In the mid-1990s, Ed Folsom, a professor of English at the University of Iowa, and another scholar, Kenneth M. Price, set out to create a digital scholarly edition of Walt Whitman’s works. The Walt Whitman Archive began life as a CD-ROM. Now housed at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, where Mr. Price teaches, the archive contains thousands of digital facsimiles of Whitman’s poetry and letters as well as writings about Whitman, and it’s constantly growing. It averages more than 20,000 visits a day from scholars, students, and Whitmaniacs everywhere. Money to keep the archive afloat comes from the co-directors’ home institutions and a series of grants, and an endowment is in the works.

The Chronicle asked Mr. Folsom to chat about how the archive has evolved and where it’s headed. This is the first in an occasional series of conversations about digital archives.

Q. How far have you gotten toward your original goal?

A. In one sense, we’re further along than I ever expected, but in another (more important) sense, we have a long, long way to go. We now have a wonderful scholarly edition of the various editions of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and we’re the only place scholars and students can go to examine the various editions side by side in facsimile, so that users can study not only Whitman’s textual changes from edition to edition, but his bookmaking changes as well—changes in typeface, page design and layout, placement of titles, and so on. We have been focusing in recent years on getting the thousands of Whitman’s poetry manuscripts—which have never been edited before and are unavailable in any print version—available in excellent facsimiles and reliable transcriptions.

Q. What’s left to add?

A. That’s the big question. The nature of digital work in the humanities is such that “conclusion” soon becomes an irrelevant or laughable concern. The very nature of digital projects is openness, not closure. The further we go on this project, the more we discover we have to do. In dealing with Whitman’s massive correspondence, for example, we quickly discovered that the old conception of what constitutes a writer’s correspondence—the letters he wrote—is an outmoded conception when we’re working in a digital instead of a print environment. Why not, for example, include the letters that were written TO Whitman as well as the letters he wrote? … Print environments are restricted because of space and costs, but digital environments can grow and grow.

Q. How much longer will it take?

A. Originally, Ken and I thought we’d spend five years or so on the project, but within a couple of years it became clear we had embarked on a career-long project that would in fact far exceed our own careers. Unlike a massive print project, which has to look toward a final publication date, digital humanities projects face no final publication date: every day is a publication date, as new material is added. … Our most severe critics turn out to be our best collaborators, since pointing out errors or omissions becomes a truly constructive thing to do in a digital environment.

Q. How has the work changed since the archive was created?

A. Originally we conceived the Whitman Archive as something that would be used primarily by scholars as a research tool. … We quickly discovered that many of our users were not scholars, but instead students at all levels, from junior high school through graduate school, as well as people from around the world who just loved Whitman’s work. … We have thousands of users in countries around the world—from Asia to Europe to South America—and many of those users have been requesting translations of Whitman’s work into multiple languages. There’s a long history of Whitman translations, and we’re now embarking on a huge translation section of the archive, where eventually we will offer a kind of history of Whitman’s translation into and reception in cultures around the world. … So we are recruiting editors to oversee the various language groups. This in itself is a career-long project for a large group of scholars.

Q. What are you proudest of? What would you do differently, if you could?

A. I’m proud to be part of team of scholars who are truly collaborative. I think one of the real strengths of digital humanities is that it creates teamwork in a field where isolated individual scholarship has long been the norm. We have a large and growing team of editors at the Whitman Archive, and I find the close collaboration—among scholars, between faculty and graduate students who work on the archive, between scholars and technical staff—to be exhilarating, a new model for how work can get done in the humanities. I don’t know that I would do anything differently, since the digital world is such a malleable space to work in, where anything you’d like to do differently, you can, in fact, figure out a way to DO!

Q. What advice would you give someone who wanted to start a digital archive?

A. Hook up right from the start with an outstanding center for digital humanities. … Ken Price and I began this project with no expertise in digital environments whatsoever. We had the good fortune to be taken in by the University of Virginia Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. … If you get off track early, it is very difficult to adjust later, but a good digital humanities center will help you avoid mistakes and make sure you are building a viable project that can grow and develop effectively. … I think eventually most universities will develop digital humanities centers, but many universities have already fallen far behind the game, and scholars who work in such places need to contact established centers to seek guidance and support.

Q. What will the archives of the future look like — 10 years, 20 years, 50 years from now?

A. I’ve given up predicting digital futures, since no one could have imagined 10 years ago what the digital environment would turn out to be today. The archives of the future will be larger, vaster, more interconnected, more powerful, easier to navigate. Every day on the Whitman Archive, we have the strong sense that we’re creating our future, hazy as it may at times seem. —Jennifer Howard

Categories: Archive-Watch