> (2009).[/ref]The simple fact that there are 12 years worth of articles and interviews relating to the archive gives a glimpse into the evolution of technology, priorities, and philosophies.[ref]Compare, for example, the Cohen article already cited to an earlier analysis of textual markup in the <em>Archive</em>, Brett Barney, <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00002.html\">\"\'Each Part and Tag of Me is a Miracle\': Reflections after Tagging the 1867 <em>Leaves of Grass,</em>\"</a> <em>TWWA</em> (2001).[/ref] This relatively rich context to the project and the archive is increasingly necessary, I believe, not only because of the increasing imperative for archivists, particularly, to make their work transparent to their users, but also to spread the value of such projects as far beyond the particular scholarly community being served as possible.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Greene 1','There are some fascinating strengths of this archive behind or beyond its more obvious assets.  The more obvious include:  a) bringing together in one “place” historical sources whose originals are widely scattered geographically; b) providing scans of sufficient density and size to permit scholars to examine at least some aspects of the original paper and photographic emulsion...','inherit','open','open','','83-revision-30','','','2012-10-15 20:54:05','2012-10-15 20:54:05','',83,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/83-revision-30/',0,'revision','',0),(2869,19,'2012-10-15 20:51:04','2012-10-15 20:51:04','Though the <em>Walt Whitman Archive</em> seems well designed for researchers at all levels of expertise, it strikes me as particularly well-suited for students or for others who may enter the site with limited knowledge about the author and his works. A significant advantage is the clean and inviting appearance of the layout at all levels of the database. The interface is wonderfully uncluttered, making exploration simple and unintimidating. On the homepage left-hand navigation menu, I found the categories to be intuitive and well-organized. I clarified this assessment with an experiment, in which I browsed manually for items that I already knew existed in the archive. In all cases, I was able to locate the target items with little or no backtracking.\r\n\r\nI found the most valuable feature of the site for the non-expert visitor to be the contextual information that was present on many of the pages in the database. For example, when clicking on any of the major links under the “published works” tab, I was given a short blurb that generally included a preface to the contents of the page, its status of development and coming additions, and any important contextual knowledge that would help me situate it in culture or among Whitman’s other works. It was also extremely helpful to find each of Whitman’s published books (excluding the foreign editions) furnished with a detailed and thoughtful “About” page, which provided enough background and compelling analysis to give me, the student and non-expert, a firm grasp of the material I was about to browse.\r\n\r\nI would feel confident and comfortable investigating a specific topic, browsing for research material, or exploring new content out of curiosity on the <em>Archive</em>. More than a repository, it is well-developed as a learning tool for those who are new to Whitman scholarship.','The Walt Whitman Archive – McGonagill 1','Though the Walt Whitman Archive seems well designed for researchers at all levels of expertise, it strikes me as particularly well-suited for students or for others who may enter the site with limited knowledge about the author and his works. A significant advantage is the clean and inviting appearance of the layout at all levels of the database. The interface is wonderfully uncluttered, making exploration simple and unintimidating.','inherit','open','open','','130-revision-24','','','2012-10-15 20:51:04','2012-10-15 20:51:04','',130,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/130-revision-24/',0,'revision','',0),(2870,19,'2012-10-15 20:51:04','2012-10-15 20:51:04','While I found the basic navigability of the site to be well-designed, I wish that it was easier to discover new things in the database. The obvious place to begin would be the search tool, which is very limited. While more robust features are promised for the future (according to a notice at the top of the page), the current tool falls short of expectations for a database of this size and quality. Discovery of new material depends upon the possibility of encountering random bits of data and the ability to arrange information in new permutations such that new synchronies arise; currently, the <em>Archive </em>is not well configured for such active contact between the reader and the raw data. In addition to random data, an improved search tool would also better allow the user to conduct specific paths of inquiry. For a hypothetical student with an assignment to follow, it can be important to view thematic cross sections rather than vertical stacks of data under folders.\r\n\r\nThe addition of tagging would help to increase the fluidity of the site. In order to maintain the rigor of its editorship, the <em>Archive</em> might prefer to use tags that are curated by a team rather than a ‘folksonomy’ approach that opens up tag authorship to all users and lets the system grow on its own, minimally governed. The functionality of the search tool might improve, also, by responding to terms that have demonstrated relevance to users rather than random syntax in content.\r\n\r\nNavigation between pages on the <em>Archive </em>is smooth and intuitive; however, it could benefit form the implementation of same-page navigation tools. Many of the pages on the site feature very long texts, which require excessive scrolling and are difficult to read in a non-linear fashion. A hyperlinked table of contents at the top might be a first step, but many of the long critical articles do not have obvious breaking points and would not divide naturally into a table. Eventually, it would be good to see a more sophisticated tool for navigating through content on the same page—as it is, a database that deliberately embraces the fluidity of digital forms traps the reader in a format that is ironically dependent upon rigid sequence and imitated print forms. Reducing this rigidity would greatly improve the user experience.','The Walt Whitman Archive – McGonagill 2','While I found the basic navigability of the site to be well-designed, I wish that it was easier to discover new things in the database. The obvious place to begin would be the search tool, which is very limited. While more robust features are promised for the future (according to a notice at the top of the page), the current tool falls short of expectations for a database of this size and quality.','inherit','open','open','','132-revision-21','','','2012-10-15 20:51:04','2012-10-15 20:51:04','',132,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/132-revision-21/',0,'revision','',0),(2871,19,'2012-10-15 20:51:04','2012-10-15 20:51:04','As the <em>Archive</em> is very aware, the Whitman corpus presents a particular set of linguistic challenges to the reader that seem to appeal for a more open and flexible form than what is offered by their original editions of print. Digital forms often work well for such challenging texts because they provide a-linear approaches of exploration and analysis, but in my opinion the <em>Archive </em>has not yet developed into a format that takes full advantage of this possibility. Though I was able to navigate around the site easily from any point with the aid of the menu across the top of the page and the breadcrumb links, my general experience of the Whitman archive was that it remains limited by linear arrangements of data. The structure of the database, which is dominated by a hierarchical folder system, can make it difficult to stir up new configurations of information: the volume of the repository is still impressive, but in this case a physical archive might allow better non-linear entry.\r\n\r\nAnd yet, the hierarchical folders and the linear browsing process they suggest also garnered my praised in an earlier question, due to their “clean” and “intuitive” qualities. While limiting to the agile Whitman scholar, these features are very advantageous in one’s initial foray into the <em>Archive</em> because they present easier options and clear delineations.\r\n\r\nPhysical archives fit well into folder systems while maintaining an element of the random and a-linear because each page is a potential entry-point. Web pages, however, favor top-view and selection rather than the act of flipping through or diving in at a random point. The <em>Walt Whitman Archive </em>has moved past the limitations of print in many ways already; if there was a way to reincorporate some of the random browsability of the physical archive, without sacrificing the intuitive appearance, the experience might benefit. This might be accomplished by exposing more metadata on the surface of the site in order to cut new cross-sections through the repository; for example, making it possible to browse by year rather than type and title of work, or organizing clusters of data by theme or biographical reference. If the editors can find a way to take the information out of its silos across the site, their users might enjoy an even more fluid and organic approach to the text.','The Walt Whitman Archive – McGonagill 3','As the Archive is very aware, the Whitman corpus presents a particular set of linguistic challenges to the reader that seem to appeal for a more open and flexible form than what is offered by their original editions of print. Digital forms often work well for such challenging texts because they provide a-linear approaches of exploration and analysis, but in my opinion the Archive has not yet developed...','inherit','open','open','','134-revision-27','','','2012-10-15 20:51:04','2012-10-15 20:51:04','',134,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/134-revision-27/',0,'revision','',0),(2872,19,'2012-10-15 20:51:04','2012-10-15 20:51:04','In the Digital Humanist’s tool belt, the database is the trusty stand-by. Robust and indispensable, it has become a basic tool of modern academic research. One of the primary endeavors of the Digital Humanities, however, is to re-focus the perspective on the tools we use, and perhaps to redefine the term “tool” in the process. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “a thing … with which some operation is performed; a means of effecting something.”[ref]<em>Oxford English Dictionary</em>, 2<sup>nd</sup> ed., s.v. “Tool.”[/ref] This definition points plainly toward outcome, the tool’s utility at accomplishing “some operation,” as if it were an extension of the user’s will as a wrench is an extension of his or her hand. But by emphasizing results only, the dictionary neglects a tool’s significant influence over process.\r\n\r\nTools define process as much as they do outcome. When one searches a database, its individual design mediates the experience, filters it, frames it. A sleek database makes the act of use nearly imperceptible—it stays out of the way, as it were, by anticipating the needs and intuitions of the general user in its design. However, the specific user will always be limited by these presuppositions. It is tempting to imagine a database as a neutral container, a kind of Tupperware 2.0, while in fact the tool guides the searches that one can make, the items that they will return, and which will appear prominent. Facets of the design guide what sorts of orderings of information, or narratives, the researcher will construct out of the raw data, such that the database itself can form a subtle argument or narrative claim.\r\n\r\nAcknowledging the skewed nature of any tool that presents information, <em>Walt Whitman Archive</em> co-editor Ed Folsom describes his approach to structuring the database: “Initially, [co-editor Kenneth] Price and I had ideas of how we would control the material in the database, and we knew the narratives we wanted to tell, the frames we wanted to construct. But the details of the database quickly exceeded any narrative we might try to frame the data with. Little roots shot out everywhere and attached to particulars we could not have imagined. Only if we insulated the narrative from the database could the narrative persist.”[ref]Ed Folsom, “Database as Genre: the Epic Transformation of Archives,”<em> The Walt Whitman Archive</em>, accessed November 2010,<em> </em><a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00142.html\">http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00142.html</a>.[/ref] To me, the <em>Walt Whitman Archive</em> is rife with narrative paths for the user. Some of these are micro-narratives, unavoidably emerging from details of the interface. Because the left-hand navigation menu is more visually prominent than the search bar, the user is more strongly guided into a browsing mode of exploration, which encourages him or her to consider Whitman through a compartmentalized view of his life and works. By featuring a simple search bar without advanced specifications or filtration[ref]A notice on the site informs the user that this feature is soon slated to undergo an enhancement, which will include the development of faceted search capabilities.[/ref], the database allows the user to cast a virtual fishing line for an assortment of items but makes it more difficult to conduct a narrowly directed search—thus, one is likely to encounter information that seems scattered rather than tight and contextual.\r\n\r\nApart from these micro-narratives, the database also cradles a deep narrative claim pertaining to Whitman’s corpus: throughout the database there is an open discussion examining the suggestive congruity between Whitman’s work and the digital medium in which it is takes form. The documentation of this resonance begins with observations about Whitman’s language and works, which seem to share characteristics of digital structure. For example, Ed Folsom to the organic networks present in Whitman’s language, an intertextual and burgeoning web of words. He compares this quality to the dense entanglement of leaves and roots that adorn the lettering on the first edition of <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, recalling the rhizome[ref]Defined as “an elongated, usually horizontal, subterranean stem which sends out roots and leafy shoots at intervals along its length.” <em>Oxford English Dictionary</em>, 3rd ed., s.v. \"Rhizome.\"[/ref]—“that subterranean stem that grows every which way and represents the nomadic multiplicity of identity—no central root but an intertwined web of roots.”[ref]Folsom, “Database as Genre.<em>”</em>[/ref] Databases, too, are rhizomorphous, he argues—and this accordance between Whitman’s work and its digital format allows the two to reflect through and off of one another, revealing new permutations of form and language.\r\n\r\nIn a proleptic twist, Whitman’s work predates its own ideal medium. A common observation in the various articles about the database is the fact that the work is perhaps better displayed in digital form that it ever was in print: the digital medium is better equipped to represent the shapes and forms of the Whitman corpus, and flexible enough to accommodate the complex relationship between the many iterations of <em>Leaves of Grass</em>. The database does not privilege one edition over any other, and treats them as autonomous but entwined works rather than pieces of a distinct whole or drafts leading up to a definitive version. The sheer multiplicity of his writing is betrayed by the rigidity of print mediums. “Whitman’s work was always being revised, was always in flux, and fixed forms of print do not adequately capture his incessant revisions,” argues Price.[ref]Kenneth M. Price, “About the <em>Archive</em>: History,” <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em>, accessed November 2010, http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/history.html.[/ref] Whitman himself advocated methods of reading and taking meaning from his texts that today seem almost designed for digital tools. A line from <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, first appearing in the 1881-82 edition, reads “the words of my book nothing, the drift of it every thing.”[ref]Walt Whitman, <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, (Washington, D.C, 1881-82), http://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1871/whole.html.[/ref] Taking long-view of literature, Whitman’s remark resonates with the current practice of distant reading, in which vast quantities of text can be analyzed as an entity using statistical information and visualizations. Predating this practice, Whitman draws the reader away from the individual minutiae of his poetry and towards impressionistic views. If any text was written for a database, this one was.\r\n\r\nThus, the <em>Archive</em> attempts not only to exhibit its contents, but to carry out a vision that Whitman may have offered in the original work. This narrative is present throughout the site primarily via the apparent compatibility between the content and form. The claim is so elegant, so fluid and simple, that the argument almost makes itself.\r\n\r\nThe <em>Walt Whitman Archive</em> is able to transcend its (considerable) utility as a research tool, performing simultaneously as a critical analysis, a new edition of Whitman, and independent artistic work. I imagine four theoretical levels at which a format can manage a text, with increasing involvement: presentation, description, criticism, and artistic response. The sophistication of this particular database is in how it blurs the lines between those acts, seeming to realize all at once and none predominantly, and, further, how it reveals the fact that this multiplicity of function must be true of all databases, however subtly, however unintentionally.\r\n\r\nThis remarkable plurality within a single tool (if tool is still an adequate term) is both fitting, in the context of Whitman, and disruptive to the user’s relationship with the technology. It remains to be addressed how, or whether, the user should adjust his or her approach to such a complex mechanism. At the recent undergraduate digital humanities symposium Re: Humanities, keynote speaker Amanda French advocated for the “rehumaniz[ation of] the inhuman mass of data.”[ref]Amanda French, “Humanities Research Methods from 1860 to 2060” (presentation at Re:Humanities, Haverford, PA, November 11-12, 2010).[/ref] She suggests that scholars who favor distant reading may be losing track of a meaningful element of the text. Rather than conducting interpretive based on massive aggregates of information, why not reacquaint ourselves with an affection for individual pieces of data, find “datum love” among the mass of details? The two methods appear to be mutually exclusive. However, by reconceiving the practice of data mining, it is arguably possible to find personal touches in the thrill of broad claims as well as the nuance of the particular.\r\n\r\nIf each database frames its contents in an array of narrative claims, then each one is specific, disputable, and limited. Rather than markers of failure, however, we might use these idiosyncracies to reawaken us to the particular experience that that tool offers. We could use the fact that a database mediates actively to inject an element of personal interaction into the task of digital research. In the course of achieving proficiency with any tool, one gains an understanding of its particular advantages and limitations through repeated contact and experimentation, returning to the interactive original meaning of “interface.”[ref]Defined as “a means or place of interaction between two systems, organizations, etc.; a meeting-point or common ground between two parties, systems, or disciplines; also, interaction, liaison, dialogue.” <em>Oxford English Dictionary</em>, 2nd ed., s.v. \"Interface.\"[/ref] Here is an opportunity to find a better alternative to the impersonal database experience, an escape from hard vocabulary statistics untempered by readerly love.\r\n\r\nThe management of scale is a challenge that each database must address by determining how the user will navigate between detail and distance. Due to Whitman’s distinctive engagement with matters of scale, especially the fluidity between the individual and the masses, the <em>Walt Whitman Archive</em> may be uniquely able to offer a distant reading that is paradoxically intimate in its connection to the philosophy of the poet. How can a distant reading cheat the humanist if it scrutinizes the work of the man who wrote, exhilarated, “Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations. Here is action untied from strings necessarily blind to particulars and details magnificently moving in vast masses?”[ref]Walt Whitman, <em>Leaves of Grass: 150<sup>th</sup> Anniversary Edition</em>, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), iii.[/ref] Ed Folsom describes Whitman’s “poetic project” as an endeavor “to move from a particular person, period, or place toward an absorptive embrace of all people, periods, and places,”[ref]Folsom, “Database as Genre.”[/ref]emphasizing the blurred distinctions between love of the particular and love of the vast. TokenX, a textual analysis tool that is available through the database, numerically charts the uses of particular words throughout the six editions of <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, giving a visual representation to the exponential growth and organic proliferation of certain words as the poetry burgeoned in its various iterations. Statistical tools such as these, when applied to the work of this particular author, are not reductive but in fact profoundly resonant with the tone and principles of the poetry they describe. Perhaps this is the database to wed tender devotion to individual data and multiplicity.\r\n\r\nFeatured prominently on the home page of the <em>Archive</em> is a striking engraving of Whitman’s face.[ref]William J. Linton, (1870-72), engraving, (http://whitmanarchive.org/multimedia/image044.html?sort=year&amp;order=ascending&amp;page=5).[/ref] The poet appears as if caught in motion, whipping past the viewer with his eddies of hair scattered about his face like sprouts. The beard connotes a general outward drift as it spreads from his face in swells and waves. And then, from somewhere in the profusion of hair and wrinkles emerges an arresting pair of dark eyes: Whitman’s eyes simultaneously confront and confide in the viewer, imparting a personal moment amidst a storm of minutiae.','The Walt Whitman Archive – McGonagill 4','In the Digital Humanist’s tool belt, the database is the trusty stand-by. Robust and indispensable, it has become a basic tool of modern academic research. One of the primary endeavors of the Digital Humanities, however, is to re-focus the perspective on the tools we use, and perhaps to redefine the term “tool” in the process. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “a thing … with which some operation is performed; a means of effecting something.\"','inherit','open','open','','136-revision-27','','','2012-10-15 20:51:04','2012-10-15 20:51:04','',136,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/136-revision-27/',0,'revision','',0),(2873,19,'2012-10-15 20:51:04','2012-10-15 20:51:04','Archive co-director Ed Folsom once noted that printed editions of Whitman’s works have had the unfortunate tendency of becoming irrelevant the moment that scholars unearth a new letter, manuscript, or biographical fact about the poet. The Whitman Archive, however, has the benefit of being able to change and adapt as often as new discoveries are brought to the attention of the directors. In such an environment, Folsom writes, “All users are potential co-editors.”[ref]Ed Folsom, “Projecting Whitman: The Evolution and Remediation of The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman,” <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em>, accessed December 2, 2010 http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00003.html.[/ref] I love the notion that everyone is a “potential co-editor” of the Whitman Archive, and I\'d like to consider how the Archive could make better use of its digital form as a way to more fully realize this potential. I would never advocate for crowd-sourcing the Archive on the model of sites like Wikipedia, but I would like the Archive directors to take more seriously the implication that “All users are potential co-editors.”\r\n\r\nI have a tremendous amount of respect for how the Archive directors have responded to public criticisms from other scholars. In a 2007 <em>PMLA</em> forum on the Whitman Archive, for example, Meredith McGill took the Archive to task for decontextualizing the poems that Whitman had published in newspapers and magazines by clipping the poems from their original sources and excluding all the other articles, poems, and advertisements that appeared alongside Whitman’s poems.[ref]Meredith L. McGill, “Remediating Whitman,” <em>PMLA</em> 112.5 (2007):1594.[/ref] The Archive promptly responded to this criticism by including the entire page of the periodical where a Whitman poem appeared. But not every user of the Whitman Archive can get the attention of the Archive directors in the pages of <em>PMLA</em>. And even those fortunate enough to do so don\'t have a mechanism for providing additional feedback to the Archive directors regarding their response to suggestions for improvement. I wonder, does McGill think it was sufficient to include the complete newspaper page where a Whitman poem appeared, or would she rather that the Archive include the rest of the issue is well? Or would she even prefer a link to some external site that hosts the entire run of the paper?\r\n\r\nThe Archive could make better use of its digital form by providing “user accounts or other community-hosting capabilities,” as Matt Cohen has recently suggested.[ref]Cohen, “Design and Politics,” 241.[/ref]Integrating Web 2.0 components such as user accounts and a comment section to the Whitman Archive would have considerable implications for the Archive: while a comments section would give scholars such as McGill a much more dynamic venue for engaging with the Archive\'s directors, it would also make the Archive feel less like a scholarly edition of Whitman\'s works and more like a Facebook fan page. Nevertheless, Archive co-director Kenneth M. Price has already said that “scholarly edition” doesn\'t necessarily describe what the Whitman Archive actually is. Instead, Price has characterized the Archive as something more like a workshop, or, as he puts it, a “group of people who are now joined together for a common purpose.”[ref]Kenneth M. Price, \"Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What\'s in a Name?\" <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em>, accessed December 2, 2010 http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00346.html.[/ref] If that group of people could also include the hundreds (if not thousands) of scholars, students, and non-academic readers who visit the Archive every day, it would not only make better use of the digital medium, but it would also go some distance toward fulfilling Folsom\'s claim that “All users are potential co-editors.”','The Walt Whitman Archive - Whitley  3','Archive co-director Ed Folsom once noted that printed editions of Whitman’s works have had the unfortunate tendency of becoming irrelevant the moment that scholars unearth a new letter, manuscript, or biographical fact about the poet. The Whitman Archive, however, has the benefit of being able to change and adapt as often as new discoveries are brought to the attention of the directors.','inherit','open','open','','142-revision-24','','','2012-10-15 20:51:04','2012-10-15 20:51:04','',142,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/142-revision-24/',0,'revision','',0),(2874,19,'2012-10-15 20:51:04','2012-10-15 20:51:04','I would like to see the Whitman Archive make more transparent the choices that go into deciding how texts are marked-up and encoded. Archive co-director Kenneth M. Price has written that the “ongoing decision-making” regarding the mark-up of texts on the Archive is “interpretive rather than mechanical,” and that this interpretive coding “adds intelligence to an electronic text . . . mak[ing] it robust and illuminating as a tool for analysis.”[ref]Kenneth M. Price,\"\'Debris,\' Creative Scatter, and the Challenges of Editing Whitman,\" in <em>Walt Whitman, Where the Future Becomes Present</em>, ed. David Haven Blake and Michael Robertson (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008), 67.[/ref] I admire Price’s forthright admission that marking-up a text for the digital medium is not merely a change in format, but an act of interpretation. As someone who visits the Whitman Archive on a regular basis, I’d like to have a clearer sense of what kinds of decisions—and, therefore, interpretations—are being made as texts are digitally encoded, and, specifically, what those decisions reveal about the textual condition of Whitman’s works.\r\n\r\nThis request is not based in a suspicion of any kind that the Archive directors are placing a biased interpretation onto Whitman’s poetry as they encode it for presentation on the Archive; rather, my request is based in a desire to following along on the process of discovery that Matt Cohen describes as an integral part of digital encoding: “As a student in the 1990s, doing transcription and basic encoding of Whitman documents, I learned a lot about textual structures that I had not encountered in seminars; when discussing these observations with the project directors, sometimes new areas of concern or future development would emerge.”[ref]Matt Cohen, “Design and Politics in Electronic American Literary Archives,” in <em>The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age</em>, ed. Amy Earhart and Andrew Jewell (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 233.[/ref] The Archive is already a valuable resource for gaining access to Whitman’s works; it can also be a resource for learning about how Whitman constructed his texts in manuscript and in print by eavesdropping on the process by which these texts are reconstructed for the digital medium.\r\n\r\nDirectors and editors at the Archive have already begun to provide the kind of running commentary on the encoding process that I would like to see more of. Brett Barney, the Senior Associate Editor of the Archive, has written an insightful essay about his encoding the 1867 edition of <em>Leaves of Grass</em> that is available on the Archive, and both Price and Folsom have published, in a number of different venues, provocative essays that detail the lessons about textuality that they have learned from preparing texts for the Archive.[ref]Brett Barney, \"‘Each Part and Tag of Me is a Miracle: Reflections after Tagging the 1867 Leaves of Grass,” <em>The <em>Walt Whitman Archive, </em></em><em>accessed December 2, 2010 </em><a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00002.html\">http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00002.html</a>. Additional essay by Folsom and Price are also available at http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/index.html.[/ref] Currently, the Whitman Archive makes available the TEI-encoded XML source files for the major texts on the Archive as well as the Archive’s encoding guidelines and related DTD files. As much as I value this peek into the inner workings of the Archive, the process by which these XML files are created—the “ongoing decision-making” Price refers to—is as important as the product itself. The Archive could benefit from more self-reflexive commentaries on the encoding process, perhaps using Barney’s essay as a model. The recently added <a href=\"http://wwa-changelog.blogspot.com/\">WWA-Changelog</a>—a blog connected to the Archive that details the changes that editors make to files once they are posted online—could provide a model for how such commentaries could be more fully integrated into the experience of working with the Archive.','The Walt Whitman Archive - Whitley 2','I would like to see the Whitman Archive make more transparent the choices that go into deciding how texts are marked-up and encoded. Archive co-director Kenneth M. Price has written that the “ongoing decision-making” regarding the mark-up of texts on the Archive is “interpretive rather than mechanical,” and that this interpretive coding...','inherit','open','open','','140-revision-20','','','2012-10-15 20:51:04','2012-10-15 20:51:04','',140,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/140-revision-20/',0,'revision','',0),(2875,19,'2012-10-15 20:51:04','2012-10-15 20:51:04','From my perspective as a scholar, the greatest strength of the Whitman Archive is that it provides free and open access to the essential texts for studying the life and work of Walt Whitman. I’ve consulted the Whitman Archive every time I’ve ever written about Whitman, whether it’s to check the precise wording of a text, to follow the life cycle of a poem as it moves from manuscript to print and on through the various editions of <em>Leaves of Grass</em>, to identify the location of a primary document in a brick-and-mortar archive, to read nineteenth-century reviews of Whitman’s writing, or to search the Archive’s exhaustive database of Whitman scholarship. Using the Whitman Archive is like having immediate access to shelves and shelves worth of valuable (and often expensive) books.\r\n\r\nWhen I was a graduate student I burned through a toner cartridge printing out page images of the antebellum editions of <em>Leaves of Grass</em> from the Whitman Archive. The poems in these early editions went through radical revisions from one edition of <em>Leaves of Grass</em> to the next, and I really needed to get to know these poems in order to make the argument I was making in my dissertation about Whitman’s antebellum period. Being able to access these poems in various states gave me a much better sense of Whitman’s pre-Civil War career than the variorum of <em>Leaves of Grass</em>—with its decontextualized snippets from the antebellum editions—was able to give me.\r\n\r\nI’ve also recently learned that the Whitman Archive is more than just a repository of raw materials that scholars can mine for the resources we need to tell our stories about Whitman’s life and work; rather, the Archive is a storyteller in its own right. Here’s an example: <em>With Walt Whitman in Camden,</em> the multi-volume collection of Whitman’s conversations with his friend Horace Trauble, was not yet available on the Archive when I was writing an essay a few years ago about Elizabeth Porter Gould, the editor of a gift-book edition of Whitman’s poems called <em>Gems from Walt Whitman</em> (1889). Without the benefit of a searchable, digital edition of <em>With Walt Whitman in Camden</em> I had to find references to Gould the old-fashioned way: cribbing from Ed Folsom’s footnotes—and, of course, slogging through the poorly indexed volumes themselves. Since I published the essay, however, I’ve had the opportunity to search for Gould in the Archive’s edition of <em>With Walt Whitman in Camden</em>, and the effect of having the Archive’s search engine generate a list of these references had a remarkable impact on me. The essay that I had written demanded a certain amount of focus in order to make the argument about gender and authorship that I wanted to make, and I was always left with a touch of regret that I never had the chance to unfold the fascinating relationship between Whitman and Gould as fully as I would have liked. Opening up different tabs in my browser to read each of these references on the Whitman Archive, however, allowed me to track the progress of their relationship as they negotiated their competing goals for what <em>Gems from Walt Whitman </em>should be. I’m proud of the story that I was able to tell about Whitman and Gould, but I’m also glad to know that the Whitman Archive can tell that story another way.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Whitley  1','From my perspective as a scholar, the greatest strength of the Whitman Archive is that it provides free and open access to the essential texts for studying the life and work of Walt Whitman. I’ve consulted the Whitman Archive every time I’ve ever written about Whitman, whether it’s to check the precise wording of a text, to follow the life cycle of a poem...','inherit','open','open','','138-revision-22','','','2012-10-15 20:51:04','2012-10-15 20:51:04','',138,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/138-revision-22/',0,'revision','',0),(2876,19,'2012-10-15 20:51:03','2012-10-15 20:51:03','Ed Folsom has written that one of the goals of the Whitman Archive is to “grow the database so that the surprises of searching and juxtaposing will become richer and more frequent.\" Folsom’s vision is that the Whitman Archive will become not only a centralized repository for all of Whitman’s texts, but also a discovery tool for exploring what he calls “the wild and unpredictable intersections of the data that the interface allows us to generate.”[ref]Ed Folsom, “Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives,” <em>PMLA</em> 112.5 (2007): 1609-10.[/ref] The prospect of having the Archive uncover meaningful relationships between texts is, indeed, an exciting one. As Jonathan Freedman notes, the “ability to link heterogeneous subjects and find once-occulted connections and interconnections makes scholarship invigoratingly fun.”[ref]Jonathan Freedman, “Whitman, Database, Information Culture,” <em>PMLA</em> 112.5 (2007): 1597.[/ref] As a frequent user of the Whitman Archive, I’ve experienced this “invigorating fun” first-hand, and I look forward to the Archive including more texts by and about Whitman, and incorporating more discovery tools like Brian Pytlik Zillig’s <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/resources/tools/index.html\">TokenX</a>.\r\n\r\nAs someone working on digital humanities projects of my own, however, I’m as interested in understanding what it takes to create such tools for discovery as I am the end-user experience of having digital tools make “unpredictable” and “invigorating” discoveries on my behalf. For the remainder of this essay, I’m going to share some thoughts on what has to happen on the back end of a digital project in order to make an otherwise rigorously structured digital artifact feel “wild and unpredictable” to its users. I’ll start with Kenneth M. Price’s description of the necessary labor that goes into structuring data such that it will yield surprising results for end users: \"A database is not an undifferentiated sea of information out of which structure emerges,” Price writes. “Argument is always there from the beginning in how those constructing a database choose to categorize information.\"[ref]Price, “Edition.”[/ref] To an end user who searches a database and finds an interesting juxtaposition between a handful of the hundreds (or thousands) of total documents on that database, it can seem as if those documents have emerged out of “an undifferentiated sea of information.” The reality, however, is far different.\r\n\r\nWhen Price alludes to the process that the creators of a database go through as they decide how to “categorize information,” he makes it clear that whenever a user generates a surprising set of juxtapositions between documents it is because someone, somewhere, at some point, has meticulously categorized those documents in such a way that a search engine (or other text analysis tool) will be able to process those documents in a meaningful way. Jerome McGann, who has also commented on the rigorous process of structuring data that is required to create a digital archive, writes that “databases and all digital instruments require the most severe kinds of categorical forms. The power of database—of digital instruments in general—rests in its ability to draw sharp, disambiguated distinctions.”[ref]Jerome McGann, “Database, Interface, and Archival Fever,” <em>PMLA</em> 112.5 (2007): 1590.[/ref] As both Price and McGann indicate, what can feel like a surprising juxtaposition for the end user has, to a certain extent, already been determined in advance through a time- and labor-intensive process of marking-up, encoding, or otherwise categorizing data.\r\n\r\nThis is not to say that those who structure the data for a digital archive have already anticipated every possible search string that users could ever imagine. On the contrary, what interests me as both the user and the creator of digital archives is the effect by which this “sharp, disambiguated” structuring of data can, indeed, produce juxtapositions that archivists could never have predicted. The fundamental preconditions for cultivating such serendipitous discoveries, it seems to me, are a large enough data set and a sufficiently intelligent schema for categorizing that data (not to mention the time, money, software, hardware, human resources, and expertise required to process and categorize the data in the first place).\r\n\r\nAllow me to cite an example from outside the realm of digital archiving to illustrate what’s involved in structuring data that yields serendipitous juxtapositions. Pandora Radio is an Internet music service whose goal is to create customized, online radio stations for its users. This customization is based on the work of the Music Genome Project, which has categorized the musical attributes of thousands of different songs. Taking into consideration “everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and . . . singing and vocal harmony,” the Music Genome Project assigns anywhere between 150 and 400 different descriptors to a single song. These descriptors are based on both objective criteria such as the types of instruments used in the song or whether the song is in a major or a minor key, as well as more subjective criteria such as whether or not a song features “Acoustic Sonority,” “Prevalent Use of Groove,” or a “Wet Recording Sound.\"[ref]“The Music Genome Project,” Pandora Radio, accessed December 2, 2010 <a href=\"http://www.pandora.com/mgp.shtml\">http://www.pandora.com/mgp.shtml</a>.[/ref] (These descriptors are referred to as musical “genes,” but they could just as easily be called metadata or tags.) Visitors to Pandora Radio type in the name of a song that they like, and then based on the attributes that have been pre-assigned to that song, Pandora will play other songs with similar attributes. The promise of Pandora is that once a database of songs is categorized according to a controlled vocabulary capable of being processed by a computer, listeners will be pleasantly surprised to discover songs that they never knew they already liked. (These songs are, of course, available for purchase so that no serendipitous discovery goes un-capitalized.)\r\n\r\nI cite this example within the context of the Whitman Archive not necessarily because Pandora Radio provides a model for digital scholarship of nineteenth-century literature, but because the process of categorizing songs for the Music Genome Project is remarkably similar to the archivist’s effort of structuring data in such a way that it can produce surprising results for the end user. For both Pandora and the Whitman Archive, then, the goal is to reach the tipping point where methodical structuring becomes unexpected discovery, where the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing and structured data takes on forms that the structure-ers never quite imagined. I like to think that this tipping point where structure yields serendipity is similar to the moment in a fractal pattern where geometry becomes art, the moment where a rigorous, mathematically defined structure takes on an aesthetic quality that was never explicitly intended by the mathematical code that undergirds it, but that is nevertheless absolutely dependent upon that code for its very existence.\r\n\r\nMy hope as both the user and creator of digital archives is that we can come to a better understanding of the processes of classification and naming that are involved in these efforts structure data in meaningful ways. Scholars of literature are already comfortable thinking about the power of language to represent—and even create—the world around us. We already have at our disposal a variety of theoretical apparatuses for thinking about the power of language to name and define the world, from the formalism of the New Critics to the semiotics of the Post-Structuralists and even the focus on the materiality of language in Book History scholarship. What we need to add to this list of theories and methodologies is a more sophisticated understanding of taxonomy and categorization. This will not only require an interdisciplinary rendezvous with librarians and scholars of information architecture, but it will also demand that we do the cultural history of such seemingly mundane phenomena as filing cabinets and accounting ledgers. Compared to the work being done by digital humanities scholars in the areas of data visualization, text mining, social networking, and geo-spatial analysis, studying the history of cataloging, sorting, and organizing seems to be the intellectual equivalent of a trip to Target to buy hard-plastic storage bins when you’d rather be at the Apple Store picking up an iPad. Nevertheless, everything that we want digital technology to do to help us better understand literary texts depends upon our ability to properly name, sort, and categorize the information that we put into a computer. We do ourselves a disservice to ignore or even minimize this crucial stage of the process.\r\n\r\nOne of the most frequently quoted statements about the future of digital scholarship in the humanities comes from Jerome McGann, who wrote that “the digital technology used by humanities scholars has focused almost exclusively on methods of sorting, accessing, and disseminating large bodies of materials. In this respect the work has not engaged the central questions and concerns of the [humanities, which is] . . . . the exploration and explanation of aesthetic works.”[ref]Jerome McGann, <em>Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web</em> (New York: Palgrave, 2001), xi-xii.[/ref] I don’t want to make a straw-man out of McGann’s powerful insight, but I can’t help but take issue with his claim that the “sorting” of texts will not aid us in our goal of using digital technology to explore and explain aesthetic works. Before a digital tool of any kind can work with a text in any way, the elements of that text must be sorted, classified, and categorized according to a schema that the computer will understand. This is not to say that scholars in the digital humanities should put aside their text visualization projects and their geo-spatial analyses in order to do the Dewey Decimal system one better, but rather that the foundational tasks of organizing and classifying should more completely theorized and more intimately woven into the fabric of digital scholarship.\r\n\r\nBy attending to the tedium of taxonomy we may begin to feel like nineteenth-century scriveners rather than twenty-first century techies. Like those scriveners of old, we may prefer not to spend our time with such mundane things. Nevertheless, if we wish to generate the kinds of “wild and unpredictable intersections of . . . data” that “makes scholarship invigoratingly fun” we should embrace what actually promises to be a fascinating conversation about the history of taxonomy, structure, classification, and form. This conversation will take us through the Library of Alexandria, the Great Chain of Being, medieval bestiaries, Wunderkammer, the Mundaneum, the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, cryptography, tarot cards, and Vannevar Bush’s Memex. Every time we tag, code, or classify a text for a digital archive, we are participating in the long history of human classification systems. The better able we are to understand that history and to situate ourselves within it, the better understanding we will have of our digital archives and what they can do.','The Walt Whitman Archive - Whitley  4','Ed Folsom has written that one of the goals of the Whitman Archive is to “grow the database so that the surprises of searching and juxtaposing will become richer and more frequent.\" Folsom’s vision is that the Whitman Archive will become not only a centralized repository for all of Whitman’s texts, but also a discovery to...','inherit','open','open','','144-revision-30','','','2012-10-15 20:51:03','2012-10-15 20:51:03','',144,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/144-revision-30/',0,'revision','',0),(2877,19,'2012-10-15 17:25:04','2012-10-15 17:25:04','In this issue, five contributors critique and analyze <em><a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/\" target=\"_blank\">The Walt Whitman Archive</a></em> by answering four questions about this digital archive. We invite you to read through the roundtable by question or by author.','The Walt Whitman Archive','','inherit','open','open','','336-revision-24','','','2012-10-15 17:25:04','2012-10-15 17:25:04','',336,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/336-revision-24/',0,'revision','',0),(2878,19,'2012-10-15 20:51:05','2012-10-15 20:51:05','I give a great credit to <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em> co-director Kenneth Price for taking a critical look at the costs associated with an endeavor such as his.\r\n<blockquote>[M]any people, myself included, have described our site as free, yet a considerable amount of resources continue to go into its making. I want to explore that conundrum. … When users visit a deep scholarly archive on the web they are experiencing the (mostly real) benefit of displaced costs. Instead of money being spent by the user at the point of contact, money is spent elsewhere along the line: by universities in the form of faculty time, equipment, graduate student assistance, and internal grants; by external funding agencies; and, in our case, curiously, by more than one publisher. … We might ask: Is what the Whitman archive has done a sustainable model for the production of other full-scale scholarly editions on the web? We have been fortunate with grants, publishers, libraries, and generous universities. But if it requires such a constellation of good fortune to produce an electronic scholarly edition, do we have a sound economic model in place? As the questions imply, I don\'t think we do.[ref]Kenneth M. Price, <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00004.html\">\"Dollars and Sense in Collaborative Digital Scholarship: The Example of the <em>Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive</em>,\"</a> <em>TWWA</em> (2001).[/ref]</blockquote>\r\nYet for all his candor, and the importance of that candor, he does not take the next (and even more difficult) step of analyzing the project’s benefits as well as its costs. Saying such an online archival endeavor is not sustainable is, in part, to say it does not (cannot, I will suggest) provide sufficient benefits to sustain continuing such costs. For me this is part of a larger question about how and why we allocate archival resources. I have no particular bone to pick with the <em>Whitman Archive</em>; I have raised similar concerns about the disproportionate staff and monetary resources devoted by bricks and mortar repositories to literary collections as a genre, congressional papers as a genre,[ref]Mark A. Greene, \"Appraisal of Congressional Papers at the Minnesota Historical Society: A Case Study,\" <em>Archival Issues</em> 19:1 (1994), 31-44.<em> </em>Republished in <em>An American Political Archives Reader,</em> Karen Dawley Paul , Glenn R Gray , and L. Rebecca Johnson Melvin eds. (Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2009), 181-96.[/ref] university records as a genre, state/county/local court records as a genre, and general store records as a genre[ref]Mark A. Greene, “From Village Smithy to Superior Vacuum Technology: Modern Small Business Records and the Collecting Repository,” <em>Archival Issues</em> 23:1 (1998), 41-58.[/ref]—all categories of records I believe are represented disproportionately in repositories and given disproportionate attention by archivists.\r\n\r\nAn argument that resource expenditure is disproportionate requires some comparison. As my then colleague at the Minnesota Historical Society wrote in 1998,\r\n<blockquote>while politics is an important component of Minnesota history, it is at least arguable that its importance is not so great as the resources that the Society has devoted to documenting it. Neither the stack space nor the staff time is sufficient to swallow Congressional collections whole and still be able appropriately to document business, recreation, family life, etc. for Minnesota. We had to ask: ‘Do we really need 116 feet of material to document Congressman Tom Hagedorn’s eight years in office when we keep 110 feet for nearly seventy years of the St. Paul Area United Way?’[ref]Todd J. Daniels-Howell, “Reappraisal of Congressional Records at the Minnesota Historical Society,” <em>Archival Issues </em>23:1 (1998), 36.[/ref]</blockquote>\r\nThis was hardly a precise comparison, to be sure, but it was an early attempt to ask archivists to consider the theretofore reflexive resource allocation required to document congressional service to the nth degree compared to both the opportunity costs and the relative benefit (to a repository’s users) of shifting resources to other acquisition, processing, and preservation goals. It is not that Hagedorn’s congressional tenure was value-<em>less</em> nor that the United Way’s records were objectively more valuable, only that we had never before considered the relative costs and benefits.\r\n\r\nSuch comparison is no easy matter, granted. It might be abstractly valid to ask whether it is a good allocation of resources to develop an exhaustive online archives for Walt Whitman when there are not such efforts underway for, say, Theodore Roosevelt,[ref]At least so far as I can discover, though I did not perform a truly exhaustive search.[/ref] but the fact is we have no mechanism to determine, in any way that is even vaguely acceptable on a wide scale, whether one historical figure is more “deserving” of such a site than another. And even if we did, we don’t have a mechanism for ensuring that the more deserving figure would automatically generate the structure necessary to solicit and manage the resources that might then be available. And if we succeeded in identifying such mechanisms there would still loom the matter of judging relative quantity and quality of use of the sites—use being, I believe, the “end of all archival effort.”[ref]Theodore R. Schellenberg, <em>The Management of Archives</em> (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 108. I have pursued the idea of the centrality of use to archival work most extensively in “’The Surest Proof’: The Use of Business Records and Implications for Appraisal,” <em>Archivaria</em> 45 (Spring 1998), 127-69 and later in Greene and Meissner, “More Product, Less Process.”[/ref]\r\n\r\nSo is this a purely rhetorical exercise? I don’t think so. As difficult as these questions are to answer with precision, they remain necessary questions and there are pieces of answers available once we start asking. My plea is that we do start asking, that we do start expecting to define quantitative and qualitative measure of the costs and benefits of such projects and, by extension, of our bricks and mortar archival endeavors as well. Not only do I think we owe it to our constituents and funders, I also believe it will increasingly be demanded by our administrators.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Greene 4','I give a great credit to The Walt Whitman Archive co-director Kenneth Price for taking a critical look at the costs associated with an endeavor such as his. \"[M]any people, myself included, have described our site as free, yet a considerable amount of resources continue to go into its making. I want to explore that conundrum.\"','inherit','open','open','','104-revision-26','','','2012-10-15 20:51:05','2012-10-15 20:51:05','',104,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/104-revision-26/',0,'revision','',0),(2879,19,'2012-10-15 20:51:05','2012-10-15 20:51:05','The digital form highlights a question faced by every project or repository working to build online digital collections from analog originals. The digital form permits creation of extremely high density and equally high quality facsimiles,[ref]Scanning requirements are in “<a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/technical_summary.html\">Technical Summary</a>,” <em>TWWA</em>.[/ref] making it possible to determine physical characteristics of the original impossible to consider during the era of microfilm or photocopying. For example, project transcribers can apparently discern\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>ink blots, smudges, and stray pen marks;</li>\r\n	<li>pin holes;</li>\r\n	<li>embossing;</li>\r\n	<li>variations in ink, pencil, or paper;</li>\r\n	<li>distinctions between single and multiple overstrikes[ref]From “<a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/mediawiki/index.php/Whitman_Encoding_Guidelines#What_Not_to_Encode\">5.9.1 What Not to Encode</a>,” <em>TWWA</em>.[/ref]</li>\r\n</ul>\r\nWhile these are “what not to encode,” they denote the expectation that facsimiles supplied to the transcribers are capable of producing such details. As an extra measure of quality, “project staff <em>examine each digital image</em> [when creating JPEGs from original TIFF files] <em>cleaned and cropped</em> for web delivery.”[ref]“Technical Summary,” emphases added.[/ref] The intricate encoding guidelines themselves are also part of making high quality facsimiles accessible.\r\n\r\nThe opportunity cost of demanding extremely high standards encompasses both a slow pace of making facsimiles accessible to users and the ability to create a complete archive of Whitman material—this latter price due to the inevitable (though not supportable) decision by some repositories to decline participation if it requires public accessibility to such high quality scans.[ref]See “<a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/history.html\">History of the Project</a>,” <em>TWWA</em>, for brief discussion of some libraries’ requirement to limit user access to 72 dpi facsimiles.[/ref] There is nothing inherently logical about sacrificing a complete collection for highest-quality facsimiles. Nor is there innate reason for choosing quality over quantity, particularly since one can structure a project whereby “inferior” facsimiles are placed online relatively quickly while higher-quality facsimiles are posted, gradually, later. The question of whether (and which) users are best served by large quantity rather than high quality is one accurately answered only by asking users themselves. Surveys or focus groups for gathering user input have not been employed by <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em> it appears—but neither have they been used by the vast majority of projects and repositories creating online collections.\r\n\r\nFor a decade now I have been actively involved in projects to increase the quantity of archival material accessible to users at the expense of traditional notions of quality. What began as an effort to speed processing of large modern manuscript (hidden) collections has evolved into jeremiads on trading speed for precision in most other aspects of archives administration as well—including the creation, description, and mounting of digital facsimiles online.[ref]See, particularly, Mark A. Greene and Dennis Meissner, “More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing,” <em>American Archivist</em>, 68:2 (Fall/Winter 2005), 208-263 and Mark A. Greene, “MPLP: It’s Not Just for Processing Anymore,” <em>American Archivist</em> 73:1 (Spring/Summer 2010), 175-203.[/ref] In some cases, including processing and digitization, there is direct evidence that some users prefer “more” over “better” at a ratio of about two-to-one. Far more research is required, certainly, and we should never assume that what holds true for one project/repository and its audience holds equally true for all. But we should certainly be more anxious to determine the answers than we have been heretofore.','360°: The Walt Whitman Archive – Greene 3','The digital form highlights a question faced by every project or repository working to build online digital collections from analog originals.  The digital form permits creation of extremely high density and equally high quality facsimiles, making it possible to determine physical characteristics of the original impossible to consider during the era of microfilm or photocopying...','inherit','open','open','','90-revision-35','','','2012-10-15 20:51:05','2012-10-15 20:51:05','',90,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/90-revision-35/',0,'revision','',0),(2880,19,'2012-10-15 20:51:05','2012-10-15 20:51:05','The weaknesses I have noticed in the <em>Archive</em> are not unique to this site. One problem is the site’s misunderstanding—and thus its improper assertion—of copyrights.[ref]I am a founding member of the Society of American Archivists’ Intellectual Property Working Group.[/ref] Specifically the site asserts the existence of copyright in the transcripts and facsimiles and more broadly in Whitman’s writings—because transcripts and facsimiles are “slavish copies” neither is entitled to copyright protection;[ref]The term is from the U.S. Second District Court of New York’s decision in <em>Bridgeman Art Library Ltd v. Corel Corporation</em>, 1998.[/ref]published or unpublished anything written by Whitman is in the public domain.[ref]See “<a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/conditions.html\">Conditions of Use</a>,” <em>TWWA</em>. Unpublished works are public domain for authors deceased prior to 1940; published works for everything published prior to 1923. For an authoritative source, see Peter Hirtle, “Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States: 1 January 2010,” online at <a href=\"http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm\">http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm</a>.[/ref] Only original contributions of editors are copyrightable at this late date.[ref]Such mistakes are not unique to <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em>, certainly. Copyright statements for the <em>In the Valley of the Shadow</em> Civil War project (<a href=\"http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/VoS/usingvalley/copyright.html\">http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/VoS/usingvalley/copyright.html</a>) and the <em>Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition</em> site (<a href=\"http://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/read/?_xmlsrc=lc.privacy.xml&amp;_xslsrc=LCstyles.xsl\">http://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/read/?_xmlsrc=lc.privacy.xml&amp;_xslsrc=LCstyles.xsl</a>) are much more egregious.[/ref] What distresses me about the inaccuracies is they suggest that there are limits to use of the main site content by researchers—notwithstanding frequent assertions that the purpose of the archive is “to make Whitman\'s vast work electronically accessible” to all.[ref]Katherine L. Walter and Kenneth M. Price, <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00001.html\">\"An Online Guide to Walt Whitman\'s Dispersed Manuscripts,\"</a> <em>TWWA</em> (2004).[/ref] Making the archive accessible but incorrectly claiming limitations on actual use is paradoxical at best.\r\n\r\nThere are other issues causing me unease, for example the inadequacy of site use data. The site does not regularly report use statistics, and what statistics it does provide—average daily hits in 2007[ref]Ed Folsom, <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00142.html\">\"Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives,\"</a> <em>TWWA</em> (2007).[/ref]--are of dubious value even when current.[ref]Google Analytics: “the number of hits a website receives is not a valid popularity gauge, but rather is an indication of server use and loading” (<a href=\"http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&amp;answer=33026\">http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&amp;answer=33026</a>). Better measures are unique visitors or page views, coupled with visits’ duration.[/ref] In addition there is little similar data at similar websites to compare to (though to their credit one of the site editors did gather some parallel data in 2008).[ref]The data, from the <em>Willa Cather Archive</em> and the <em>Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition,</em> is<em> </em>presented in Kenneth M. Price,<strong> </strong><a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00267.html\">\"Electronic Scholarly Editions,\"</a> <em>TWWA</em> (2008).[/ref] Thus this is an endemic weakness of major “archive” sites, a weakness related to a broader disinterest in the economics and sustainability of such sites.[ref]And of bricks and mortar archival operations, though this is beginning to change, as suggested by the questions—“Does the level of onsite use of special collections justify the resources being expended? What are the most appropriate measures by which to evaluate use?”—in Jackie M. Dooley and Katherine Luce, <em>Taking Our Pulse: The OCLC Research Survey of Special Collections and Archives</em> (OCLC, 2010), 34-36, online at <a href=\"http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2010/2010-11.pdf\">http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2010/2010-11.pdf</a>.[/ref] The greater viability of websites such as <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em> is ultimately the $64,000 question and the focus of my essay for Part II of this roundtable.','360°: The Walt Whitman Archive – Greene 2','The weaknesses I have noticed in the Archive are not unique to this site.  One problem is the site’s misunderstanding—and thus its improper assertion—of copyrights. Specifically the site asserts the existence of copyright in the transcripts and facsimiles and more broadly in Whitman’s writings—because transcripts and facsimiles are “slavish copies” neither is entitled to copyright protection...','inherit','open','open','','88-revision-26','','','2012-10-15 20:51:05','2012-10-15 20:51:05','',88,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/88-revision-26/',0,'revision','',0),(2881,19,'2012-10-15 20:51:05','2012-10-15 20:51:05','At this time, the <em>Walt Whitman Archive</em> is the single most extensive resource for the study of Whitman, and it<em> </em>has progressed steadily toward its primary goal: “to make Whitman\'s vast work, for the first time, easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers.” We take an expansive view of what is relevant “Whitman” material in a digital thematic research collection,[ref]Carole L. Palmer, \"Thematic Research Collections,\" In <em>A Companion to Digital Humanities</em> (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 348-65.[/ref] so we include both Whitman-authored pieces and incoming correspondence, reviews of his writings, selected recent criticism, and other materials not usually included in \"collected works.\" We aspire to produce the richest possible resource for the study of his writings, life, and reception. Our annotated bibliography, the logical starting point for scholarly work on the poet, includes all known critical writings about Whitman from 1839 to the present day—it comprises over 14,000 entries and continues to grow. The site receives a great deal of traffic: in a typical recent month (February 2010) we had nearly 39,000 visits to our site, more than 30,000 of which were by unique visitors.\r\n\r\nAs a project co-director, I coordinate the ongoing work necessary to build it. (Ed Folsom and I work closely with Elizabeth Lorang, the current project manager, in this capacity.) The site is less <em>used</em> in my work than it regularly <em>constitutes</em> a major part of my work as a scholar. At times, though, I employ the site in much the same manner as other literary scholars, albeit with greater knowledge of the site’s strengths and limitations and with awareness of material now in the pipeline that isn’t currently available to the public. As a literary critic, I appreciate what the <em>Whitman Archive</em> makes newly possible. For example, those of us writing about Whitman can now trace the development of his poetry across multiple versions—in isolated manuscript drafts; in notebooks; in periodical printings; and in various book publications—in a way that was all but unimaginable before the advent of the Web. His manuscripts are dispersed at nearly one hundred repositories around the world. In some cases, what was once a single manuscript has become separated into parts, with different sections of the manuscript held in repositories separated by great distance. Such manuscripts can now be virtually reunited.\r\n\r\nThe <em>Whitman Archive</em> has become fundamental to criticism, but citation of the <em>Archive</em> lags behind its actual use. A recent study by Lisa Spiro and Jane Segal indicates that many people use major American literature web sites, including the <em>Whitman Archive</em>, only to then cite print sources.[ref]“The Impact of Digital Resources on Humanities Research” available at\r\nhttp://library.rice.edu/services/dmc/about/projects/the-impact-of-digital-resources-on-humanities-research\r\n[/ref] This ill-conceived practice needs to change in order for digital humanities to get its due. To enable people to reference individual parts of the <em>Whitman Archive</em> more easily, all <em>Archive </em>pages will soon include additional metadata for use with Zotero and other reference management software<em>.</em> In my own scholarly practice, I have cited the <em>Whitman Archive</em> many times, and when Susan Belasco, Ed Folsom, and I compiled the collection <em>Leaves of Grass: The Sesquicentennial Essays</em> (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), we advised all contributors to cite the <em>Whitman Archive</em> when referring to Whitman texts.','360°: The Walt Whitman Archive – Price 1','At this time, the Walt Whitman Archive is the single most extensive resource for the study of Whitman, and it has progressed steadily toward its primary goal: “to make Whitman\'s vast work, for the first time, easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers.” We take an expansive view of what is relevant “Whitman” material in a digital thematic research collection...','inherit','open','open','','107-revision-22','','','2012-10-15 20:51:05','2012-10-15 20:51:05','',107,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/107-revision-22/',0,'revision','',0),(2882,19,'2012-10-15 20:51:05','2012-10-15 20:51:05','Some weaknesses of the <em>Whitman Archive</em> are a function of its stage of development. We haven’t had time to accomplish all that we have envisaged. For example, we would like to provide a good introduction to the site, so that users at various levels of knowledge—and our users <em>are</em> quite varied—can get oriented quickly when they first encounter the site. In addition, given our scope, it is not surprising that many content areas are underdeveloped: we provide all known contemporary reviews of Whitman’s writings, but a person could legitimately ask why have we not, then, provided other essays about Whitman from the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, all out of copyright, which might shed even more light on Whitman than do these reviews. Only in the last few months have we made available any of Whitman’s prose, and we have done little thus far with Whitman’s journalism. We value his journalism and have made plans for editing it, but we have not had time yet to see significant results in this area.\r\n\r\nCurrently, the <em>Whitman Archive</em> also lacks sufficient integration of material across the site. For example, if Horace Traubel mentions a specific Whitman poem in <em>With Walt Whitman in Camden</em>, we should offer ready access to that particular version (and possibly also other versions of the poem). We could also link the poem to commentary, including contemporary reviews, books from the University of Iowa Press Whitman series, and articles from the full run of the <em>Walt Whitman Quarterly Review</em>. Individual essays from <em>WWQR</em> currently are linked from citations in the criticism bibliography, and we hope to integrate more fully this journal of record for Whitman studies with the <em>Whitman Archive</em>. This more complete integration of content, like most of the changes I would suggest for the <em>Archive</em>, will be undertaken as time allows.\r\n\r\nWe are also currently investigating the application of Web 2.0 features and functionality for the <em>Archive</em>, in hopes of enabling collaboration and interaction with users of the <em>Archive</em>.<em> </em>Ideally, we would like to harness the enthusiasm and knowledge of our users. As a first step in this direction, <em>Archive </em>staff at the University of Texas at Austin are exploring user accounts for the <em>Archive</em>, accounts which would allow users both to contribute to the <em>Archive</em> as well as to create their own collections of materials. Early work is also under way on a database designed to track the what, when, and how of Whitman’s reading—that is, what did Whitman read, when did he read it, and how do we know that he read a particular text? We believe that our user community could help us populate the database. Similar resources could be integrated into the <em>Whitman Archive</em> and include user-generated information: accounts of Whitman appearances in films, television shows, advertisements, and novels, for example. Users might also participate in attribution studies. Whitman is known to have contributed to the <em>Armory Square Hospital Gazette </em>during the Civil War<em>. </em>No complete run of the newspaper exists, however, and no pieces bear Whitman’s signature. User-collaborators could help us track down scattered issues of this rare paper as well as generate a lively and informative debate about the authorship of unattributed essays in the paper. As a scholarly site, we must strike the right balance between openness and scholarly rigor, and a fundamental question for us is how to encourage participation while insuring that quality control checks remain in place. We also hope to allow users with accounts to work with the texts and data of the <em>Whitman Archive </em>in order to explore their own interpretations. Sophisticated users might access our XML and XSLT files in a work area where they could alter the encoding and stylesheets in order to pursue particular interpretive goals.','360°: The Walt Whitman Archive – Price 2','Some weaknesses of the Whitman Archive are a function of its stage of development.  We haven’t had time to accomplish all that we have envisaged.  For example, we would like to provide a good introduction to the site, so that users at various levels of knowledge—and our users are quite varied—can get oriented quickly when they first encounter the site. In addition, given our scope, it is not surprising that many content areas...','inherit','open','open','','109-revision-19','','','2012-10-15 20:51:05','2012-10-15 20:51:05','',109,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/109-revision-19/',0,'revision','',0),(2884,19,'2012-10-15 20:59:42','2012-10-15 20:59:42','A comparison of the <em>Whitman Archive</em> to its print predecessor, <em>The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman</em>,[ref]When The New York University Press ceased publishing the Collected Writings in 1984, they had issued twenty-two volumes, many more than were originally projected. Despite the magnitude of what had been accomplished, many of the original objectives of the edition were not met. For example, the poetry manuscripts and periodical printings of Whitman\'s poetry were never collected, and the long-promised journalism, projected to appear in six volumes, never appeared in the NYUP edition. Peter Lang eventually published two volumes of the journalism in 1998 and 2003, though these volumes cover only the period from 1834–1848, leaving Whitman\'s innumerable contributions to periodicals in the final forty-four years of his life still to be edited. The Peter Lang volumes are produced so as to replicate the appearance of the New York University Press edition, though the editors of that series (all now deceased) did not oversee their production. Arguably, the Peter Lang volumes constitute volumes 23 and 24 of the Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, and a 25th volume, treating recently discovered correspondence, edited by Ted Genoways, was published by University of Iowa Press in 2004.[/ref] helps to clarify the advantages and disadvantages of digital and analog forms. Despite the many achievements of the print volumes in the <em>Collected Writings of Walt Whitman</em>, this editorial project ultimately became quite chaotic. Whitman\'s outgoing correspondence, for example, has been the subject of editorial treatment since the 1960s, when Edwin Haviland Miller edited five volumes of Whitman’s correspondence. Miller arranged the volumes chronologically, and with the fifth volume, he published an addendum of sixty-five letters that he uncovered even as the first four volumes appeared. Although this addendum meant that some letters would always be out of order, the complications of working with this single addition or revision were not insurmountable. Nine years later, however, a sixth volume appeared, and it included one hundred additional letters, complicating the organization further. Then, in 1991, Miller published fifty new letters in the <em>Walt Whitman Quarterly Review</em>,<em> </em>and Ted Genoways published third and fourth supplements of nearly one hundred letters in the journal<em> </em>in 2000 and 2002. In 2004, the University of Iowa Press issued a seventh volume of Whitman\'s correspondence, which included all of Whitman\'s letters found since Miller\'s sixth volume. In the end, there were nearly as many supplements as the number of Miller\'s original volumes, and over the last six years, even more letters have surfaced. This one aspect of the <em>Collected Writings</em> illustrates how print editions can devolve into disorder, even when the initial aim is to bring order to the literary record. I am confident that after the <em>Whitman Archive</em> “finishes” work on the correspondence previously unknown or lost letters will surface somewhere. It is a great strength of the digital medium that when this happens, new material can be integrated seamlessly into the collection.\r\n\r\nIn a related way, our “Integrated Guide to Walt Whitman’s Poetry Manuscripts” aggregates facsimile images of all surviving drafts of Whitman’s poems regardless of their geographical dispersion. The digital images and integrated guide bring order to the manuscripts and, for most purposes, erase the need to travel in order to study the manuscripts. (Individual repositories may have labeled an item by its first line or its working title, but we have created an overarching virtual order for all repositories, and we have labeled each individual poetry manuscript with what we call a “work” identifier based on the title of the last published version of the manuscript.) The high quality color facsimiles available on the <em>Archive</em> offer significant advantages for the study of the manuscripts; the images can be manipulated in photo-editing software to help us decipher otherwise illegible handwriting or zoom in on features of the ink, paper, and other characteristics such as pinholes, in order to offer new readings about the manuscripts and their relationships to one another.\r\n\r\nDespite the integrated guide’s utility, however, it remains an under-utilized resource. Indeed, one of our challenges has been how to make sure people find the content and tools most useful for their research questions. Perhaps a downside of bringing together so much material in one place is that doing so can inadvertently re-bury material (in some places, the organizational hierarchy of the <em>Archive</em> is fairly flat or one-dimensional, and in others, it is quite structured). It is hard to get a sense of the magnitude of the <em>Whitman Archive</em> at a glance. The more we enrich the site, the more challenging it becomes to keep the interface simple, straightforward, intuitive, and sufficiently informative.\r\n\r\nBooks are sometimes more convenient in various ways. The failure of a server does not make individual volumes of the <em>Collected Writings</em> temporarily disappear. For most practical purposes, the <em>Collected Writings</em> as a resource stays stable (and carries all the advantages and disadvantages of that condition). Print can rely on nicely developed interface and design that evolved over centuries, but digital conventions are still relatively young and therefore sometimes neither clear nor aesthetically pleasing.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Price 3','A comparison of the Whitman Archive to its print predecessor, The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman,[ref]When The New York University Press ceased publishing the Collected Writings in 1984, they had issued twenty-two volumes, many more than were originally projected. Despite the magnitude of what had been accomplished, many of the original objectives of the edition were not met. ','inherit','open','open','','111-revision-22','','','2012-10-15 20:59:42','2012-10-15 20:59:42','',111,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/111-revision-22/',0,'revision','',0),(2885,19,'2012-10-15 20:51:05','2012-10-15 20:51:05','At the <em>Whitman Archive</em> we recently have focused on two aspects of Whitman\'s work: 1) what we call his scribal documents—the letters Whitman copied or drafted for others and the notes and summaries he drafted as a clerk in federal government offices; 2) Whitman\'s crossing of international boundaries as seen in translations and in the remaking of “Whitman” as his work is absorbed into other cultural, literary, and political traditions. In what follows I discuss these new developments to illustrate how the <em>Whitman Archive </em>continues to unfold to reveal new layers for development. After more than fifteen years, the <em>Whitman Archive </em>still intrigues me daily—whether it is Whitman’s writings, the people and processes which bring these texts to the public, the way we make them available, or what we (and others) may be able to do with them in the future. I conclude with a consideration of the long-term viability of our project and the crucial matters of funding and open access.\r\n\r\nFor the past two years I have been studying Whitman’s scribal documents and his time in Washington, DC (1863-1873) during and following the Civil War. Whitman worked for the Army Paymaster’s office, for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (part of the Department of the Interior), and for the Attorney General’s office. When I first went to Washington to look for documents in Whitman’s handwriting that might have been preserved in the records of these offices, I hoped to find perhaps a half dozen items in the National Archives; seven trips later, I have found close to 3,000.[ref]This research was prompted in part by the Whitman Archive’s recent grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Historical Publications and Records Commissions to edit Whitman’s literary works and correspondence from the Civil War and Reconstruction era. These documents are now being transcribed and should be fully available within the next two years.[/ref] Thus far, all of the items are from the Attorney General’s Office. These scribal documents are crucial for understanding Whitman’s Washington years, his position in this particular office, and the influence of this work upon his literary development.\r\n\r\nOne document in Whitman’s handwriting, on an envelope of the Attorney General’s Office, says in its entirety:\r\n<blockquote><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Memoranda</span>\r\n\r\n<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">pardon</span> applicants Sept 8-9 -1865\r\n\r\n<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">also</span> the negro-suffrage\r\n\r\n<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">also position</span> of the President</blockquote>\r\nThe stationery might suggest that these are notes Whitman made to himself about work in the Attorney General’s office. But are they, and how can we know? Perhaps they are notes about issues Whitman wanted to consider as he was composing “Democratic Vistas.” After all, anyone who has worked with Whitman manuscripts knows that many of his letters and literary manuscripts were written on this type of office stationery and other repurposed pieces of paper. I draw attention to this document not because it is the most powerful of the scribal documents (if it is one[ref]It may be significant that this document was not found where most of the scribal documents have been discovered, in the National Archives, but instead in the Charles E. Feinberg collection at the Library of Congress.[/ref]). I highlight it, in fact, because of its liminal status: we can not determine whether this is a literary or a scribal document, a document written for Whitman\'s own purposes or for the purposes of others. As such, it challenges in a useful way the boundaries between literary and scribal documents.\r\n\r\nImagining a firm wall dividing these areas of life for Whitman is misleading. At times, Whitman used his office address as his literary postal address, and he worked in the office at night (the heat and lighting were important benefits). Moreover he first gained his clerkship with the help of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who recommended him on literary and patriotic grounds.[ref]See the letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Salmon P. Chase, 10 January 1863 available at http://whitmanarchive.org/biography/correspondence/cw/tei/nar.00002.html[/ref] And it was because Whitman’s Blue Book (his personal and very heavily revised copy of the third edition of <em>Leaves of Grass</em>)<em> </em>was found at his government desk that he lost his job at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. James Harlan, Secretary of the Interior, judged the book to be immoral, though Whitman’s allies staunchly defended it and helped him to secure a new post in the Attorney General’s office. During his Washington years, Whitman\'s literary and clerical lives regularly occurred in the same physical locations and no doubt out of related emotional and psychological circumstances.\r\n\r\nOne of the challenges in studying the scribal documents is to figure out what impact Whitman’s work in a series of low-level government positions had on his creative life. To date, critics have almost entirely ignored his ten years of labor in Washington offices. How should we understand and treat the scribal documents? In most cases Whitman acted not as author but as a conduit for the words and thoughts of others. Thus, it could be argued that these documents should not be featured in an archive centrally concerned with Whitman’s writings. If his intellectual contributions to scribal documents are unclear and likely minimal, perhaps these documents should be excluded altogether from the <em>Whitman Archive</em>, or at least not prioritized.[ref]It is not clear yet—we need more time to study this trove of documents—how exactly the Attorney General’s office functioned. Did Whitman merely transcribe a clean copy from a draft written by someone else? Did he sometimes generate the letter based on an outline of points provided by another, or based on comments made in conversation to him? Certainly some of those who supervised him recognized his intellectual capacities. James Speed, for example, sought Whitman’s aid when he prepared an oration dedicating a bust of Abraham Lincoln.[/ref] It could be further argued that we should concentrate our finite time on making available additional known Whitman-authored documents (e.g., his journalism or short stories or novel, <em>Franklin Evans</em>). On the other hand, the scribal documents are potentially more revealing to scholars than such Whitman-authored documents, both because of the quantity of information and because the scribal documents were previously altogether unknown. Scholars may lack perfect access to Whitman’s journalism, short stories, and novel, but they do have reasonably good access for the time being. The same is not true for the scribal documents, and, if the <em>Whitman Archive </em>does not work on these materials, they are likely to remain buried, unavailable to enrich future biographical and critical studies.\r\n\r\nWhitman\'s experiences in Washington offices have rich implications. In Washington, Whitman was an actor near the epicenter of government efforts to reshape the nation in the aftermath of war. [ref]Rosemary Graham mistakenly argues that “for the most part . . . Whitman spent these postwar years as an observer.” See “Attorney General’s Office, United States,” in <em>Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia</em>, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland, 1998).[/ref] In his day job as an anonymous clerk, he and others in the office of the Attorney General dealt with postwar experiments with civil rights, war crimes, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, battles over land claims in the west, and an assortment of other matters. He treated closely related matters while revising <em>Leaves of Grass</em> and drafting his probing cultural analysis “Democratic Vistas.” His network of friendships in Washington offices also shaped his ability to get government jobs and to advance his literary career. For example, Whitman sent a copy of his “Proud Music of the Sea-Storm,” published in the <em>Atlantic Monthly</em> in February 1869, to an acquaintance named Julius Bing,[ref]Julius Bing (dates unknown) served as the clerk of the Joint Select Committee on Retrenchment in 1867 and 1868 and ghostwrote the 1868 report “Civil Service of the United States” before being appointed diplomatic agent for Crete later that year. A major advocate for reform of the Civil Service, Bing wrote a series of articles on the civil service for the <em>North American Review </em>and <em>Putnam’s Magazine</em> in 1867-1868. For more on Bing, about whom little is known, see Art Hoogenboom, <em>Outlawing the Spoils: A History of the Civil Service Reform Movement 1865-1883</em> (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968), especially 40-49.\r\n\r\nAlthough Whitman must have sent at least one letter to Bing, since Bing thanked Whitman for sending a copy of the <em>Atlantic Monthly</em> that included Whitman’s “Proud Music of the Sea-Storm” (the poem was published in the February 1869 issue of the magazine), no additional correspondence between Bing and Whitman has been identified to date.[/ref] a clerk of the Joint Select Committee on Retrenchment in 1867 and 1868. In response, Bing wrote a lengthy letter urging Whitman to write a poem about the Child Crusades. The poem was attempted by Whitman but never realized as such (Whitman’s notes on the topic and trial lines can be found in the Thomas B. Harned Collection of the Library of Congress). To the best of my knowledge, this aborted poem has not received any critical commentary, but I think it is well worth study because it is a rare instance of Whitman, in effect, collaborating on a poem, and it also shows him addressing an international issue of the remote past, but one with continuing resonance in his time and in our own.\r\n\r\nThe scribal documents also help shed light on Whitman’s increasing interest in international issues in his later writings—his work in the Attorney General’s office meant that he, quite literally, had his hand in international incidents involving Canada, Mexico, Ireland, France, Britain, Spain, China, and many other countries. The <em>Whitman Archive</em> recently has focused increasingly on international issues in more direct ways, too. Since most people in the world first encounter Whitman in a language other than English we are attempting to better serve that audience. We currently provide translations of Whitman\'s work into German, Spanish, and Russian; translations into Ukrainian, Portuguese, and Yiddish are far along in development. In addition, we are in conversation with scholars about expanding our work into Chinese, Polish, Italian and other languages soon. It is fascinating to see what happens to Whitman when he crosses linguistic and cultural borders and becomes absorbed in another milieu. This interaction often illuminates both the hosting cultural tradition as it comes to terms with Whitman as well as the ways that American audiences have interpreted Whitman\'s works.\r\n\r\nOne of the strengths of the <em>Archive</em>, related to the digital nature of our work, is the ever-evolving team that has built and continues to build the project. The <em>Whitman Archive</em> has become a training ground and laboratory for the next generation of literary scholars and digital humanists. The staff of the <em>Whitman Archive</em>—largely made up of graduate students—get hands-on experience and serve as apprentices of sorts. These graduate students serve as assistant editors and often attain positions of considerable responsibility within the project. I have been delighted by the diverse career paths our “alumni” have taken: one has gained a faculty position in a library; another works at the vice-chancellor level at a major university in an information technology role; some have gained tenure track positions at research-oriented institutions; others are employed at digital centers in various roles. Collectively they have demonstrated a range of ways to succeed professionally; their lives offer hope in a time of difficult job prospects in the humanities.\r\n\r\nAlthough the creation of the <em>Whitman Archive</em>—a vast and still rapidly growing resource—has cost a great deal of money, we are able to make it freely available. One of the strengths of the <em>Archive</em>, then, stems from success in garnering local support from several key institutions, a steady stream of grant support from four different federal agencies, and donations from various individuals and private foundations. These fundraising efforts culminated in the creation of a permanent endowment to support ongoing editorial work. We realize that this ongoing work could potentially reach far into the future, and we strive to make our work reusable for later scholars (so they can improve upon it) by documenting our practices and decisions. Having an endowment obliges us to think in longer terms than is common for scholars: we have the burden and advantage of a project that should continue well beyond the lives of anyone now working on the <em>Whitman Archive</em>.\r\n\r\nFor end users a key advantage of the <em>Whitman Archive</em> is that it makes freely available what would otherwise be difficult, costly, or impossible to access. The nature and extent of our audience are changed profoundly because the <em>Whitman Archive</em> is freely available, changes that are all to the good in my view. Instead of working with a small audience of specialist scholars in mind, we now also consider our large, varied, international audience as well. The importance of open access can hardly be overestimated. For us, open access means more than making content freely available for reading and analysis; it means making content freely available for reuse and repurposing. We willingly share files and have people work with them and reuse them in projects as long as those projects also are open, and they cite the <em>Archive</em>.\r\n\r\nDespite what the <em>Walt Whitman Archive</em> has accomplished thus far, we recognize that some features are lacking and that other features should be improved. The current search capability of the <em>Archive </em>is fairly limited and fails to take full advantage of our encoding, a key contribution to Whitman scholarship. Upcoming developments make me optimistic about leveraging the <em>Archive</em>’s rich encoding in more sophisticated ways, however, and experiments in indexing and searching the <em>Archive</em> are ongoing. The text base we’ve developed and continue to develop will lend itself to experimentation—by us and others, and we have rightly spent fifteen years developing the corpus so that it can be read, researched, and used by a variety of audiences employing a range of technologies and methodologies. The <em>Whitman Archive</em> also provides for the study of a new scholarly form, thanks to our documentation including encoding guidelines, history, and essays about the <em>Archive</em>. What seems clear is that the <em>Whitman Archive</em> is one of a group of projects that are demonstrating how the print-based monumental scholarly edition can be reimagined and advanced in the form of an electronic archive.','The Walt Whitman Archive – Price 4','At the Whitman Archive we recently have focused on two aspects of Whitman\'s work: 1) what we call his scribal documents—the letters Whitman copied or drafted for others and the notes and summaries he drafted as a clerk in federal government offices; 2) Whitman\'s crossing of international boundaries as seen in translations and in the remaking of “Whitman” as his work is absorbed into other cultural, literary, and political traditions.','inherit','open','open','','114-revision-23','','','2012-10-15 20:51:05','2012-10-15 20:51:05','',114,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/114-revision-23/',0,'revision','',0),(2886,19,'2012-07-17 21:30:00','2012-07-17 21:30:00','home page text here','Home','','inherit','open','open','','539-revision-6','','','2012-07-17 21:30:00','2012-07-17 21:30:00','',539,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/539-revision-6/',0,'revision','',0),(2887,19,'2012-10-15 20:58:03','2012-10-15 20:58:03','In this issue, five contributors critique and analyze <em><a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/\" target=\"_blank\">The Walt Whitman Archive</a></em> by answering four questions about this digital archive. We invite you to read through the roundtable by question or by author.','The Walt Whitman Archive','','inherit','open','open','','336-revision-25','','','2012-10-15 20:58:03','2012-10-15 20:58:03','',336,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/336-revision-25/',0,'revision','',0),(3285,19,'2012-10-17 00:44:09','2012-10-17 00:44:09','There were many benefits working with these undergraduates. The undergraduates selected to work for this project were balanced bilinguals who demonstrated robust literacy in English and Haitian Creole, which I was able to assess since they had taken my intermediate Haitian Creole course. The State of Florida has a large Haitian-American population that is second only to New York State; and, positioned at the Flagship University of the State, I instruct a significant number of Haitians and Haitian-Americans who have an advanced command of spoken and written Haitian Creole. Due to this strength, it is only natural to cultivate and tap into these talents for the benefit of their professional development and for the momentum of this project. As Haitian Creole is the third most spoken language in the State of Florida after English and Spanish, developing advanced literacy in the language benefits employment prospects and it empowers individuals to seek out unique  knowledge that exists only in Haitian Creole. Bilingual and biliterate candidates for employment in Florida’s healthcare industry, tourism industry, government, law enforcement and judiciary system, transportation and a host of other industries stand out next to their monolingual peers. Mastery of literacy in two languages is beneficial because knowledge can be acquired and shared via different mediums; individuals with these skills can facilitate communication, accuracy and productivity.\r\n\r\nComplex and large projects like <em>Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English</em> and <em>The Vodou Archive</em>—projects that overlap with specialized aspects of culture and language—are best done, I think, in collaboration with others. Since many of the texts are at first obscure, it is helpful to have several individuals bring unique knowledge and skills to the task of translation and interpretation. Each undergraduate editorial assistant has a unique mastery of Haitian Creole and English. Since material is parsed and analyzed by various editorial assistants, over time the collaboration allows for the emergence of an accurate collective transcription and translation. Given their fluency in Haitian Creole and English, the undergraduates provided outstanding transcriptions and translations of Vodou songs and interviews with Vodou practitioners that I could edit and improve upon for the book or <em>The Vodou Archive</em>.','Undergraduates in the Archives - Hebblethwaite 2','There were many benefits working with these undergraduates. The undergraduates selected to work for this project were balanced bilinguals who demonstrated robust literacy in English and Haitian Creole, which I was able to assess since they had taken my intermediate Haitian Creole course. ','inherit','open','open','','1507-revision-14','','','2012-10-17 00:44:09','2012-10-17 00:44:09','',1507,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1507-revision-14/',0,'revision','',0),(3286,19,'2012-10-17 00:44:57','2012-10-17 00:44:57','<em>The Vodou Archive</em> is a collaborative partnership spearheaded by the University of Florida and Duke University which seeks to improve the understanding of a central Haitian and Haitian-American spiritual tradition by gathering the <strong>audiovisual</strong> and <strong>textual</strong> sources of Vodou communities, by <strong>interpreting</strong> what we collect, by <strong>expanding </strong>the holdings through a <strong>self-submission tool</strong>, and by diffusing the knowledge via an open access digital library.  You can find the current prototype here (<a href=\"http://www.dloc.com/vodou\">http://www.dloc.com/vodou</a>),  hosted within the existing <a href=\"http://dloc.com/\">Digital Library of the Caribbean</a> (dLOC). In addition to the 27 international partners working with the Digital Library of the Caribbean, collaborators from the University of Notre Dame, the University of Miami, the Schrijversvakschool, Florida International University, the Université des Antilles et de la Guyane, and City Lore, among others, will contribute elements to <strong><em>The Vodou Archive</em></strong>. This project belongs to a tradition of scholarly work stretching back to the early 20<sup>th</sup> century that has sought to counter reductionist and racist visions of the religion through ethnography, analysis of culture and music, and an exploration of the role of Vodou in Haiti’s founding revolution. Such work has long turned to the central texts in Haitian Vodou: its <strong>Creole-language songs</strong>.\r\n\r\nBuilding on my <em>Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English</em>,<a href=\"#_ftn1\">[1]</a> <em>The Vodou Archive</em> project makes these songs available in Haitian Creole and English along with substantial interpretative annotations and essays to contextualize the collection. The materials to be edited and curated in <em>The Vodou Archive</em> are of major literary, historical, cultural and religious significance. The vast Vodou corpus stands out because it preserves a wealth of African cultural, ethnological and historical knowledge.<a href=\"#_ftn2\">[2]</a> (Beauvoir 2008b). The oral and textual corpora of songs are comprised of the authentic and living traditions of the Vodou religion. They are primarily the songs that are sung in the context of Vodou worship in public and domestic ceremonies and they constitute the sacred literature of the religion. Vodou songs, a constant in ceremonies, address the mythologies and characteristics of the lwa and they describe their relations with humans. Vodou songs are time capsules that reveal the history and origins of the Haitian people in Africa, their journey to the Americas in the French slave trade, and their lives in the French colony. Due to their sacred nature, they are very well-preserved records of African and Haitian history and culture.<a href=\"#_ftn3\">[3]</a>). Ceremonies and songs preserve African historical (i.e. <em>Bosou</em>, <em>Achade</em>, <em>Legba</em>, <em>Danbala</em>), cultural (i.e. <em>lwa</em>,<em> ounsi</em>, <em>ason</em>,<em> oungan</em>) and geographical (i.e. <em>Rada</em>, <em>Savalou</em>, <em>Boumba</em>) terms in a creolized or blended religious and cultural system.<a href=\"#_ftn4\">[4]</a> <a href=\"#_msocom_1\">[C1]</a> Likewise, there are numerous Vodou ceremonies (rites) classified by the African <em>nanchon </em>(nations/communities) where they originate, i.e. Rada, Petwo, Ginen, Seneka, Ibo, Danwonmen, Nago, Kongo, Kita, etc.<a href=\"#_ftn5\">[5]</a>\r\n\r\nUndergraduates played, and will play, a key role in this archive.  They contributed first drafts of transcriptions and translations of Vodou songs and interviews with Vodou practitioners for the book, <em>Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English</em> (Hebblethwaite 2012). The undergraduate students worked on transcribing and translating interviews that I collected from Vodou priests in Haiti and they also transcribed and translated rare pre-existing published materials.<a href=\"#_ftn6\">[6]</a>   The students, Joanne Bartley, Vanessa Brissault, Kat Warwick, Wilmide Vernet, and Musset Apollon, were either paid hourly through grant funding or they earned credit for an independent study. We worked from manuscripts that employ a range of Haitian Creole spelling systems. The official variety, the “IPN,” named after the <em>Institut Pédagogique National</em>, was adopted for the first time in 1980. Many of our manuscripts predate 1980 and thus transcription required heavy correction and consultation with lexicographical works.<a href=\"#_ftn7\">[7]</a>The students had been exposed to the official variety of Haitian Creole spelling in my intermediate Haitian Creole course. After establishing the Haitian Creole source text, the students next produced the first draft of the English translation. I then corrected the Haitian Creole and English drafts in various cycles as the materials moved towards the finished products, the book or the Vodou Archive.  (See Figure 1, and for the related Vodou Archive digital library, Figures 2 &amp; 3.)<span class=\"caption\" style=\"width: 166px; margin-bottom: 20px;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/hebbelthwaite_fig1.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2358\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px; margin-right: 10px;\" title=\"hebbelthwaite_fig1\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/hebbelthwaite_fig1-166x250.jpg\" alt=\"Figure 1\" width=\"166\" height=\"250\" /></a> Figure 1: The book cover of Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English.</span>\r\n\r\n<span class=\"caption left\" style=\"margin-right: 20px; width: 266px; clear: none;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/hebbelthwaite_fig2.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-2359\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\" title=\"hebbelthwaite_fig2\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/hebbelthwaite_fig2-333x208.jpg\" alt=\"Figure 2\" width=\"266\" height=\"166\" /></a> Figure 2: The homepage of the Vodou Archive.</span><span class=\"caption left\" style=\"margin-right: 10px; width: 266px; clear: none;\"><a href=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/hebbelthwaite_fig3.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-2360\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px; clear: right;\" title=\"hebbelthwaite_fig3\" src=\"http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/hebbelthwaite_fig3-333x208.jpg\" alt=\"Figure 3\" width=\"266\" height=\"166\" /></a> Figure 3: This screen shot presents the view inside of the Vodou Archive with the filter menu for narrowing results on the left hand side of the screen.</span>\r\n<div class=\"footnotes\">\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<div id=\"_ftn1\" class=\"footnote\">[1] Benjamin Hebblethwaite and Joanne Bartley, <em>Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English </em> <em>= Chante vodou an kreyòl ayisyen ak angle</em> (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012).</div>\r\n<div id=\"_ftn2\" class=\"footnote\">[2] Max Beauvoir, <em>Le Grand Recueil Sacré ou Répertoire des Chansons du Vodou Haïtien </em>(Port-au-Prince: Edisyon Près Nasyonal d Ayiti, 2008).</div>\r\n<div id=\"_ftn3\" class=\"footnote\">[3] Claudine Michel, “Vodou in Haiti: Way of Life and Mode of Survival,” in <em>Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture: Invisible Powers, </em>ed. Claudine Michel and Patrick Bellegarde-Smith (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 27–37.<em></em></div>\r\n<div id=\"_ftn4\" class=\"footnote\">[4] See Roger Brand, <em>Cultes vodoun et textes oraux des Wéménou du sud Bénin </em>(Munich: Lincom Europa, 2000), 15; Marc Monsia, <em>Religions indigènes et savoir endogène au Bénin </em>(Cotonou, Benin: Les Éditions du Flamboyant, 2003); Gilbert Rouget, <em>La musique et la transe </em>(Paris: Gallimard, 1991 (1980)); and Gilbert Rouget, <em>Initiatique vôdoun, images du rituel: Chants et danses initiatiques pour le culte des vôdoun au Bénin </em>(Saint-Maur, France: Éditions Sépia, 2001), v.</div>\r\n<div id=\"_ftn5\" class=\"footnote\">[5] Max G. Beauvoir, <em>Lapriyè Ginen </em>(Port-au-Prince: Edisyon Près Nasyonal d Ayiti. 2008), 109-110.</div>\r\n<div id=\"_ftn6\" class=\"footnote\">[6] Milo Marcelin, <em>Mythologie Vodou (Rite Arada)</em>,<em> </em>2 vols. (Pétionville: Éditions Canapé Vert, 1950); Laura Boulton, “Laura Boulton’s Songs” (1947), in <em>Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English = Chante vodou an kreyòl ayisyen ak angle</em>, eds. Benjamin Hebblethwaite and Joanne Bartley (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012), 127-145;  J.L., “J.L. Songs,” in <em>Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English</em>,<em> </em>147-184; Harold Courlander, unpublished manuscript (1939–1940), University of Michigan Special Collections Library; Milo Rigaud, <em>La tradition voudoo et le voudoo haïtien: Son temple, ses mystères, sa magie </em>(Paris: Éditions Niclaus, 1953).</div>\r\n<div id=\"_ftn7\" class=\"footnote\">[7] Albert Valdman, Iskra Iskrova, Jacques Pierre, and Nicolas André, <em>Haitian Creole-English Bilingual Dictionary</em> (Bloomington, IN: Creole Institute, 2007); Bryant Freeman and Jowel Laguerre, <em>Haitian-English Dictionary</em>, 5th ed. (Lawrence, KS: Institute of Haitian Studies, 2004).</div>\r\n<div id=\"_msoanchor_1\" class=\"footnote\">[C1] The Brand citation is here. The original reference is: (Brand 2000: 15; Monsia 2003; Rouget 1991, 2001: v).  Which of the two Brand books should be referenced (I chose 2000a, but that could be wrong)?</div>\r\n</div>','Undergraduates in the Archives - Hebblethwaite 1','The Vodou Archive is a collaborative partnership spearheaded by the University of Florida and Duke University which seeks to improve the understanding of a central Haitian and Haitian-American spiritual tradition by gathering the audiovisual and textual sources of Vodou communities, by interpreting what we collect, by expanding the holdings through a self-submission tool, and by diffusing the knowledge via an open access digital library.  ','inherit','open','open','','1504-revision-31','','','2012-10-17 00:44:57','2012-10-17 00:44:57','',1504,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/1504-revision-31/',0,'revision','',0),(2889,19,'2012-10-15 20:59:28','2012-10-15 20:59:28','Some weaknesses of the <em>Whitman Archive</em> are a function of its stage of development. We haven’t had time to accomplish all that we have envisaged. For example, we would like to provide a good introduction to the site, so that users at various levels of knowledge—and our users <em>are</em> quite varied—can get oriented quickly when they first encounter the site. In addition, given our scope, it is not surprising that many content areas are underdeveloped: we provide all known contemporary reviews of Whitman’s writings, but a person could legitimately ask why have we not, then, provided other essays about Whitman from the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, all out of copyright, which might shed even more light on Whitman than do these reviews. Only in the last few months have we made available any of Whitman’s prose, and we have done little thus far with Whitman’s journalism. We value his journalism and have made plans for editing it, but we have not had time yet to see significant results in this area.\r\n\r\nCurrently, the <em>Whitman Archive</em> also lacks sufficient integration of material across the site. For example, if Horace Traubel mentions a specific Whitman poem in <em>With Walt Whitman in Camden</em>, we should offer ready access to that particular version (and possibly also other versions of the poem). We could also link the poem to commentary, including contemporary reviews, books from the University of Iowa Press Whitman series, and articles from the full run of the <em>Walt Whitman Quarterly Review</em>. Individual essays from <em>WWQR</em> currently are linked from citations in the criticism bibliography, and we hope to integrate more fully this journal of record for Whitman studies with the <em>Whitman Archive</em>. This more complete integration of content, like most of the changes I would suggest for the <em>Archive</em>, will be undertaken as time allows.\r\n\r\nWe are also currently investigating the application of Web 2.0 features and functionality for the <em>Archive</em>, in hopes of enabling collaboration and interaction with users of the <em>Archive</em>.<em> </em>Ideally, we would like to harness the enthusiasm and knowledge of our users. As a first step in this direction, <em>Archive </em>staff at the University of Texas at Austin are exploring user accounts for the <em>Archive</em>, accounts which would allow users both to contribute to the <em>Archive</em> as well as to create their own collections of materials. Early work is also under way on a database designed to track the what, when, and how of Whitman’s reading—that is, what did Whitman read, when did he read it, and how do we know that he read a particular text? We believe that our user community could help us populate the database. Similar resources could be integrated into the <em>Whitman Archive</em> and include user-generated information: accounts of Whitman appearances in films, television shows, advertisements, and novels, for example. Users might also participate in attribution studies. Whitman is known to have contributed to the <em>Armory Square Hospital Gazette </em>during the Civil War<em>. </em>No complete run of the newspaper exists, however, and no pieces bear Whitman’s signature. User-collaborators could help us track down scattered issues of this rare paper as well as generate a lively and informative debate about the authorship of unattributed essays in the paper. As a scholarly site, we must strike the right balance between openness and scholarly rigor, and a fundamental question for us is how to encourage participation while insuring that quality control checks remain in place. We also hope to allow users with accounts to work with the texts and data of the <em>Whitman Archive </em>in order to explore their own interpretations. Sophisticated users might access our XML and XSLT files in a work area where they could alter the encoding and stylesheets in order to pursue particular interpretive goals.','360°: The Walt Whitman Archive – Price 2','Some weaknesses of the Whitman Archive are a function of its stage of development.  We haven’t had time to accomplish all that we have envisaged.  For example, we would like to provide a good introduction to the site, so that users at various levels of knowledge—and our users are quite varied—can get oriented quickly when they first encounter the site. In addition, given our scope, it is not surprising that many content areas...','inherit','open','open','','109-revision-20','','','2012-10-15 20:59:28','2012-10-15 20:59:28','',109,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/109-revision-20/',0,'revision','',0),(2890,19,'2012-10-15 20:59:21','2012-10-15 20:59:21','At this time, the <em>Walt Whitman Archive</em> is the single most extensive resource for the study of Whitman, and it<em> </em>has progressed steadily toward its primary goal: “to make Whitman\'s vast work, for the first time, easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers.” We take an expansive view of what is relevant “Whitman” material in a digital thematic research collection,[ref]Carole L. Palmer, \"Thematic Research Collections,\" In <em>A Companion to Digital Humanities</em> (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 348-65.[/ref] so we include both Whitman-authored pieces and incoming correspondence, reviews of his writings, selected recent criticism, and other materials not usually included in \"collected works.\" We aspire to produce the richest possible resource for the study of his writings, life, and reception. Our annotated bibliography, the logical starting point for scholarly work on the poet, includes all known critical writings about Whitman from 1839 to the present day—it comprises over 14,000 entries and continues to grow. The site receives a great deal of traffic: in a typical recent month (February 2010) we had nearly 39,000 visits to our site, more than 30,000 of which were by unique visitors.\r\n\r\nAs a project co-director, I coordinate the ongoing work necessary to build it. (Ed Folsom and I work closely with Elizabeth Lorang, the current project manager, in this capacity.) The site is less <em>used</em> in my work than it regularly <em>constitutes</em> a major part of my work as a scholar. At times, though, I employ the site in much the same manner as other literary scholars, albeit with greater knowledge of the site’s strengths and limitations and with awareness of material now in the pipeline that isn’t currently available to the public. As a literary critic, I appreciate what the <em>Whitman Archive</em> makes newly possible. For example, those of us writing about Whitman can now trace the development of his poetry across multiple versions—in isolated manuscript drafts; in notebooks; in periodical printings; and in various book publications—in a way that was all but unimaginable before the advent of the Web. His manuscripts are dispersed at nearly one hundred repositories around the world. In some cases, what was once a single manuscript has become separated into parts, with different sections of the manuscript held in repositories separated by great distance. Such manuscripts can now be virtually reunited.\r\n\r\nThe <em>Whitman Archive</em> has become fundamental to criticism, but citation of the <em>Archive</em> lags behind its actual use. A recent study by Lisa Spiro and Jane Segal indicates that many people use major American literature web sites, including the <em>Whitman Archive</em>, only to then cite print sources.[ref]“The Impact of Digital Resources on Humanities Research” available at\r\nhttp://library.rice.edu/services/dmc/about/projects/the-impact-of-digital-resources-on-humanities-research\r\n[/ref] This ill-conceived practice needs to change in order for digital humanities to get its due. To enable people to reference individual parts of the <em>Whitman Archive</em> more easily, all <em>Archive </em>pages will soon include additional metadata for use with Zotero and other reference management software<em>.</em> In my own scholarly practice, I have cited the <em>Whitman Archive</em> many times, and when Susan Belasco, Ed Folsom, and I compiled the collection <em>Leaves of Grass: The Sesquicentennial Essays</em> (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), we advised all contributors to cite the <em>Whitman Archive</em> when referring to Whitman texts.','360°: The Walt Whitman Archive – Price 1','At this time, the Walt Whitman Archive is the single most extensive resource for the study of Whitman, and it has progressed steadily toward its primary goal: “to make Whitman\'s vast work, for the first time, easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers.” We take an expansive view of what is relevant “Whitman” material in a digital thematic research collection...','inherit','open','open','','107-revision-23','','','2012-10-15 20:59:21','2012-10-15 20:59:21','',107,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/107-revision-23/',0,'revision','',0),(2891,19,'2012-10-15 20:59:00','2012-10-15 20:59:00','The weaknesses I have noticed in the <em>Archive</em> are not unique to this site. One problem is the site’s misunderstanding—and thus its improper assertion—of copyrights.[ref]I am a founding member of the Society of American Archivists’ Intellectual Property Working Group.[/ref] Specifically the site asserts the existence of copyright in the transcripts and facsimiles and more broadly in Whitman’s writings—because transcripts and facsimiles are “slavish copies” neither is entitled to copyright protection;[ref]The term is from the U.S. Second District Court of New York’s decision in <em>Bridgeman Art Library Ltd v. Corel Corporation</em>, 1998.[/ref]published or unpublished anything written by Whitman is in the public domain.[ref]See “<a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/conditions.html\">Conditions of Use</a>,” <em>TWWA</em>. Unpublished works are public domain for authors deceased prior to 1940; published works for everything published prior to 1923. For an authoritative source, see Peter Hirtle, “Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States: 1 January 2010,” online at <a href=\"http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm\">http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm</a>.[/ref] Only original contributions of editors are copyrightable at this late date.[ref]Such mistakes are not unique to <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em>, certainly. Copyright statements for the <em>In the Valley of the Shadow</em> Civil War project (<a href=\"http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/VoS/usingvalley/copyright.html\">http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/VoS/usingvalley/copyright.html</a>) and the <em>Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition</em> site (<a href=\"http://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/read/?_xmlsrc=lc.privacy.xml&amp;_xslsrc=LCstyles.xsl\">http://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/read/?_xmlsrc=lc.privacy.xml&amp;_xslsrc=LCstyles.xsl</a>) are much more egregious.[/ref] What distresses me about the inaccuracies is they suggest that there are limits to use of the main site content by researchers—notwithstanding frequent assertions that the purpose of the archive is “to make Whitman\'s vast work electronically accessible” to all.[ref]Katherine L. Walter and Kenneth M. Price, <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00001.html\">\"An Online Guide to Walt Whitman\'s Dispersed Manuscripts,\"</a> <em>TWWA</em> (2004).[/ref] Making the archive accessible but incorrectly claiming limitations on actual use is paradoxical at best.\r\n\r\nThere are other issues causing me unease, for example the inadequacy of site use data. The site does not regularly report use statistics, and what statistics it does provide—average daily hits in 2007[ref]Ed Folsom, <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00142.html\">\"Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives,\"</a> <em>TWWA</em> (2007).[/ref]--are of dubious value even when current.[ref]Google Analytics: “the number of hits a website receives is not a valid popularity gauge, but rather is an indication of server use and loading” (<a href=\"http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&amp;answer=33026\">http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&amp;answer=33026</a>). Better measures are unique visitors or page views, coupled with visits’ duration.[/ref] In addition there is little similar data at similar websites to compare to (though to their credit one of the site editors did gather some parallel data in 2008).[ref]The data, from the <em>Willa Cather Archive</em> and the <em>Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition,</em> is<em> </em>presented in Kenneth M. Price,<strong> </strong><a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00267.html\">\"Electronic Scholarly Editions,\"</a> <em>TWWA</em> (2008).[/ref] Thus this is an endemic weakness of major “archive” sites, a weakness related to a broader disinterest in the economics and sustainability of such sites.[ref]And of bricks and mortar archival operations, though this is beginning to change, as suggested by the questions—“Does the level of onsite use of special collections justify the resources being expended? What are the most appropriate measures by which to evaluate use?”—in Jackie M. Dooley and Katherine Luce, <em>Taking Our Pulse: The OCLC Research Survey of Special Collections and Archives</em> (OCLC, 2010), 34-36, online at <a href=\"http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2010/2010-11.pdf\">http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2010/2010-11.pdf</a>.[/ref] The greater viability of websites such as <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em> is ultimately the $64,000 question and the focus of my essay for Part II of this roundtable.','360°: The Walt Whitman Archive – Greene 2','The weaknesses I have noticed in the Archive are not unique to this site.  One problem is the site’s misunderstanding—and thus its improper assertion—of copyrights. Specifically the site asserts the existence of copyright in the transcripts and facsimiles and more broadly in Whitman’s writings—because transcripts and facsimiles are “slavish copies” neither is entitled to copyright protection...','inherit','open','open','','88-revision-27','','','2012-10-15 20:59:00','2012-10-15 20:59:00','',88,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/88-revision-27/',0,'revision','',0),(2892,19,'2012-10-15 20:58:49','2012-10-15 20:58:49','The digital form highlights a question faced by every project or repository working to build online digital collections from analog originals. The digital form permits creation of extremely high density and equally high quality facsimiles,[ref]Scanning requirements are in “<a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/technical_summary.html\">Technical Summary</a>,” <em>TWWA</em>.[/ref] making it possible to determine physical characteristics of the original impossible to consider during the era of microfilm or photocopying. For example, project transcribers can apparently discern\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>ink blots, smudges, and stray pen marks;</li>\r\n	<li>pin holes;</li>\r\n	<li>embossing;</li>\r\n	<li>variations in ink, pencil, or paper;</li>\r\n	<li>distinctions between single and multiple overstrikes[ref]From “<a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/mediawiki/index.php/Whitman_Encoding_Guidelines#What_Not_to_Encode\">5.9.1 What Not to Encode</a>,” <em>TWWA</em>.[/ref]</li>\r\n</ul>\r\nWhile these are “what not to encode,” they denote the expectation that facsimiles supplied to the transcribers are capable of producing such details. As an extra measure of quality, “project staff <em>examine each digital image</em> [when creating JPEGs from original TIFF files] <em>cleaned and cropped</em> for web delivery.”[ref]“Technical Summary,” emphases added.[/ref] The intricate encoding guidelines themselves are also part of making high quality facsimiles accessible.\r\n\r\nThe opportunity cost of demanding extremely high standards encompasses both a slow pace of making facsimiles accessible to users and the ability to create a complete archive of Whitman material—this latter price due to the inevitable (though not supportable) decision by some repositories to decline participation if it requires public accessibility to such high quality scans.[ref]See “<a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/history.html\">History of the Project</a>,” <em>TWWA</em>, for brief discussion of some libraries’ requirement to limit user access to 72 dpi facsimiles.[/ref] There is nothing inherently logical about sacrificing a complete collection for highest-quality facsimiles. Nor is there innate reason for choosing quality over quantity, particularly since one can structure a project whereby “inferior” facsimiles are placed online relatively quickly while higher-quality facsimiles are posted, gradually, later. The question of whether (and which) users are best served by large quantity rather than high quality is one accurately answered only by asking users themselves. Surveys or focus groups for gathering user input have not been employed by <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em> it appears—but neither have they been used by the vast majority of projects and repositories creating online collections.\r\n\r\nFor a decade now I have been actively involved in projects to increase the quantity of archival material accessible to users at the expense of traditional notions of quality. What began as an effort to speed processing of large modern manuscript (hidden) collections has evolved into jeremiads on trading speed for precision in most other aspects of archives administration as well—including the creation, description, and mounting of digital facsimiles online.[ref]See, particularly, Mark A. Greene and Dennis Meissner, “More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing,” <em>American Archivist</em>, 68:2 (Fall/Winter 2005), 208-263 and Mark A. Greene, “MPLP: It’s Not Just for Processing Anymore,” <em>American Archivist</em> 73:1 (Spring/Summer 2010), 175-203.[/ref] In some cases, including processing and digitization, there is direct evidence that some users prefer “more” over “better” at a ratio of about two-to-one. Far more research is required, certainly, and we should never assume that what holds true for one project/repository and its audience holds equally true for all. But we should certainly be more anxious to determine the answers than we have been heretofore.','360°: The Walt Whitman Archive – Greene 3','The digital form highlights a question faced by every project or repository working to build online digital collections from analog originals.  The digital form permits creation of extremely high density and equally high quality facsimiles, making it possible to determine physical characteristics of the original impossible to consider during the era of microfilm or photocopying...','inherit','open','open','','90-revision-36','','','2012-10-15 20:58:49','2012-10-15 20:58:49','',90,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/90-revision-36/',0,'revision','',0),(2893,19,'2012-10-15 20:57:11','2012-10-15 20:57:11','Ed Folsom has written that one of the goals of the Whitman Archive is to “grow the database so that the surprises of searching and juxtaposing will become richer and more frequent.\" Folsom’s vision is that the Whitman Archive will become not only a centralized repository for all of Whitman’s texts, but also a discovery tool for exploring what he calls “the wild and unpredictable intersections of the data that the interface allows us to generate.”[ref]Ed Folsom, “Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives,” <em>PMLA</em> 112.5 (2007): 1609-10.[/ref] The prospect of having the Archive uncover meaningful relationships between texts is, indeed, an exciting one. As Jonathan Freedman notes, the “ability to link heterogeneous subjects and find once-occulted connections and interconnections makes scholarship invigoratingly fun.”[ref]Jonathan Freedman, “Whitman, Database, Information Culture,” <em>PMLA</em> 112.5 (2007): 1597.[/ref] As a frequent user of the Whitman Archive, I’ve experienced this “invigorating fun” first-hand, and I look forward to the Archive including more texts by and about Whitman, and incorporating more discovery tools like Brian Pytlik Zillig’s <a href=\"http://www.whitmanarchive.org/resources/tools/index.html\">TokenX</a>.\r\n\r\nAs someone working on digital humanities projects of my own, however, I’m as interested in understanding what it takes to create such tools for discovery as I am the end-user experience of having digital tools make “unpredictable” and “invigorating” discoveries on my behalf. For the remainder of this essay, I’m going to share some thoughts on what has to happen on the back end of a digital project in order to make an otherwise rigorously structured digital artifact feel “wild and unpredictable” to its users. I’ll start with Kenneth M. Price’s description of the necessary labor that goes into structuring data such that it will yield surprising results for end users: \"A database is not an undifferentiated sea of information out of which structure emerges,” Price writes. “Argument is always there from the beginning in how those constructing a database choose to categorize information.\"[ref]Price, “Edition.”[/ref] To an end user who searches a database and finds an interesting juxtaposition between a handful of the hundreds (or thousands) of total documents on that database, it can seem as if those documents have emerged out of “an undifferentiated sea of information.” The reality, however, is far different.\r\n\r\nWhen Price alludes to the process that the creators of a database go through as they decide how to “categorize information,” he makes it clear that whenever a user generates a surprising set of juxtapositions between documents it is because someone, somewhere, at some point, has meticulously categorized those documents in such a way that a search engine (or other text analysis tool) will be able to process those documents in a meaningful way. Jerome McGann, who has also commented on the rigorous process of structuring data that is required to create a digital archive, writes that “databases and all digital instruments require the most severe kinds of categorical forms. The power of database—of digital instruments in general—rests in its ability to draw sharp, disambiguated distinctions.”[ref]Jerome McGann, “Database, Interface, and Archival Fever,” <em>PMLA</em> 112.5 (2007): 1590.[/ref] As both Price and McGann indicate, what can feel like a surprising juxtaposition for the end user has, to a certain extent, already been determined in advance through a time- and labor-intensive process of marking-up, encoding, or otherwise categorizing data.\r\n\r\nThis is not to say that those who structure the data for a digital archive have already anticipated every possible search string that users could ever imagine. On the contrary, what interests me as both the user and the creator of digital archives is the effect by which this “sharp, disambiguated” structuring of data can, indeed, produce juxtapositions that archivists could never have predicted. The fundamental preconditions for cultivating such serendipitous discoveries, it seems to me, are a large enough data set and a sufficiently intelligent schema for categorizing that data (not to mention the time, money, software, hardware, human resources, and expertise required to process and categorize the data in the first place).\r\n\r\nAllow me to cite an example from outside the realm of digital archiving to illustrate what’s involved in structuring data that yields serendipitous juxtapositions. Pandora Radio is an Internet music service whose goal is to create customized, online radio stations for its users. This customization is based on the work of the Music Genome Project, which has categorized the musical attributes of thousands of different songs. Taking into consideration “everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and . . . singing and vocal harmony,” the Music Genome Project assigns anywhere between 150 and 400 different descriptors to a single song. These descriptors are based on both objective criteria such as the types of instruments used in the song or whether the song is in a major or a minor key, as well as more subjective criteria such as whether or not a song features “Acoustic Sonority,” “Prevalent Use of Groove,” or a “Wet Recording Sound.\"[ref]“The Music Genome Project,” Pandora Radio, accessed December 2, 2010 <a href=\"http://www.pandora.com/mgp.shtml\">http://www.pandora.com/mgp.shtml</a>.[/ref] (These descriptors are referred to as musical “genes,” but they could just as easily be called metadata or tags.) Visitors to Pandora Radio type in the name of a song that they like, and then based on the attributes that have been pre-assigned to that song, Pandora will play other songs with similar attributes. The promise of Pandora is that once a database of songs is categorized according to a controlled vocabulary capable of being processed by a computer, listeners will be pleasantly surprised to discover songs that they never knew they already liked. (These songs are, of course, available for purchase so that no serendipitous discovery goes un-capitalized.)\r\n\r\nI cite this example within the context of the Whitman Archive not necessarily because Pandora Radio provides a model for digital scholarship of nineteenth-century literature, but because the process of categorizing songs for the Music Genome Project is remarkably similar to the archivist’s effort of structuring data in such a way that it can produce surprising results for the end user. For both Pandora and the Whitman Archive, then, the goal is to reach the tipping point where methodical structuring becomes unexpected discovery, where the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing and structured data takes on forms that the structure-ers never quite imagined. I like to think that this tipping point where structure yields serendipity is similar to the moment in a fractal pattern where geometry becomes art, the moment where a rigorous, mathematically defined structure takes on an aesthetic quality that was never explicitly intended by the mathematical code that undergirds it, but that is nevertheless absolutely dependent upon that code for its very existence.\r\n\r\nMy hope as both the user and creator of digital archives is that we can come to a better understanding of the processes of classification and naming that are involved in these efforts structure data in meaningful ways. Scholars of literature are already comfortable thinking about the power of language to represent—and even create—the world around us. We already have at our disposal a variety of theoretical apparatuses for thinking about the power of language to name and define the world, from the formalism of the New Critics to the semiotics of the Post-Structuralists and even the focus on the materiality of language in Book History scholarship. What we need to add to this list of theories and methodologies is a more sophisticated understanding of taxonomy and categorization. This will not only require an interdisciplinary rendezvous with librarians and scholars of information architecture, but it will also demand that we do the cultural history of such seemingly mundane phenomena as filing cabinets and accounting ledgers. Compared to the work being done by digital humanities scholars in the areas of data visualization, text mining, social networking, and geo-spatial analysis, studying the history of cataloging, sorting, and organizing seems to be the intellectual equivalent of a trip to Target to buy hard-plastic storage bins when you’d rather be at the Apple Store picking up an iPad. Nevertheless, everything that we want digital technology to do to help us better understand literary texts depends upon our ability to properly name, sort, and categorize the information that we put into a computer. We do ourselves a disservice to ignore or even minimize this crucial stage of the process.\r\n\r\nOne of the most frequently quoted statements about the future of digital scholarship in the humanities comes from Jerome McGann, who wrote that “the digital technology used by humanities scholars has focused almost exclusively on methods of sorting, accessing, and disseminating large bodies of materials. In this respect the work has not engaged the central questions and concerns of the [humanities, which is] . . . . the exploration and explanation of aesthetic works.”[ref]Jerome McGann, <em>Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web</em> (New York: Palgrave, 2001), xi-xii.[/ref] I don’t want to make a straw-man out of McGann’s powerful insight, but I can’t help but take issue with his claim that the “sorting” of texts will not aid us in our goal of using digital technology to explore and explain aesthetic works. Before a digital tool of any kind can work with a text in any way, the elements of that text must be sorted, classified, and categorized according to a schema that the computer will understand. This is not to say that scholars in the digital humanities should put aside their text visualization projects and their geo-spatial analyses in order to do the Dewey Decimal system one better, but rather that the foundational tasks of organizing and classifying should more completely theorized and more intimately woven into the fabric of digital scholarship.\r\n\r\nBy attending to the tedium of taxonomy we may begin to feel like nineteenth-century scriveners rather than twenty-first century techies. Like those scriveners of old, we may prefer not to spend our time with such mundane things. Nevertheless, if we wish to generate the kinds of “wild and unpredictable intersections of . . . data” that “makes scholarship invigoratingly fun” we should embrace what actually promises to be a fascinating conversation about the history of taxonomy, structure, classification, and form. This conversation will take us through the Library of Alexandria, the Great Chain of Being, medieval bestiaries, Wunderkammer, the Mundaneum, the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, cryptography, tarot cards, and Vannevar Bush’s Memex. Every time we tag, code, or classify a text for a digital archive, we are participating in the long history of human classification systems. The better able we are to understand that history and to situate ourselves within it, the better understanding we will have of our digital archives and what they can do.','The Walt Whitman Archive - Whitley  4','Ed Folsom has written that one of the goals of the Whitman Archive is to “grow the database so that the surprises of searching and juxtaposing will become richer and more frequent.\" Folsom’s vision is that the Whitman Archive will become not only a centralized repository for all of Whitman’s texts, but also a discovery to...','inherit','open','open','','144-revision-31','','','2012-10-15 20:57:11','2012-10-15 20:57:11','',144,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/144-revision-31/',0,'revision','',0),(2894,19,'2012-10-15 20:56:47','2012-10-15 20:56:47','Archive co-director Ed Folsom once noted that printed editions of Whitman’s works have had the unfortunate tendency of becoming irrelevant the moment that scholars unearth a new letter, manuscript, or biographical fact about the poet. The Whitman Archive, however, has the benefit of being able to change and adapt as often as new discoveries are brought to the attention of the directors. In such an environment, Folsom writes, “All users are potential co-editors.”[ref]Ed Folsom, “Projecting Whitman: The Evolution and Remediation of The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman,” <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em>, accessed December 2, 2010 http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00003.html.[/ref] I love the notion that everyone is a “potential co-editor” of the Whitman Archive, and I\'d like to consider how the Archive could make better use of its digital form as a way to more fully realize this potential. I would never advocate for crowd-sourcing the Archive on the model of sites like Wikipedia, but I would like the Archive directors to take more seriously the implication that “All users are potential co-editors.”\r\n\r\nI have a tremendous amount of respect for how the Archive directors have responded to public criticisms from other scholars. In a 2007 <em>PMLA</em> forum on the Whitman Archive, for example, Meredith McGill took the Archive to task for decontextualizing the poems that Whitman had published in newspapers and magazines by clipping the poems from their original sources and excluding all the other articles, poems, and advertisements that appeared alongside Whitman’s poems.[ref]Meredith L. McGill, “Remediating Whitman,” <em>PMLA</em> 112.5 (2007):1594.[/ref] The Archive promptly responded to this criticism by including the entire page of the periodical where a Whitman poem appeared. But not every user of the Whitman Archive can get the attention of the Archive directors in the pages of <em>PMLA</em>. And even those fortunate enough to do so don\'t have a mechanism for providing additional feedback to the Archive directors regarding their response to suggestions for improvement. I wonder, does McGill think it was sufficient to include the complete newspaper page where a Whitman poem appeared, or would she rather that the Archive include the rest of the issue is well? Or would she even prefer a link to some external site that hosts the entire run of the paper?\r\n\r\nThe Archive could make better use of its digital form by providing “user accounts or other community-hosting capabilities,” as Matt Cohen has recently suggested.[ref]Cohen, “Design and Politics,” 241.[/ref]Integrating Web 2.0 components such as user accounts and a comment section to the Whitman Archive would have considerable implications for the Archive: while a comments section would give scholars such as McGill a much more dynamic venue for engaging with the Archive\'s directors, it would also make the Archive feel less like a scholarly edition of Whitman\'s works and more like a Facebook fan page. Nevertheless, Archive co-director Kenneth M. Price has already said that “scholarly edition” doesn\'t necessarily describe what the Whitman Archive actually is. Instead, Price has characterized the Archive as something more like a workshop, or, as he puts it, a “group of people who are now joined together for a common purpose.”[ref]Kenneth M. Price, \"Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What\'s in a Name?\" <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em>, accessed December 2, 2010 http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00346.html.[/ref] If that group of people could also include the hundreds (if not thousands) of scholars, students, and non-academic readers who visit the Archive every day, it would not only make better use of the digital medium, but it would also go some distance toward fulfilling Folsom\'s claim that “All users are potential co-editors.”','The Walt Whitman Archive - Whitley  3','Archive co-director Ed Folsom once noted that printed editions of Whitman’s works have had the unfortunate tendency of becoming irrelevant the moment that scholars unearth a new letter, manuscript, or biographical fact about the poet. The Whitman Archive, however, has the benefit of being able to change and adapt as often as new discoveries are brought to the attention of the directors.','inherit','open','open','','142-revision-25','','','2012-10-15 20:56:47','2012-10-15 20:56:47','',142,'http://stage.archivejournal.net/issue/2/uncategorized/142-revision-25/',0,'revision','',0),