{"id":4575,"date":"2015-10-26T21:25:41","date_gmt":"2015-10-26T21:25:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/drp\/?p=4441"},"modified":"2015-10-26T21:25:41","modified_gmt":"2015-10-26T21:25:41","slug":"dh-salon-recap-the-walt-whitman-archives-pre-leaves-of-grass-fiction-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/combo\/2015\/10\/26\/dh-salon-recap-the-walt-whitman-archives-pre-leaves-of-grass-fiction-project\/","title":{"rendered":"DH Salon Recap: The Walt Whitman Archive\u2019s pre-Leaves of Grass Fiction Project"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Friday, Oct. 23rd<\/sup>, the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio hosted the fourth DH Salon of the semester. I was very glad to welcome an\u00a0enthusiastic group of faculty, staff, and graduate students to the Studio for my presentation, \u201cFrom Periodical Page to Digital Edition: The Walt Whitman Archive<\/em>\u2019s pre-Leaves of Grass<\/em>\u00a0Fiction Project.\u201d The goal of this project, which is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, is to make Walt Whitman\u2019s early fiction easily and freely accessible on The Walt Whitman Archive<\/a>.<\/em> For this project, my co-editor Nicole Gray (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) and I have been working to create a digital edition of Whitman\u2019s fiction.<\/p>\n

Most people know Walt Whitman as America\u2019s poet and the author of\u00a0Leaves of Grass, <\/em>a volume of poetry first published in 1855.<\/em>\u00a0But when the poet was in his 20s, he wrote a temperance novel\u00a0Franklin Evans; or, the Inebriate. A Tale of the Times<\/a><\/em>\u00a0and about 25 pieces of short fiction, all of which were first published in nineteenth-century newspapers and magazines.<\/p>\n

The holdings of the University of Iowa Special Collections include several periodicals that published Whitman\u2019s fiction. I collaborated with Special Collections Librarians to create an exhibit of these items to accompany my talk. Audience members were able to see Whitman\u2019s temperance novel and his first short story in the periodicals. I discussed some of the major editorial decisions, as well as the process of text encoding that lead to the production and publication of the digital edition.<\/p>\n

Audience members explored the digital edition of Whitman\u2019s novel and got a preview of the short fiction that is still being edited for publication on the\u00a0Archive <\/em>in the summer of 2016. They were also able to interact with two of the\u00a0Archive<\/em>\u2019s newest features, a bibliography<\/a> of the printings and reprints of Whitman\u2019s fiction and a map<\/a> charting the circulation of the stories across the United States and around the world. These elements of the digital edition are based, in part, on five years of my research, which has revealed several new discoveries, including approximately 350 previously unknown reprints of Whitman\u2019s short fiction in newspapers and magazines and the earliest known printing of at least one of Whitman\u2019s stories.<\/p>\n

The question and answer session following my talk was an incredibly valuable experience. My colleagues asked thoughtful questions and generously offered suggestions for future work on the project such as adding a time slider to the Whitman Archive<\/em>\u2019s current map of the printings and reprints of the fiction and using network analysis and data visualization to further examine the circulation of Whitman\u2019s fiction and its relationship to his early journalism.\u00a0\u00a0I am grateful for this feedback on our digital edition, and I am excited to continue exploring the publication history and circulation of Whitman\u2019s fiction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Friday, Oct. 23rd, the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio hosted the fourth DH Salon of the semester. I was very glad to welcome an enthusiastic group of faculty, staff, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":184,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4575"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/184"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4575"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4575\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4583,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4575\/revisions\/4583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}