The Walt Whitman Archive at a Quarter of a Century

How else, as cofounders of the Walt Whitman Archive, should Ken Price and I begin to think about its first twenty-five years, but with allusions to and quotations from Whitman himself? It is of course tempting to edge toward the inevitable and say something like, “We celebrate ourselves,” which in some sense we are doing by using our anniversary as an occasion to gather this distinguished group of scholars to think about the futures of digital humanities (DH) scholarship. “We celebrate ourselves and sing ourselves, / And what we assume you shall assume.” But we all know there is no center around which multiple futures organize themselves. If we were to begin with the way we celebrate ourselves, we would need to underscore the etymology of “celebrate,” just as Whitman encouraged us to do: never to use a word without knowing its etymology, what Emerson called its “fossil poem.” Celebrate comes from roots meaning “to return to,” “to frequent in great numbers,” “to repeat often.” And that is the twenty-five-plus-year process that we call the “Whitman Archive”: it—whatever it is—has been and remains a process of returning to it again and again, day after day, and being surprised (just as Whitman was surprised by his absorptive democratic self that changed and grew with every new experience it engaged) by just how large and varied and diverse it can become as we return to it again and again and re-turn it. We all learn in the course of our lives to use a most appropriate phrase when we celebrate a recurring event, like an anniversary or a birthday: “Many happy returns!” Because more than a thing, the Whitman Archive is an event, a process that Ken and Matt Cohen and I and so many others keep returning to; it is that kind of celebration.

So I want to begin not with a quotation from Whitman, but instead with a quick backward glance to those days decades ago when the Whitman Archive people regularly hung out with the Emily Dickinson Electronic Archives folks as we created what we called “The Classroom Electric,” a series of what we then thought, foolishly, would be permanently useful websites for teachers, websites that brought Dickinson and Whitman together in productive and illuminating ways. And it’s also a look ahead in this gathering of scholars to Marta Werner’s focus once again on Dickinson. My evocation of Dickinson is a very familiar little poem of hers, one that I’ve heard over the past couple of months used on at least three different occasions, and one that I never hear without thinking of the origins of the Whitman Archive:

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,

One clover, and a bee.

And revery.

The revery alone will do,

If bees are few.

One place I heard the poem read recently was at a gathering of some neighbors in Iowa City who were involved in a prairie restoration project, where the poem was offered as Dickinson’s suggestion that reverie is a kind of delusional thinking that may in fact be crucial to get the process of prairie restoration started, when so many in the community don’t think the project is worth doing or will never get done. But reverie can sustain the creators through uncertain times: you need to dream big, envision what could be, in order to get started. That is art. One ecological writer says about this poem that maybe it “is suggesting that we begin making something long before we know enough, and long before we pick up our tools.”1 We begin with reverie, and reverie can sustain us through a lot of tough times. But eventually we need that clover and bee.

Now, I don’t want to assign roles to actual people here, because, in the course of the development of the Whitman Archive, countless people have been the clover, the bee, and the reverie. But when I hear this poem, I see Ken Price, Charlie Green, and me in a little room at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, Ken and I standing at Charlie’s desk with a computer and a single screen. In that moment, the reverie I had brought to the project seemed to have found its single clover and single bee. It was a tiny prairie we were building then. And we needed the reverie to sustain us. And we sure as hell needed to know a lot more about what actually made a prairie. I was from Iowa, which was just then in the business of trying to restore tall-grass prairies all over the state, and little did we know then that Ken would soon enough be moving to Lincoln, on the edge of the tall-grass prairies as they turn to mixed grasses and rise to the plains. Dickinson, who had never seen an actual prairie, imagined her way to creating one: she knew the basic ingredients. Ken, Charlie, and I, who had never seen the making of an actual online archive, were trying to imagine our way toward something we at first named the “Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive.” And while we wouldn’t be making a prairie, we were soon on the prairie making an archive that had everything to do with leaves of grass.

All institutions have their origin tales, and the one most often told of the Whitman Archive is that I planted the idea in my 1992 essay in Resources for American Literary Study, later reprinted in the book Prospects for the Study of American Literature. Here is what I wrote back then, thirty years ago, in the era of the floppy disk. This was my reverie, which I began, characteristically, by complaining: I noted the disaster of the long-promised but endlessly delayed journalism volumes in the New York University Press Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, and I commented on the many difficulties of using the then-recently issued three-volume variorum of the printed editions of Leaves of Grass as part of the Collected Writings project. Then I said:

One project awaiting some enterprising scholar (or group of scholars) with computer facility is a hypertext version of Leaves of Grass (and other Whitman books) that will allow computer access to the various editions by scanning color page-by-page photographs of the texts into a database, then allowing anyone to examine the physical attributes of the various editions on a computer screen: all scholars could then have all the editions (including Drum-Taps, Specimen Days, Two Rivulets, etc.) present in state-of-the-art computer realization, complete with cross-referencing, textual annotation, and publishing history. Facsimiles of Whitman’s manuscripts and corrected proof sheets could also be included, thus allowing scholars to call up each step in the evolution of Whitman’s poems. Such hypertextual scholarship could revolutionize commentary on Whitman.2

Everything about that paragraph now is laughable, including the naïvete of my blithe assumptions about how easily “the computer” (maybe programmed by one “enterprising scholar”) would make this imagined new variorum. I’m reminded that reverie has its own telling etymology and can be tracked to roots meaning “wild conduct,” “raving,” “delirium,” “a fit of abstract musing.” Only in the past year have we finally published on the Archive something that only just begins to approach what I have always thought of, in my digital delirium, as the “magic button” that would allow users to pop up on their screen all the original notes and drafts of any and all of Whitman’s writings, along with his corrected proofs, his continual rewriting and rearranging and clustering and cutting and adding. Do you want to see “The Sleepers” take shape? Just click the magic button and watch the poem evolve from a random notebook jotting through multiple drafts that would split into several poems, including the 1855 poem that would shift even more and evolve into the final 1881 version that most readers today encounter. The Whitman Archive’s amazing new 1855 Leaves of Grass variorum edition that Nikki Gray led the way on over the past few years begins to do (now 30 years later) for one edition of Whitman what I imagined some computer-savvy folks (a busy bee or two) could accomplish by 1995, or maybe 2000 at the latest.3

In fact, the true origin of the Walt Whitman Archive was not my raving essay, but Ken Price’s response to it. If mine was the reverie, his was the actual clover and bee that turned an ill-formed dream of an archive into the small but quite real beginnings of the Whitman Archive. At William & Mary, Ken had formed or found a remarkable hive of grad students who understood “the computer” in ways Ken and I didn’t, and in my case, still don’t—people like Charles Green and Rob Nelson and Matt Cohen, all of whom convinced Ken that the Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive was a project worth starting. The Institute for Advanced Technology (fondly acronymed IATH) at the University of Virginia, with John Unsworth and Daniel Pitti, was the pioneering DH center, and Ken asked me to join him in a digital scholarly adventure that led to many long days at IATH, where much larger bees had much vaster fields of clover they tended. John and Daniel and Jerry McGann and others at IATH told us how and why we were hopelessly naïve about our project, to which Ken and I had generously pledged five full years. Now, nearly thirty years later, we feel we’ve finally begun, and have taken some baby steps toward my still-reveried magic button.

I had wanted in this brief essay to give an institutional history of the Whitman Archive as it enters its second quarter-century, a backward glance, maybe a sentence or two for every year or so; looking back on it, its multiple projects and incarnations now seem to have sped by with that kind of deceptive velocity. It is, in fact, difficult to offer an “institutional history,” because it’s hard to think of the Whitman Archive as an “institution”: there’s very little brick and mortar involved, much as we’ve all envisioned and even joked about a Whitman Archive building, if not a Whitman Archive campus. What we are physically, alas, is contained in small offices in Lincoln and Iowa City. But, as with all institutions, it’s the people who form the history, and it is stunning to me to realize that the people who have worked on the Whitman Archive now number nearly two hundred in our first quarter-century. While Ken Price and I have been there from the beginning, and Matt Cohen virtually from the beginning, the Whitman Archive would not exist without the dedication, imagination, and work of so many who have now gone on with their own careers and have left day-to-day Whitman Archive activity, but whose work is inseparable from the archive, in fact whose work defines it: from Charles Green to Elizabeth Lorang to Nicole Gray. It’s a mistake to begin naming names, both because there are so many and because it would not be illuminating unless you happen to know these truly remarkable and talented folks. At any given time, about twenty-five people (graduate students, professors, tech specialists, and, more importantly, colleagues and collaborators) are devoting some major portion of their working life to the archive. The cast of collaborators shifts, but the work goes on, made possible by our other radiating fields of collaborators: the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Archives and Records Administration, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Department of Education, the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and the University of Iowa. Without their financial support, the Whitman Archive would not be possible and would have died soon after it was begun. There are a lot of bees tending to the clover now, even on days when reveries are few.

I’d like to add just a couple more words about collaboration and collaborators, since that is really the history of the Whitman Archive. My prediction is that what we call “digital humanities” will someday be thought of simply as “collaborative humanities,” because DH is by definition the building of teams. It’s not the end of individual scholarship, but the end of hermetic scholarship: collaborative humanities is about everyone’s individual work (one clover, and a bee, and reverie) feeding into the context of a vaster and vaster collaborative network (the making of a prairie). And the Whitman Archive team is still learning just how broad and exciting and unexpected that collaboration can be, as we now have worked with IATH at the University of Virginia and with the amazing Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at Nebraska, whose staff have become the technical architects of what we have discovered is an ever-evolving “product,” or perhaps more accurately, not a product at all but a “process.” Iowa’s Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio has become a collaborator as well, and the list keeps growing, right out to our thousands of visitors/users/readers who come to the Whitman Archive for reasons we often could not fathom, but who join us as co-creators each time they point out a problem, a typo, a dead link, or a wrong identification, each time someone tracing their family genealogy comes upon a letter Whitman wrote to one of their great-grandparents or a great-grandparent wrote to Whitman, and those surprise collaborators provide us with details about that correspondent that we never would have found ourselves.

So it’s really no history I can offer here, rather just a very brief fictional story, with its own mythical beginnings, its wildly growing cast of characters, and its ever-changing face on your computer screens. When I wrote about the archive in PMLA back in 20074—in the era of the CD-ROM—analyzing database as a new genre, one particularly fit for Whitman, who developed a kind of database poetry, where his catalogs enacted a sort of data ingestion, one of the respondents to my essay, Meredith McGill, worried that we were creating a site that was too poetry-centric.5 “Yes, it looks that way,” I replied to her, “but just give us a few years.” “Check back in 2023,” I might have said if I were confident enough, “where you’ll find Whitman’s fiction in a superbly detailed edition, his journalism in ever-expanding and expanded forms, his notebooks and manuscripts, his poetry in translation, and a vast array of criticism.” There’s no product to this collaborative endeavor we’ve all set out on, just an ever-changing cast with an ever-growing list of new things to edit and to describe and to figure out. Thanks, Walt, for being so large: you’ve now got a collaborative community continuing to discover and reveal your multitudes.

I am still amazed at every time I glance at one page of manuscript notes Whitman made just a couple of years before his large 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass appeared (Figure 6.1). Whitman himself seemed to know 150 years ago that there was just emerging “A New Way & The True Way of Treating . . . History, Geography, Ethnology, Astronomy,” just about any area of knowledge, by creating “long lists of dates, terms, summary paragraphic statements, &c,” and that “New Way” was via the collection of “data, all-comprehensive, and to be pursued as far and to as full information as any one will”: that open presentation of more and more data will be “the best way of inditing [composing] history,” of composing without reducing the subject, whatever it is, that always slips the boundaries of any narrative we could write about that subject.

As is often the case, Whitman was prescient here. He sensed that the explosion of information around him (in his case, fueled by innumerable developments in industrial printing technology) was producing “so many books” that getting them all “in any history” was now hopeless, so humans would have to develop some system of coded shorthand, “long lists” of data that would be “all-comprehensive” and would contain “as full information as any one will” and will offer “the best way of inditing history for the common reader.” History (and all other types of human knowledge) would have to be composed in a very different way as a result of the massive proliferation of information. From now on, increasing data would give us the tools for inditing history as well as for indicting all the previous histories that had been written. Since any history is a narrative built on necessarily selective data, histories that absorb more and more data will become rolling indictments of the partial stories we’ve heard before.

Whitman, of course, had no concept of data as we think of it today, the coded materials that form the electronic databases that all literary scholars now routinely use. But his notion of data was certainly already edging toward that modern notion. In the 1864 Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language, data is defined simply as “something given or admitted; a ground of inference or deduction” (from the Latin for “to give”). Whitman, though, was already pushing the word toward a definition that would become incorporated into dictionaries only around the turn of the century: “Facts, esp. numerical facts, collected together for reference or information” (as the Oxford English Dictionary defines a usage traced to 1899). The more computer-nuanced definitions did not begin to emerge until the 1950s and 1960s.

It’s probably no surprise that Whitman, who often built his radically innovative poetry on a cataloging technique that gained its force by piling on detail after detail, was an advocate for a new data-driven history. “Song of Myself,” after all, can be read in one sense as a database of impressions of nineteenth-century America, data “all-comprehensive, and to be pursued as far, and to as full information as any one will.” For Whitman, the world itself was a kind of pre-electronic database, and his notebooks and notes are full of lists of particulars—sights and sounds and names and activities—that he dutifully enters into the record. Anyone who has read one of Whitman’s cascading poetic catalogs knows this: those catalogs are always indicators of an endless database, a suggestion of a process that could continue for the duration of a lifetime, a mere hint of the massiveness of the database of our sights and hearings and touches, each of which could be entered as a separate line of the ever-expanding poem. It’s why Whitman loved photography and saw it as the new democratic art. It was the first technology, we can now see, that suggested what today we think of as database: what most struck early commentators about photography was its relentless appetite for details, for every speck that appeared in the field of vision. Many hated photography for precisely that reason; it insisted on flaws and extraneous matter that a painter would have edited out of the scene in order to create beauty. But beauty, Whitman said, democratic beauty, was fullness, not exclusion, and required an eye for completeness, not a discriminating eye. Photography was teaching us to see the world as a database, a vast and indiscriminate accumulation of givens.

So the Whitman Archive: our attempt at an all-comprehensive set of data that suggests this author we call “Walt Whitman” is not containable, but is always escaping us. “Missing me one place search another,” he tells us at the end of “Song of Myself,” in a line that could serve as a kind of stripped-down instruction for using the Whitman Archive. Whitman’s key metaphor, leaves of grass, was always meant to generate in the reader not a manicured and well-kept lawn of identical blades of grass, but rather the tall-grass prairie that he celebrates again and again in poems like “The Prairie Grass Dividing”: that vast sea of diverse grasses, with their rhizomatic roots creating a tangle of relationships impossible to sort out, interconnected in a fertile database waiting for unseen connections to be discovered. It’s a prairie waiting for the reverie of you, whoever you are.