0.19 Civil war washington, the walt whitman archive, and some  (Page 4/12)

Recently, however, we’ve been devoting more thought to the ways that we can enhance intellectual access to Whitman, his writings, and the world he moved in, and we are assessing what new types of contextualization might mean for the infrastructure, usability, function, and the look and feel of the Archive , as well as for the distinctions between text, context, and commentary. One of the questions we have asked is: What would be the effects of prioritizing geography in the organization and analysis of his works? We would like to study and present Whitman as a city poet. He once said that Leaves of Grass “arose out of my life in Brooklyn and New York from 1838 to 1853, absorbing a million people, for fifteen years with an intimacy, an eagerness, an abandon, probably never equaled.” Quoted in David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Knopf, 1995), p. 83. A life-long city-dweller, his work also emerged out of New Orleans, Washington D.C., and Philadelphia/Camden. We would like for the Walt Whitman Archive to enable and promote place-based interpretations of his writing, across genre and across time, that have not been possible before. It would be useful to be able to study all of these areas with dynamic maps based on historic sources and containing details down to the level of individual buildings within blocks. When information from census records, health records, police reports and contemporary guides is coded onto period maps for these cities, different topics could be pursued about Whitman's writing and new discoveries would emerge. One could ask, for example: What portion of the more than one hundred hospitals that sprang up in Washington, D.C., during the Civil War did Whitman actually visit and in what parts of the city did his visits cluster? How did his visits to hospitals compare to those of Harriet Jacobs, Louisa May Alcott, Abraham Lincoln, and now little-known nurses such as Amanda Akin Stearns and Hannah Ropes? What was his circuit? What was the racial make-up of the various wards in which he lived and of the hospitals he visited? To consider such questions is to reexamine our scholarly methodology. In short, what happens—what is obscured and what is clarified—when tracing a writer's movements through time and space is afforded as much attention as tracing the textual variations in his or her texts? These questions are not the kind traditionally addressed by printed scholarly editions, but that may be because the print apparatus could not accommodate them. Certainly the data necessary to support these inquiries is no more tangential to studying Whitman than, say, a listing of line-end hyphens.

To speak to these questions, I have recently begun work on Civil War Washington , a collaborative project involving, among others, University of Nebraska-Lincoln historians Susan Lawrence and Kenneth Winkle. Many people have made important contributions to the project in its early stages. Those deserving special acknowledgment include Brett Barney, Stacey Berry, Karin Dalziel, Keith Nickum, Wesley Raabe, and Katherine Walter. For a full list of participants in the project, see (External Link) . This project has a direct relationship to the Whitman Archive and shares some data with it, but it can also stand alone as an independent project. For the purposes of this essay, I want to regard Civil War Washington as an edition akin to the topic or theme-based editions mentioned earlier. I recognize that “edition” is a problematic term in some ways for a project such as Civil War Washington ; “digital thematic research collection,” though it has its own difficulties, may be a more accurate term. For a longer meditation on the problem of naming the work done in this type of digital scholarship, see my “Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What’s in a Name,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 3, no. 3 (Summer 2009), available at (External Link) This project began in 2006, more than a decade after the founding of the Whitman Archive, and it remains in an early stage of development. Civil War Washington brings together more disciplines than the Whitman Archive , and it approaches content and context from different historical, institutional, and methodological perspectives. The differences between the two projects reflect some trends in humanities scholarship over the decade that separated their founding. Civil War Washington draws on the methods of many fields—history, literary studies, geography, urban studies, computer-aided mapping—as it creates experimental digital scholarship. We believe the site will ultimately provide insights into the large and complex forces that transformed Washington from a sleepy Southern town to the symbolic center of the Union and nation. Actually, the city was conceived as a symbolic center from the start in the 1780s, but the federal government was too weak to impose a unifying order, so it developed more haphazardly, according to economic and private forces—leading to a train station in the mall, for example. The Civil War gave Lincoln the opportunity (and need) to expand the federal government's actual and symbolic power. The identity of Washington was in many ways created by the War, and the developing city shaped how the divided country understood itself and the conflict. With the rest of the nation, Washington and its people responded in dramatic and distinctive ways to the four years of war. Initially all but undefended, Washington became the most fortified city in the world. Its population tripled as troops, fugitive slaves, bureaucrats, prostitutes, actors, authors, doctors, laborers and others were drawn to the capital by a sense of duty, desperation, or adventure. Rapid construction permanently transformed the city. Military installations, government buildings, hospitals, transportation routes, and all of the other structures required by a national capital at war started to fill in the spaces so grandly laid out in L’Enfant’s 1791 plan for a utopian urban metropolis. For the first time, Washington became an important literary site as well, with publishing houses, a thriving newspaper business, and notable writers living in or passing through the city (among them were Whitman, Lincoln, the naturalist John Burroughs and the remarkable African American literary and cultural figures Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Jacobs).