Preserving the Walt Whitman Archive

“To think How Eager We Are in Building Our Houses”: Constructing Digital Projects

Editors and archivists alike have discussed how digital editions, digital archives, and digital thematic research collections are multifaceted entities subject to updates, expansions, transformations, obsolescence, failures, and migrations.6 Under these conditions, editing and preservation both become the work of tending or long-term cultivation. Even a digital edition that is no longer actively expanding does not simply exist in the world. It requires effort to maintain: server space, security updates, and domain renewals. The claiming of the domain and the building and compiling and updating of the code are recurring and collective activities, often involving a collective that expands and changes over time. The proliferation of digital projects and the persistence of some, like the Whitman Archive, over decades also has helped to inspire conversations about project “sunsetting,” or (as a Duke University ScholarWorks “Project Planning” document defines it), “thoughtfully ceasing to update or maintain a digital work.”7 This is practical, necessary, and also sometimes sad work: a 2019 roundtable on sunsetting was subtitled “on digital praxes of letting go.”8

As is the case for many large-scale digital projects, the scope of materials that have come to make up the Whitman Archive is vast. Users are familiar with the website, whitmanarchive.org, divided into seven major sections and many more subsections and providing access to tens of thousands of files. Hosted by the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s (UNL) Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH), the Archive and its publication framework are currently under active reconstruction, but at the time of writing, the project still uses Apache Cocoon to dynamically transform XML files into HTML, with a Google-based site search and section searches powered by SOLR. Grant-funded work is now fueling the process of transforming it into a Ruby on Rails application that draws on the CDRH application programming interface (API) and leverages the center’s custom publishing system. This change will align the project’s web components much more substantively with principles of digital longevity like those articulated by the University of Victoria–based “Endings Project.”9 The Archive also curates scads of high-resolution TIFF files; lower-resolution JPG access derivatives; style sheets; scripts; Google documents; SharePoint documents; Excel files; wiki pages; databases (including a tracking database linking images and transcriptions and a database with bibliographical information about more than a century of Whitman criticism); electronic, printed, and handwritten correspondence, files and photocopies; journal issues; Git repositories, Post-it notes; objects accumulated over more than twenty-five years of meetings and Whitman camps (the familiar name for all-hands annual planning meetings); and more.

Preservation processes are in place for some of these materials, with more to come as digital capacities in the UNL Libraries expand. Most of the project’s high-resolution scans of Whitman manuscripts and other materials have been deposited into Ex Libris Rosetta, a digital asset management (DAM) and preservation system. Lots of copies are made to keep stuff safe, some purposefully and some compulsively, from server backups to redundant copies on servers, hard drives, optical media, and individual computers. Printed copies of some records are generated and kept in file cabinets in the Whitman Archive offices. The files that make up two early versions of the Archive have been saved and can be accessed through the current interface. Two different versioning systems have been used in project workflows for various aspects of the work: Apache Subversion and Git. You’ll notice the passive tense in this paragraph: the agents doing this work are so many and have changed so often over the years that each of these actions has truly been a cooperative effort, sometimes but not always guided by a clear plan or leadership intervention. And this description does not take into account the preservation processes also constantly happening among the project’s large community of users, as people save images of poetry manuscripts for use in scholarship or because they are beautiful, or as they download the project’s XML to use for various forms of computational analysis, or as they copy individual lines of poetry into essays or journals or notebooks.10

Sitting there in that summer of 2020, the more I thought through the scope of what constitutes the “Whitman Archive,” the more overwhelming it seemed, particularly when thinking about preservation as a bulwark against loss. But recent work in archives and elsewhere suggests that maybe there are other ways of thinking about it. Resources like The Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap (STSR), developed by the Visual Media Workshop at the University of Pittsburgh, guide creators or inheritors of digital projects through a series of steps designed to produce documentation about a project’s sustainability goals, essential features, and sociotechnical frameworks.11 Key to the process as the Roadmap presents it are both an iterative approach and the recognition that there are various pathways and sustainability options available: “Digital humanities projects can, and should, have a variety of expectations of longevity.”12 Part of the work project representatives are asked to do in the first section of modules is to consider fundamental aspects of the project, including its scope, its mission, its community of users, and its priorities.

Preservation and editing both have the virtue, done carefully, of prompting some consideration and articulation of value. In reflecting on the spirit of the Whitman Archive and thinking about connecting preservation actions to values, some of what I wanted to figure out how to preserve was not just the technical or the content layers of the project, but less tangible or documentary things and more ephemeral ones, more ephemeral even than the digital materials or the links among them: the discoveries it had made possible, the moments of serendipity or surprise at recognizing something new in Whitman based on searches or juxtapositions of images and text on the Archive; the moments where, to paraphrase the poet, something startled us where we thought we were safest—“wonder at the resurrection of the wheat.”13

I also thought about the social infrastructure of the Whitman Archive, the people who have been so fundamental to its construction and maintenance over the years. It’s a lot of people, the staff page now featuring about two hundred folks who have contributed to the project. There are the codirectors: the project was shaped by the confident leadership and people-cultivating energy of Ken Price and the wisdom and poetic sensibility of Ed Folsom, both inheritors of the rich tradition of Whitman scholarship. In its more recent Nebraska- and Iowa-based iterations, the project has also been shaped by the leadership, organization, and people-wrangling accomplishments of Kevin McMullen, Stephanie Blalock, Brett Barney, and Elizabeth Lorang; brilliant design and dev management by the CDRH’s Karin Dalziel; the programming prowess of Jessica Dussault, Greg Tunink, and others; the enthusiasm of contributing editors like Matt Cohen, Stefan Schöberlein, Jason Stacy, and Caterina Bernardini; sustained institutional support orchestrated by Katherine Walter; the labors of more extraordinary graduate and undergraduate students than I can count, who have gone off to do amazing things in a wide range of fields. There were consultants and supporters and advisors providing just the right words of caution or suggestion at just the right times. There were great strides in the wrong direction, good-natured corrections of course, and cosmic discussions over everything from authorship to the placement of a comma. These all have been, in so many ways, the heart of the Whitman Archive.

There are oral histories, too. I remember a moment when Brett, keeper of Whitman Archive lore, first told me about the “Price escape” and the “Folsom escape.” Some impossible situation had come up (I can’t remember what, now, one of many cruxes or interface lapses occasioned by Whitman’s constant revision and vast assemblage of texts and re-texts and pretexts and contexts), and as we sat in silence staring forlornly at the screen, Brett said, “well, there’s always the Folsom escape.” First, there was the Price escape: that thing that needs doing can be done by some unspecified future people at some unspecified future time. And then there was the Folsom escape: whatever it was that couldn’t possibly be captured or represented satisfactorily by the encoding or the web display would be okay, because a user could consult the associated images or explanatory text. And so, inch by inch, file by file, with care and compromise, the project moved forward. These escapes are things that speak beyond themselves: they are bridges, incantations, models, and habits of mind that move us from where we are to where we wish to go. They look at the stultifying pull of perfectionism in the eye, and then they move on.

What sort of thing is this that we are trying to preserve? How much of it can we capture with WARC files and bitstreams? How much of it do we need or want to capture? These are challenging practical questions, but they are also challenging theoretical, ontological, and ethical ones. The Whitman Archive, like editions in any medium, is a locus, a site of layered materiality around which relationships form and reform. Drawing on Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s discussion of planned obsolescence, “Open Digital Collaborative Project Preservation in the Humanities” is a conference aligned with the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) that has invited discussions of “a complex problem made more complex when environments are not static objects but rather dynamic collaborative spaces.”14 The sociology of texts is also the sociology of digital editorial projects.

And preservation, like editing, is world-building work. The impress of time is everywhere upon it. Alan Galey has explored some of the intersections, noting the temporality of both sets of activities: working in the present to preserve the materials of the past for the audiences and readers and users of the future.15 Web archiving has often been described by archivists in terms of capturing “moments in time.”16 Time is at the heart of other methods and tools of digital preservation and access: emulation, versioning, migration and reformatting, DAM systems. Data-curation models like the one provided by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) describe a lifecycle punctuated by stages and interventions, but the cycle is circular and (unlike the life of an individual) does not necessarily involve an endpoint.17 Even the endpoint, as represented by guidelines like those described in The Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap or the Digital Documentation Process, or in principles like those articulated by the Endings Project, often isn’t really the end: data, documentation, and other project materials are deposited into institutional or open-source digital repositories, or stored in some other secure location for continued access.18 The work of sustainability and preservation is an ongoing and collective process, a set of specific actions, but also an orientation, a willingness to mediate in an open-ended way between technologies and people of the past and present and technologies and people of the future.19

This has driven calls to rethink not the ontology of the digital project, exactly, but rather the comparisons we use to try to imagine its persistence. A recent publication on what the authors refer to as “expansive digital publications” proposes: “If the scholarly community conceptualizes these projects as analogous not to a codex but to museum exhibits, for example, or the performing arts, then ephemerality becomes not an undesirable accident but an essential quality of the work.”20 They also raise the notion, often heretical to scholars if familiar to archivists, that not everything can be preserved, and (what’s more) not everything should be preserved. I think of some of those lost things from the past whose felt absence is registered only by the incommensurate presence of other things, and our desire for them: the missing chapters of Martin Delany’s serialized novel Blake; William Wells Brown’s play Experience; the way some Indigenous words and languages used to sound. We project our own desires into these spaces at our peril, Saidiya Hartman reminds us, even as we must summon the courage and the compassion to do that work.21 Before romanticizing ephemerality or embracing the lessons offered by its particular form of surrender, we must remember how often power has dictated what was preserved and what was not.

What do we save, of what we can save? In the case of a project like the Whitman Archive, not everything can be saved, and (we argue) not everything should be saved, and insofar as we have any agency in deciding—and capacity to balance the difficult work of building, managing, and preserving—it is practical and ethical work that deserves some attention. Time and backlogs being what they are, the work and resources devoted to saving one thing are taken from the work and resources devoted to saving another.22 There are a range of ways in which digital editorial projects can be maintained, from fully functioning, database-driven websites and archival information packages, to a collection of static HTML pages, to a series of screenshots in a documentary description, to a snapshot on the Internet Archive. As the STSR suggests, “end-of-life” planning requires a project to go back to basics, to identify “significant properties,” to think about the aspects that mean something to users, and how they might be sustained. It also suggests a need or an opportunity to reflect on key moments in the formation and development of a project and its connections to other projects, as well as broader conversations and initiatives, particularly for projects like the Whitman Archive that have emerged and evolved as part of the emergence and evolution of the field or subfield of DH.

“These Also Flow onward to Others . . .”: Preservation and Letting Go

Fenlon has noted that the distinction between preservation and sustainability is often not clear in discussions of DH projects. “One implication of this challenge,” she suggests, “is the need for a stronger vocabulary for articulating the contributions of digital scholarship to support determinations about what needs to be kept ‘alive’ (and in what form, and for how long), and what can be effectively fixed in amber.”23 This distinction also speaks to the ways that the digital preservation practices that have developed for long-term maintenance of static materials often can only be partial, and maybe only address part of the question: “It is a good idea to archive the data from these projects,” Christine Madsen and Megan Hurst point out, “but that will not sustain them.”24

Scholars and practitioners in the libraries and archives world are profoundly aware of the difficulties attending digital preservation, but for many humanities scholars they are something new to be contending with, in part because digital materials require a kind of premortem. What’s needed for these, preservation guidelines have suggested, is thinking about the end at the very beginning: building the project’s sunset into its sunrise, into the laying of the foundations.25 “Preservation action is needed at the start of the life of a digital object,” the Digital Preservation Coalition’s Digital Preservation Handbook advises, “not always at its end.”26 For digital editorial projects, this can be something of a melancholy activity not just because the end must be built into the beginning, not just because ultimately separating the two is, perhaps, impossible, but also because the broader context of the world is deeply unstable. We no longer have the luxury of thinking about sustainability as an intellectual exercise, if we ever did. Now, more apparently, it has become a matter of survival.

Whitman is a challenge and a joy to edit in part because he was so involved with the production of his books, testing any desire to circumscribe or project authorial intention. The 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass was brought about almost entirely as a matter of the relationships he had developed as a printer and newspaper editor, and the poet maintained that he had set some of the type for the edition himself. Material traces on surviving copies suggest the books probably were printed in stages between other jobs, their manufacture proceeding as a series of moments in time, a context-driven tempo of production.27 When the 1860–1861 edition was being produced, Whitman installed himself in the Boston printing house, probably driving the printers crazy with his interventions. This involvement with the material production of his books combined with his newspaper experience to influence both his poetic metaphors and his sense of the fixity and finality of the codex and the printed page—which he saw as neither fixed nor final, but perpetually subject to transformation.

Digital editions and projects have been around long enough now that many of them have woven themselves deeply into the work and the psyches of scholars, and in some cases the sentiments. Having worked so closely with the Whitman Archive for so many years, it is difficult for me to imagine, for instance, the interface in any color but blue. But of course it wasn’t always blue, any more than Leaves of Grass was always green: Whitman himself set the example with the many interfaces of Leaves of Grass.28 Unless you owned more than one copy, your experience of Whitman’s poetry was profoundly shaped by whichever book you bought. As fondness for a particular set of retro computer games can anchor a person in time, so too we might measure out our academic lives by our affection for the peculiarities of the printed and digital editions and collections we use.

One example of such a collection is Old Fulton New York Post Cards, an astonishing, idiosyncratic preservation effort in its own right that has served as a long-time resource for Whitman scholars and a range of other people interested in the history of New York.29 This website, a labor of love by a retired IT professional, has long been a repository of millions of scans of New York newspapers, many of which could not be found elsewhere, and is equipped with a maddening but somehow charming interface that defies all current principles of usability and interface design.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions of preservation are several, and they describe the preservation of many things: self, identity, health, antiquities, furniture, buildings, customs, language, remains. Preservation is also against many things: damage, decay, destruction, weather, disease, sin, extinction, dissipation, death. One of the definitions of “preservation” in the OED is “the state or condition of being preserved; intactness, keeping, repair”:30 intactness, as in the maintenance of a unified being as a whole (or perhaps the seeking of connections among things); keeping, as in “actively to hold in possession; to retain in one’s power or control” (or perhaps “the taking care of a thing or person,” “to observe by attendance, presence, residence”); repair, as in to fix (or perhaps “to return . . . to come back again”).31

Following these words to their meanings, and imagining for them alternate, recursive meanings, begins to hint at the multiple valences of preservation, including a dark side that has registered in the literature and ruminations of archivists and theorists alike. In their book The Undercommons, a theoretical-poetic work grown out of the Black radical tradition and published as both a printed volume and an open-access PDF freely available for download, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten repair to the violence of the invocation of categories. “This responsibility for the preservation of objects,” they write, “becomes precisely that Weberian site-specific ethics that has the effect, as Theodor Adorno recognized, of naturalizing the production of capitalist sites.”32

As a rejoinder, they summon preservation as a mode of liberatory meta- or anti-critique, applied to self and community as protective positivity, a kind of reverberation within and resistance to the trap of institutional authority (including that gravitational pull of expertise, competence, credit, and critique that has often been the uninterrogated foundation of scholarly edition-making). In The Undercommons, Moten and Harney write: “Critique endangers the sociality it is supposed to defend, not because it might turn inward to damage politics but because it would turn to politics and then turn outward . . . were it not for preservation, which is given in celebration of what we defend, the sociopoetic force we wrap tightly round us, since we are poor. Taking down our critique, our own positions, our fortifications, is self-defense alloyed with self-preservation”:33 preservation as something given, in celebration; self-preservation and self-defense as a matter of taking down fortifications. Preservation as/for sociopoetic force here is a matter of the self and a matter of the social. Moten and Harney also summon a kind of “militant preservation”: “The multitude uses every quiet moment, every sundown, every moment of militant preservation, to plan together, to launch, to compose (in) its surreal time.”34

And here we find a quandary, or perhaps an opportunity; and here editing and its discontents may help us. What, with respect to the temporalities of digital preservation, are we to make of this concept of “surreal time”? Digital editing challenges us to find our escapes, to become comfortable with states of incompleteness. Corrections are possible; versions can coexist; multiple stages of description might be part of a project’s work plan; new sections of the Whitman Archive are added as new discoveries are made or new contributors with different interests develop grant projects. Digital preservation, too, draws our attention to moments. What we preserve is a series of fragments meant to represent or be summonable as the whole. But who better than Whitman to remind us that the unified, unchangeable whole or origin was always an illusion, even before the bitstream, even before software and its dependencies?

Here we split a definition of preservation into parts, tinker, and bring it back together again: in the surreal time of preservation, we might privilege movement rather than fixity, we might declare keeping as giving (as taking care, as continuous and careful observation), we might declare repair as taking down (as return, as coming back again). Here things are not necessarily intact, at least not in the way we have imagined. Here the state of being intact was a dream, a projection, more virtual than the virtual world itself,35 but also a call into the future that imagines a group of people working to build the kinds of connections and foundations that can function as intactness within a given set of circumstances. Preservation, here, becomes not so much an effort to reconstruct exactly something that was, as to maintain the possibility of something that could be—even if that something looks quite different from how it did before.

The Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project, another project affiliated with the CDRH at Nebraska, has been working to digitize archival documents related to the Genoa U.S. Indian Industrial School, a boarding school that operated in Genoa, Nebraska, from 1884 to 1934, enrolling children from more than forty Native American tribes.36 The meanings and set of practices comprising preservation in the context of this project are still evolving. They include: the digitization itself, which proliferates copies of and access to archival materials but also recontextualizes them with respect to the information most likely to be of interest to descendants and tribal communities; the plan to ingest high-resolution scans into a DAM system, and also the plan to copy images to hard drives to give to tribal representatives; work with the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition to aggregate metadata for documents related to boarding schools across the United States. There are also convenings of community advisors, plans to record interviews and speak with members of Indigenous communities about how to archive their own digital and analog materials, and ongoing conversations about reconciliation, acknowledgement, repatriation, and sovereignty.

This is only one small example of an ecosystem aspiring to sociopoetic, recursive modes of preservation. A wide range of postcustodial, participatory, and community-oriented approaches to archival work have started to put pressure on the idea of preservation itself, and the scope and imagination of what is being preserved. Preservation becomes an act of creation, both technological and social, a connection-building practice that considers all the many valences of sustainability, including minimal preservation and no preservation at all. “At a time of so much doom and gloom about the state of digital preservation,” Laura Morreale has written, “it might be helpful to step back and ask why the loss of digital material is considered such a catastrophe.”37 “Knowing how to stop doing things is an important skill to learn,” developer-librarian Matt Miller writes in a discussion of what he calls “repotting” digital projects. He concludes:

I have one bonus example, something I really think of sunsetting, rather than repotting. . . . I made a site as a class project in graduate school to explore the possibilities of embedded metadata in digital assets. I had to evaluate the effort in repotting this tool or not. It could not be made into a static site because it is not a content site, you upload a digital asset and it will inform you of the embedded metadata present. I could possibly Dockerize it but it requires a special PHP module that was difficult to get working almost a decade ago, the thought of trying to get it functional today, even with Docker sounded extravagant. So I said farewell little website, you had a good run, someone even used it to write an academic paper but you can’t do everything and this is something that can be let go. I made sure to make some videos of the site, do a webcapture of it, put all the source code on Github and redirected the domain to a page with all this information.

It’s sad to turn off something you spent time building but you also get the satisfaction of not having to think about it ever again. And maybe that little room that is freed up in your brain is the space needed to make it to the next thing.38

The STSR modules define a “state of graceful degradation,” one example of an approach a project might take in its “Retirement” phase, as “defined by its utterly minimal interventions and accepting partial failures of the total system in due course.”39 Something about this formulation, perhaps the touch of drama added by the “utterly,” seems to speak to the many kinds of emotional investment in a project, whether they manifest as fondness for it or relief at the prospect of being able to walk away from it (or both). The almost cosmic determinism of “in due course” also introduces a temporality that is not purely agent-driven, an acknowledgement of the way in which obsolescence proceeds as a function of the broader worlds of technology, links among digital resources, and communities of use and practice.

“The Preparations Have Every One Been Justified”: Futures of Digital Editing

“To think the thought of death merged in the thought of materials,” as Whitman puts it in the poem “To Think of Time”40—a poem that persisted, evolving, through all the editions of Leaves of Grass. He introduced a version of this line in the 1872 edition, where the poem appears as part of the section “Passage to India.” House-building often becomes a figure for him, and here in this section of “To Think of Time” the speaker casts the passage of time and mortality against the building of houses (and possibly coffins, and possibly other things too):

But it is the thought of death that this poem is about, merged with the thought of materials—the poet observes the builders, but builds only the lines of the poem himself, one step removed from both the materials and the mortality.42 And perhaps this is somewhere else the merge and the keeping can happen, here in the surreal space-time of poetry. The metaphor bridges two deeply human activities (building and dying) and looks for meaning in them, meaning shaped by the framing activity of the poem: “to think of time.”

Preservation and editing both could be described in this way: to think the thought of death, merged in the thought of materials. Digital objects can seem immaterial, and deceptively so, as Matthew Kirschenbaum has pointed out.43 The bitstream persists on material substrates, whatever the forms of transformation and mediation between those and the web page displaying on your computer screen, the interface that has shaped your explorations of poetry and your pursuits of understanding.

Preservation (or not, or how) is the unavoidable future of digital editing. The activities undertaken in pursuit of digital preservation sit, sometimes uncomfortably, between a set of established practices and an open-ended call continually to adapt, to include, to inquire, to desist. As Morreale points out, “in a cruel irony, even the digital preservation tools we create seem to become quickly obsolete.”44 (I see one building the house that serves him a few years . . .) More in certain ways than ever before, time is compressed—the end is always in sight—surreal time is upon us all, and it is demanding a reckoning and a reconciliation.

As the Whitman Archive is repotted again after almost thirty years, we might take the opportunity to think again of time, to think of building, to think of endings, to think of preservation. How do we work toward the sustainability of both a project and the imaginative and social and practical forces that fuel it? How might a project cultivate possibility for future transformations, for finding grace in its own endings, whatever those may look like, and its new beginnings? A digital edition is an investment not just in building and rebuilding but in keeping as care, in repair as return, in celebration and cooperation, in the willingness to work in moments. The preservation and maintenance of digital projects, like editing itself, is challenging and elegiac work, but somehow this seems like cause for joy as much as doom or despair, maybe because it necessitates a kind of thinking of time beyond the individual, outside possession and agency, past completeness and authoritativeness and perfection, that might serve us well as we move forward into the tumult of the twenty-first century.

Notes

1. 1. William Kilbride, “Saving the Bits: Digital Humanities Forever?,” in A New Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth (West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 415 (emphasis mine).

2. 2. Katrina Fenlon, “Sustaining Digital Humanities Collections: Challenges and Community-Centred Strategies,” Conference Pre-Print, International Journal of Digital Curation 15, no. 1 (2020), dx.doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v15i1.725.

3. 3. James Smithies et al., “Managing 100 Digital Humanities Projects: Digital Scholarship & Archiving in King’s Digital Lab,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 13, no. 1 (2019).

4. 4. See, e.g., Kilbride, “Saving the Bits”; Smithies et al., “Managing 100 Digital Humanities Projects”; Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, “Done: Finishing Projects in the Digital Humanities,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 3, no. 2 (2009) (and other essays in this cluster); Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 121–54; Julia Flanders and Trevor Muñoz, “An Introduction to Humanities Data Curation,” DH Curation Guide (2012); Elena Pierazzo, Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories, Models and Methods (Surrey: Ashgate, 2015), 169–91.

5. 5. I should note that these reflections draw on conversations well underway in recent archival scholarship and practice. Work on postcustodial, participatory, and community archiving has interrogated concepts of possession and access that have long informed ideas about the structure and function of archives, proposing instead more recursive, community-based and outward-facing reformulations. For recent examples, see the essays in the June 2019 special issue of Archival Science: “‘To go beyond’: Towards a Decolonial Archival Praxis,” ed. J. J. Ghaddar and Michelle Caswell. See also Katie Shilton and Ramesh Srinivasan, “Participatory Appraisal and Arrangement for Multicultural Archival Collections,” Archivaria 63 (Spring 2007): 87–101; F. Gerald Ham, “Archival Strategies for the Post-Custodial Era,” The American Archivist 44, no. 3 (1981): 207–16; Terry Cook, “Evidence, Memory, Identity, and Community: Four Shifting Archival Paradigms,” Archival Science 13 (2013): 95–120; and Verne Harris, “The Archival Sliver: Power, Memory, and Archives in South Africa,” Archival Science 2 (2002): 63–86.

6. 6. For a discussion of terms used to describe digital editorial and digitization projects, see Kenneth M. Price, “Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What’s in a Name?,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 3, no. 3 (2009). See also Pierazzo, Digital Scholarly Editing,193–201.

7. 7. Duke University ScholarWorks, “Project Planning: Transitions,” ScholarWorks, Duke University, accessed October 28, 2022, scholarworks.duke.edu/plan-and-build/project-planning/transitions/.

8. 8. “The Caribbean Digital VI,” December 6, 2019, Barnard College Digital Humanities Center, last modified 2019, caribbeandigitalnyc.net/2019/program/.

9. 9. “The Endings Project: Building Sustainable Digital Humanities Projects,” accessed August 31, 2022, https://endings.uvic.ca/index.html. The CDRH publishing system, which consists of three parts—Datura (a Ruby gem designed to manage and transform data), Apium (the CDRH’s API), and Orchid (a Rails engine that configures new Rails applications to draw from the API and synthesizes functionality across apps)—is loosely based on the discovery system created by Project Blacklight.

10. 10. Recognizing the significant engagement of what she calls “research communities” in DH resources, Fenlon has proposed that some of the work of sustainability might involve consciously thinking about the role of those communities, a kind of “community-centred sustainability” in keeping with archival discussions more broadly about community and participatory archiving (“Sustaining Digital Humanities Collections,” 9). Preservation efforts sometimes also involve creative leveraging of information networks both past and present, as a recent Whitman Archive grant proposal to reconstruct lost nineteenth-century newspaper issues from reprinted text suggests.

11. 11. Visual Media Workshop at the University of Pittsburgh, The Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap (STSR), accessed October 28, 2022, https://sites.haa.pitt.edu/sustainabilityroadmap/.

12. 12. STSR, “Welcome and Getting Started.”

13. 13. See the first line of the poem “This Compost,” originally titled “Poem of Wonder at The Resurrection of The Wheat”: “Something startles me where I thought I was safest” (Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass [Brooklyn, NY: Fowler & Wells, 1856], 202). What startles need not be limited to content: The STSR notes that user studies suggest, “the more varied, and sometimes unexpected, the audiences for digital projects are, the more sustainable they might become.”

14. 14. Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) 2022 chair, Luis Meneses, “Open Digital Collaborative Project Preservation in the Humanities,” June 7, 2022, accessed October 28, 2022, web.archive.org/web/20220607160251/https://dhsi.org/dhsi-2022-open-digital-collaborative-project-preservation-in-the-humanities/.

15. 15. Alan Galey, The Shakespearean Archive: Experiments in New Media from the Renaissance to Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

16. 16. See, for instance, “GPO Captures Moments in Time Through Web Archiving,” 2021, accessed October 28, 2022, https://www.gpo.gov/docs/default-source/news-content-pdf-files/2021/typeline_spring-2021_gpo-captures-moments-in-time.pdf.

17. 17. “DCC Curation Lifecycle Model,” Digital Curation Centre, accessed October 28, 2022, https://www.dcc.ac.uk/guidance/curation-lifecycle-model.

18. 18. Katherina Fostano and Laura K. Morreale, “The Digital Documentation Process,” The Digital Documentation Process, January 31, 2019, digitalhumanitiesddp.com/. Module A2 of The STSR advises users to retain project documentation in its discussion of the “retirement” phase of projects, even if the project opts for removal: “The future will be interested in your work.”

19. 19. “Preservation,” Fitzpatrick writes, “presents us with technical requirements but overwhelmingly social solutions” (Planned Obsolescence, 126).

20. 20. David Hansen, Liz Milewicz, Paolo Mangiafico, Will Shaw, Mattia Begali, and Veronica McGurrin, “Expansive Digital Publishing,” 2019, expansive.pubpub.org/pub/snb2tqyr/release/1. See also Christine Madsen and Megan Hurst, who describe research data produced in and by digital humanities projects as “more like a dictionary than ‘traditional’ research data,” suggesting its availability for multiple uses and a reliance on long-term updates that reshapes the data’s lifecycle (“Are Digital Humanities Projects Sustainable? A Proposed Service Model for a DH Infrastructure,” Coalition for Networked Information Membership Meeting, December 10, 2018, slideshare.net/mccarthymadsen/are-digital-humanities-projects-sustainable-a-proposed-service-model-for-a-dh-infrastructure.)

21. 21. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14.

22. 22. This point deserves a full stop emphasis. The Whitman Archive is very well funded and supported compared to many DH projects. One pressing question preservation poses is how scholars, preservationists, administrators, funding agencies, and users can help to make sure that well-funded projects affiliated with established DH centers and research institutions are not the only ones that are preserved, particularly when preservation assessment, planning, and action are so heavily resource-intensive and often emotionally charged.

23. 23. Fenlon, “Sustaining Digital Humanities Collections,” 6.

24. 24. Madsen and Hurst, “Are Digital Humanities Projects Sustainable?” See also Pierazzo for a discussion of how the use of standards and the separation of data from interface have emerged as key aspects of preservation strategy, despite the often significant role of the interface in interpreting and mediating the data for users (Digital Scholarly Editing, 171–79).

25. 25. From a (2008) Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access: “The need to make preservation decisions can arise as early as the time of the asset’s creation, particularly since studies to date indicate that the total cost of preserving materials can be reduced by steps taken early in the life of the asset” (quoted in Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence, 125). See also Kilbride, “Saving the Bits”; STSR, “Welcome and Getting Started”; Fostano and Morreale, “The Digital Documentation Process”; and Smithies et al., “Managing 100 Digital Humanities Projects.”

26. 26. Digital Preservation Coalition, Digital Preservation Handbook, 2nd ed., dpconline.org/handbook.

27. 27. Nicole Gray, “Introduction to the 1855 Leaves of Grass Variorum,” The Walt Whitman Archive, ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, and Kenneth M. Price, 2020, whitmanarchive.org/item/anc.02135.

28. 28. For photographs of the covers of the editions of Leaves of Grass, see Ed Folsom, Whitman Making Books/Books Making Whitman: A Catalog and Commentary, Iowa City, IA: Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, University of Iowa, 2005; for the colors of early versions of the Walt Whitman Archive, see “Earlier Versions of the Archive,” The Walt Whitman Archive, accessed October 28, 2022, https://whitmanarchive.org/about/earlier.html.

29. 29. Thomas M. Tryniski, Old Fulton New York Post Cards, last modified 2018, fultonhistory.com/. (An Internet Archive web capture of this site is available at web.archive.org/web/20221209114147/http://www.fultonhistory.com/).

30. 30. “Preservation, n.,” OED Online, last modified December 2022, https://www-oed-com.libproxy.unl.edu/view/Entry/150719.

31. 31. “Keep, v.,” OED Online, last modified December 2022, https://www-oed-com.libproxy.unl.edu/view/Entry/102776; “keeping, n.,” OED Online, last modified September 2021, https://www-oed-com.libproxy.unl.edu/view/Entry/102785; “repair, v. 2,” OED Online, last modified December 2022, https://www-oed-com.libproxy.unl.edu/view/Entry/162631; “repair, v. 1,” OED Online, last modified December 2022, https://www-oed-com.libproxy.unl.edu/view/Entry/162630 (emphases mine).

32. 32. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 36.

33. 33. Harney and Moten, 19.

34. 34. Harney and Moten, 77.

35. 35. N. Katherine Hayles has proposed a “strategic definition of ‘virtuality’”: “Virtuality is the cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns” (How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999], 13–14).

36. 36. Susana D. Grajales Geliga, Margaret Jacobs, and Elizabeth Lorang, “Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project,” accessed October 28, 2022, genoaindianschool.org/.

37. 37. Laura Morreale, “Medieval Digital Humanities and The Rite of Spring: Thoughts on Performance and Preservation,” BodoArXiv, July 2019, 4, https://eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/id/eprint/1306/.

38. 38. Matt Miller, “Repotting Old Digital Humanities Projects,” January 31, 2020, https://thisismattmiller.com/post/repotting-old-digital-humanities-projects/.

39. 39. The idea of “graceful degradation” was an anchor of a 2009 survey project aiming to better understand the stages of DH projects; see Bethany Nowviskie and Dot Porter, “Graceful Degradation Survey Findings: How Do We Manage Digital Humanities Projects through Times of Transition and Decline?,” accessed October 28, 2022, nowviskie.org/Graceful_Degradation.pdf.

40. 40. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1891–1892), 333.

41. 41. Whitman, 334.

42. 42. Whitman revised toward “materials,” both in this section and at the end of the poem, where death changes to materials in 1872 and later.

43. 43. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008).

44. 44. Morreale, “Medieval Digital Humanities,” 3.