The Walt Whitman Project

Ed Folsom
F. Wendell Miller Distinguished Professor of English
University of Iowa

The Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive is a groundbreaking collaboration between Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price, two preeminent Whitman scholars, who have found an ideal medium for enhancing research and understanding an artist whom Folsom describes as "a poet given to compulsive self-revision." Whitman's work "is better understood in terms of process rather than product, fluidity rather than stability"--a style accommodated, according to Folsom, far better by hypertext than by traditionally static printed texts.

While there is nothing new about hypertext or the digitization of classic texts made available through the World Wide Web, the digital projects led by Folsom and Price are unique in the quality and quantity of the facsimile images they offer and the comfort the author/editors seem to feel within the three-dimensional environment of the Web. Many similar Web sites have come online with a smattering of texts and small, overly compressed images which provide little more than a teasing glimpse of an artist or topic. Folsom and Price have given us an opportunity to view facsimiles of manuscripts detailed enough to see fingerprint smudges left behind where Whitman must have brushed through ink splattered on a scratched out word. Folsom and Price aim for nothing less than a comprehensive offering of texts, including all versions of Leaves of Grass and all the reviews of Whitman's work published during his lifetime.

The Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive http://www.whitmanproject.org/ takes advantage of the endless extensibility of the World Wide Web and can easily accommodate previously unknown texts as they surface, and other scholars can join in, linking and integrating additional texts and commentary. Folsom states that the Archive "has the great advantage of being able to distribute, in digital form, large amounts of material at low cost and thus to make rare Whitman items -- once restricted to those able to undertake expensive travel -- available to a broad audience."

The Archive team, Folsom, Price and Webmaster Charles Green, have carefully thought through the structural problems and opportunities of hypertext and navigation through a Webbed set of documents. Folsom characterizes the Web site as an "environment É built to experiment with certain ideas about hypermedia design and to provide a method of testing those ideas through their actual application." The form and structure of hypertext are particularly appropriate and useful for studying Whitman. "We finally have a technology that can capture Whitman's incessant alterations of his poetry," Folsom says. "Archives are filled with copies of his printed texts on which he has added handwritten alterations. Working through these documents becomes an exercise in hypertext. You see a poem changing, word by word, line by line, edition by edition."

The allure of the digital realm has not diverted Folsom from traditional academic publication. The revised and expanded book that he co-edited with Jim Perlman and Dan Campton, Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song won an Independent Publisher Book Award in 1999. He also had essays in American Literature, Philological Quarterly, Studies in the American Renaissance, Etudes Anglaises, Resources in American Literary Studies, etc. and essays in A Historical Guide to Walt Whitman (Oxford UP, 2000), Recovering the Prairie (Wisconsin, 1999), and Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia (Garland, 1998).

The Major Authors on CD-ROM: Walt Whitman was named an "Outstanding Academic Book" for 1998 by Choice, the review journal for major research and academic libraries. This was the third time one of Folsom's publications was honored with an OAB by the American Library Association. The disc contains the entire 22 volumes of Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, facsimiles of various editions of Leaves of Grass, the reviews, more than 800 facsimiles of notebooks, daybooks, diaries and other manuscripts, and more than 100 photographs of Whitman. Folsom and Price annotate with extensive critical and editorial comment. Unlike paper-based editions, the CD-ROM is fully searchable. Early drafts can be instantly displayed alongside later drafts or final publications. The Library Journal joined Choice in giving this CD-ROM its highest recommendation and noted that "it serves serious literature scholars well." But CD-ROMs, like their paper forebears, have come to seem limited and static.

The Walt Whitman Project was funded from 1991-1994 by a National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Grant, by a CIFRE grant in 1998, and by an Arts & Humanities Initiative Grant in 1999. Beginning in the summer of 2000, the project will be supported by another three-year grant from the NEH. Folsom has also been working with Price on a four-year grant from the Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE) focusing on pedagogical applications of the Whitman Hypertext Archive and the Emily Dickinson Electronic Archives. The project is affiliated with the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities.

"For the first time in the history of scholarship, a researcher can study simultaneously the notebook version of a Whitman poem, an early draft of it, its first and subsequent appearances in print, and its final published form. . . . All of this can be done without traveling to several different libraries over an extended period of time. . . . This CD-ROM offers the serious student and scholar access to the historical Whitman and makes possible new interpretations and fresh understanding of his work and of his place in 19th-century America. Highly recommended for graduate and research collections." (Choice, June 1998)

"Another excellent title in a series [Major Authors on CD-ROM] that serves serious literature scholars well." (Library Journal, April 15, 1998)

"The site . . . serves as an invaluable one-stop resource for researchers who want to compare handwritten and printed versions of Whitman's works. ...'Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of the poems?' Whitman once asked. In hypertext, the better question may be, Have you ever had so much fun in the process?" (The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 3, 1998)