About Author: sblalock

Posts by sblalock

Announcing “A Rich Revelation”: Zachary Turpin Discovers Lost Novella by Walt Whitman

– February 20, 2017

Zachary Turpin, a PhD candidate in English at the University of Houston (who made international headlines in April 2016 with his discovery of a previously unknown journalistic series by the poet Walt Whitman entitled “Manly Health and Training”) has made another major find: a long-lost, secret novella, also authored by Whitman, entitled Life and Adventures of Jack Engle: an Auto-Biography (A Story of New York at the Present Time). Totaling about 36,000 words, Jack Engle, was published anonymously as a work of serial fiction in six installments in 1852 in the New York Sunday Dispatch, a weekly newspaper edited by Amor J. Williamson and William Burns that regularly published works of serial fiction. Turpin’s incredible find means that Jack Engle, a novella that Whitman never talked about and that no one knew he had written, can now be republished for the first time since 1852 and confidently attributed to Whitman for the first time ever. In the current issue of the online, open access Walt Whitman Quarterly Review (WWQR), Editor Ed Folsom and Managing Editor Stefan Schöberlein have published Jack Engle in full, and the 150-page journal issue also includes an essential and substantial scholarly introduction by Turpin. The University of Iowa Press collaborated with Turpin and the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review to publish a print edition of Jack Engle, including an introduction by Turpin. Hardback and paperback copies of the novel are now available for purchase on the University of Iowa Press website.

The Masthead of the New York Sunday Dispatch. Whitman’s Life and Adventures of Jack Engle was serialized in the weekly newspaper from March 14 to April 18, 1852. Image Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Although the publication of Jack Engle today will certainly receive national and international media attention, its appearance in 1852 was barely advertised, and, as far as we know, there were no reviews of the novella and no other responses from newspaper readers. On March 13, 1852, the day before Jack Engle began its run in the Dispatch, a brief and unremarkable literary notice for the novella was published in three New York newspapers: the Tribune, the Herald, and the Daily Times. The notice promised readers that the following day, the Dispatch would begin publishing the Life and Adventures of Jack Engle, an Auto-Biography, a novella praised in the notice as “A Rich Revelation,” that would deal with “the Philosophy, Philanthropy, Pauperism, Law, Crime, Love, Matrimony, Morals, &c., which are characteristic of this great city at the present time.”

Newspaper notice for Jack Engle, which was published in the Tribune, the Herald, and the Daily Times on March 13, 1852. Image Courtesy of ProQuest and the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review.

This new work of fiction would be printed over the next month from March 14 to April 18, 1852, with a few chapters appearing each week. As Turpin points out in his beautifully written and informative introduction, the novella ran without a byline, and there were no additional advertisements or notices. This is especially striking because Whitman had been a successful fiction writer throughout much of the 1840s. In fact, by 1852 he had published at least 26 short stories, and several of them had appeared in the Democratic Review, one of the era’s most prestigious magazines. He had also written a temperance novel, Franklin Evans, or the Inebriate, a Tale of the Times that had sold 20,000 copies–more than anything else Whitman would publish in his lifetime, including Leaves of Grass. It was only later that Whitman, then known primarily as a novelist and popular fiction writer, would become one of the nation’s favorite poets, and it took nearly 165 years after the original publication of Jack Engle for Turpin to discover the novella and prove conclusively that Whitman authored it.

Jack Engle, which Turpin describes as “a story of coincidence, adventure, and the incompatibility of love and greed” stands as a historic and incredibly important new find. According to University of Iowa Professor and Walt Whitman expert Ed Folsom, Jack Engle is a “momentous” find that “makes us rethink everything we thought we knew about Whitman’s fiction.” After all, it has long been believed that Whitman’s fiction career spanned only seven years–from the publication of his first short story “Death in the School-Room” in the Democratic Review in August 1841 until the printing of “The Shadow and the Light of a Young Man’s Soul” in the Union Magazine in June 1848. After this, Whitman was thought to have given up fiction writing for good and turned to composing poems–a puzzling career move given the success and widespread circulation of his earlier fiction. The publication of “Jack Engle” in 1852 offers evidence that Whitman did not make such a definitive transition from writing short stories to crafting poems with long, prose-like lines. Instead, he continued writing fiction at least into the early 1850s, which nearly coincides with the time he began working on the poems that would later appear in the first edition of Leaves of Grass, published in 1855. As Turpin puts it in his introduction, “Whitman did not give up but began again,” seemingly returning to novel-writing, while also drafting plot outlines and prose fragments. Because of Jack Engle, therefore, instead of seeing Whitman as a fiction writer abruptly shifting to poetry, scholars and readers alike must now imagine him as a writer of poetry and fiction for newspapers and magazines who was not yet sure what shape Leaves of Grass or even the next few years of his writing career would or should take.

Whitman has not traditionally been praised among scholars for his fiction writing ability. Thomas Brasher, editor of The Early Poems and the Fiction, a volume of the Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, said of the early stories that “Whitman had no talent for fiction,” while Emory Holloway, an early Whitman biographer, wrote that many of the poet’s early and melodramatic stories “deserved to die in the age of sighs that gave them birth.” Jack Engle stands in sharp contrast to Whitman’s early fiction even though it clearly drew from some of that writing. As Turpin points out in his introduction, Jack Engle is “some of the better fiction Whitman produced.” The plot and characters in this novella were clearly composed and sketched by a more mature Whitman; he was a far more experienced writer of newspaper fiction by 1852 than he had been when he wrote his short stories a decade earlier. According to Turpin, Whitman drew on several genres of popular fiction while writing Jack Engle, including “sentimentalism, sensationalism, adventure fiction, [and] reform literature,” among other genres. To this list, I would add detective and mystery fiction, as well as epistolary fiction given the number of texts–ranging from letters and wills to gravestones and prison narratives–that advance the central plot. By drawing on all of these genres, Whitman creates a novella that Turpin has called “Dickens Light” and that might also be described as a tale of corruption, misogyny, class division, religion, romance, and male friendship.

The first chapter of Life and Adventures of Jack Engle, published in the Sunday Dispatch on March 14, 1852. Image Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Jack Engle follows the adventures of a young orphan in New York who is adopted by Ephraim Foster, a milkman and “purveyor of pork and sausage” near the Bowery and his wife Violet, a woman Whitman describes as having the “breadth of a good sized man” and no knowledge of “what are now called Women’s Rights.” Ephraim urges young Jack to pursue the study of law, which Jack undertakes largely for the sake of pleasing his adoptive father. Soon Jack finds himself employed by “Mr. Covert,” a corrupt and greedy lawyer who “had among the forms of his selfishness, some political ambition.” Covert is also the guardian of a young woman named Martha, and he is constantly scheming to cheat Martha and other beneficiaries out of the inheritance left for them by her imprisoned and dying father. When Jack and Martha meet, they realize they are actually old acquaintances; they become fast friends once again, and Jack longs to help the unhappy young woman. Can Jack and Martha thwart Covert’s attempts to steal her inheritance? Even more importantly, will they be able to keep Martha from falling victim to the lawyer’s sinister and “licentious passions”? Will the identity of Jack Engle’s parents and his family history ever be revealed? The answers to these key questions and many more can only be found by reading the novella in full. Along the way, readers will meet numerous other odd and eccentric characters, including a dancing girl, several individuals of the Quaker faith, some law clerks (one of whom doubles as a detective), a series of night watchmen policing the boundaries of the city, and a dog that, oddly enough, is also called “Jack.” In order to learn the fate of Jack Engle and Martha, readers must follow the action of the story as it moves from a sausage vendor’s shop to the law offices and from the dancing girl’s home to the boat docks under the cover of darkness. The tale’s numerous mysteries are finally resolved and, at the end, the characters can begin to look forward to the future rather than back on their respective pasts.

Even though the air of mystery, the humor, and the impressive cast of characters set Jack Engle apart from Whitman’s earlier fiction, it is hard not to see some similarities between it and his previous writings. Much like the novella’s protagonist Jack Engle, the main characters of Whitman’s short story “The Love of the Four Students” are studying law under the guidance of a lawyer. The character of Violet Foster, Jack’s adoptive mother, is actually taken from “The Fireman’s Dream,” an unfinished piece of fiction that Whitman published in 1844 in the New York Sunday Times and Noah’s Weekly Messenger. Only two chapters of “The Fireman’s Dream” were ever published,” but the description of Violet in Jack Engle is taken, nearly verbatim, from the characterization of Violet Boanes in the earlier work. As Turpin also points out, the villainous lawyer “Mr. Covert” shares his name with an earlier character, “Adam Covert,” another evil lawyer who is murdered as a result of his scheming in “Revenge and Requital,” a tale that was published in 1845, seven years before Jack Engle.

These connections to Whitman’s earlier fiction, combined with both the improved quality of the writing in Jack Engle and the previous success of Franklin Evans, make Whitman’s decision to publish the novella anonymously seem especially perplexing. It would have made sense, after all, for Whitman to attempt to capitalize on the sales figures of Franklin Evans by including his name in a byline with Jack Engle. At the same time, Whitman was not typically silent about the success of his fiction. He once bragged to the editor of the Boston Miscellany that his short stories had been reprinted frequently by newspapers and magazines all over the country, and he was right in his assessment of the widespread circulation of those stories. Even when Whitman attempted to distance himself from his novel and the short stories late in his life, he was particularly vocal in his dismissals of those early works. In 1882, Whitman wrote that he sincerely wished “all those crude and boyish pieces” of fiction he wrote in his youth would drop into “oblivion,” and in 1888 he reportedly referred to Franklin Evans as “damned rot.” But as far as we know he never mentioned Jack Engle at all. There is no known evidence that Whitman ever claimed it or disavowed it. He does not seem to have spoken about it–not even to his family or closest friends–and the only time he wrote about it might well have been the plot outline, including character names that he recorded in his schoolmaster notebook, the document that led Turpin to this amazing find.

A page from Walt Whitman’s schoolmaster notebook that outlines part of the plot of Jack Engle. Image Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Whitman’s silence on the subject of Jack Engle–save for the notes about the plot–certainly made Turpin’s work more challenging. But Turpin’s research methodology is worthy of note here because he was able to utilize and move between digital and archival (print) collections to make the find. While prose fragments are not necessarily unusual in Whitman Studies, long lists of plot events and the actions of individual characters are rare. Scholars have long been aware of the schoolmaster notebook and a plot outline that includes the name “Jack Engle,” among others from the novella. Turpin followed the sparse evidence from digitized images of the notebook pages to newspaper databases, where he encountered an announcement for the publication of a novella that promised to detail the life and adventures of “Jack Engle.” Turpin was able to confirm his discovery–matching the plot Whitman outlines to the events of the full novella–with the support of the English Department at the University of Houston and research assistance from the Library of Congress, which holds one of the only–if not the only–series of extant issues of the Sunday Dispatch that printed the installments of Jack Engle. In collaboration with the staff of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, Turpin then transcribed and edited the novella for the journal and for the University of Iowa Press’s newly released print edition. With an open access (free) digital edition and a print edition of Jack Engle now available for purchase, the novella will certainly have a new life as readers and fans of Whitman examine this secret, long-lost novella for the first time. The very existence of Jack Engle also suggests that there may be more works of fiction by Whitman waiting to be discovered, and it is my sincere hope that many more rich revelations about the novella and about all of Whitman’s fiction will soon follow.

Stephanie M. Blalock

Digital Humanities Librarian &

Associate Editor, Walt Whitman Archive

(http://www.whitmanarchive.org/)

University of Iowa Libraries

The Discovery of “Manly Health and Training”: Walt Whitman’s Long-Lost Guide to Getting the Body You’ve Always Wanted

sblalock

– April 29, 2016

An announcement for Walt Whitman’s “Manly Health and Training,” published in The New York Atlas on September 12, 1858. Image Courtesy of The American Antiquarian Society.

In the third open-access issue of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review (WWQR) Editor Ed Folsom and Managing Editor Stefan Schöberlein publish in full a newly discovered book-length work by the poet Walt Whitman entitled “Manly Health and Training.” Zachary Turpin, a PhD candidate in English at the University of Houston, recently discovered “Manly Health and Training,” a previously unknown thirteen-part journalistic series of 47,000 words that originally appeared in the New York Atlas in 1858. Turpin’s important find means that “Manly Health and Training” can now be republished and confidently attributed to Whitman for the first time since 1858. As Turpin points out in the detailed introduction that accompanies “Manly Health and Training” in WWQR, surviving issues of the Atlas are rare today, even on microfilm, and he used one of the few remaining reels containing the newspaper, currently held by the American Antiquarian Society, to find “Manly Health and Training.” The byline for each of the installments lists the author as “Mose Velsor of Brooklyn,” a pen name that Whitman was known to have used occasionally for newspaper articles, and some of the articles from the “Manly Health” series also correspond in subject matter and/or wording with selections from Whitman’s notes on health and the body.

“Manly Health and Training,” which Turpin describes as a long lost “guide to living healthily in America,” stands as a remarkably significant new find. The articles promise to help fill in substantial gaps in the poet’s biography and to change the way we understand Whitman’s writings from this period. “Manly Health and Training” ran in the Atlas beginning on September 12, 1858, and ending the day after Christmas, December 26, 1858. This is approximately two years after the publication of the second edition of Leaves of Grass (1856) by Fowler and Wells—a Brooklyn publishing firm known for their texts on phrenology and physiognomy—and two years before the much-expanded third edition of Leaves of Grass (1860) that saw the addition of the “Calamus” and “Enfans d’Adam” (“Children of Adam”) poems on homoerotic and heterosexual love, respectively. In addition to being published between these two volumes of Leaves of Grass, “Manly Health and Training” (1858) was printed at nearly the same time as Whitman is believed to have been working on a twelve-poem sequence about love between men that he titled “Live Oak, with Moss,” which would become the core of “Calamus.”

In order to create “Manly Love and Training,” according to Turpin, Whitman drew on a number of sources ranging from temperance periodicals to works on science and pseudoscience of the period. The series of articles are shaped by many identifiable aspects of nineteenth-century culture including such topics as phrenology, eugenics, male friendship, sports and sports figures, lecture and oratory, vegetarianism, and other social reform and self-help literature. The articles are remarkable, then, for their wide array of content, but they are equally surprising for what is largely absent: the topics of women’s bodies, health, and training. Such an absence, while perhaps not entirely unexpected, merits further investigation given that on September 16, 1888, Whitman told his friend Horace Traubel that women were among his “sturdiest defenders, upholders” and that Leaves of Grass was “essentially a woman’s book.”

The first installment of Walt Whitman’s “Manly Health and Training” on the front page of The New York Atlas on September 12, 1858. Image Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

Turpin’s discovery of Whitman’s “Manly Health and Training” will certainly shed new light on the poet’s activities in the years following the publication of the articles and leading up to and continuing through the Civil War. If, for example, Whitman advocated a training program that involved exercise and a healthy diet, then why did he choose to spend so much of his time in 1859 and the early 1860s at Pfaff’s, a New York beer cellar and popular American Bohemian hangout, known for its coffee, lager beer, and wine selection, as well as its substantial food offerings? How does Whitman’s interest in leading American men toward sound, muscular, and virile bodies change the way we view Whitman’s seeming need to volunteer in the hospitals of the Civil War, where he would have seen first-hand the devastating injuries—the gaping wounds—in those very bodies he was seeking to guide toward a state of “perfect health”? And what does Whitman’s insistence that the very act of reading is not a “half-sleep” but rather a “gymnast’s struggle” mean for us, as readers of his works, in light of “Manly Health and Training,” with its assessment of prize-fighting and advocacy of exercise?

With the publication of “Manly Health and Training” in WWQR, we can begin to answer these questions and, no doubt, to formulate many others. But Turpin’s find, 158 years after the original publication of Whitman’s articles, should also draw our attention to the fact that even when it comes to well-known authors like Whitman, much remains to be discovered. This is likely true, not just of Whitman, but of many other nineteenth-century writers when our research includes newspapers and magazines. Examining periodicals in print and digital forms, as well as archival research in general, has yielded significant finds in the field of Whitman Studies over the past several years. A new Whitman poem, as well as numerous reprints of his short fiction and reprints of his poetry in periodicals have come to light, and, recently, a letter Whitman wrote for a Civil War Soldier was discovered in the National Archives. Turpin’s find also serves to remind researchers that not all newspapers and magazines from the past are digitized, available, and easily searchable online. In fact, many periodicals are still available only on microfilm and/or in print form. The discoveries we make in the future, then, will depend a great deal on where we look and how we preserve and use archival material in all formats.

0061860BostonbyphotographStephenalonzoschoffcharles e feinberg collection library of congress whitmanarchive

Walt Whitman in 1860, Photographer: Stephen Alonzo Schoff, after an oil portrait by Charles W. Hine, Original Plate in the Charles E. Feinberg Collection, Library of Congress, Image Courtesy of The Walt Whitman Archive

Finally, the publication of “Manly Health and Training” in its entirety in the current WWQR is a noteworthy feat in itself. In October 2015, during open-access week, WWQR, a University of Iowa journal and the international journal of record in Whitman Studies, made the transition from a print journal to an online only, open-access publication with the help and support of the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio at the University of Iowa Libraries. This online format, as the editors of the journal make clear in their foreword to the issue, has made possible the publication in full of Whitman’s “Manly Health and Training.” In the journal’s previous print version, printing costs and page limits would have necessitated the careful selection of only a few excerpts from this previously unknown text. One of the many benefits of offering a scholarly journal as an online and open-access resource is that this digital format opens up a range of publishing options and formats not possible in print alone. As a result, the editors can share this newly discovered piece of the poet’s writing with an ever-growing international body of Whitman readers who access his writings via an internet connection. In the future, “Manly Health and Training” will also be available on the Walt Whitman Archive. If, as Whitman wrote in his advertisement for “Manly Health and Training,” he intended this text “for the People,” he almost certainly would have approved. It is my hope that all readers of “Manly Health and Training” will actively engage and even struggle with this piece as Whitman recommended, since it remains for us–the readers–to investigate how Whitman came to write this piece, to trace the origins of these ideas, and to determine how we, in coming to this text some 158 years after its first publication, might make use of it in our own time and in our own ways.

Stephanie M. Blalock

Digital Humanities Librarian &

Associate Editor, Walt Whitman Archive

University of Iowa Libraries

DH Salon Recap: “Whitman’s Letters—The Collaboration of the Walt Whitman Archive Correspondence team”

sblalock

– March 1, 2016

Letters Written by Walt Whitman, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries

On February 12, 2016, the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio hosted the second DH Salon event of the semester—a collaborative presentation highlighting the Walt Whitman Archive’s Correspondence project. Presenters included Ed Folsom (Roy J. Carver Professor of English and Co-Director, Walt Whitman Archive), Stephanie Blalock (Digital Humanities Librarian & Associate Editor, Walt Whitman Archive), Stefan Schoeberlein (Managing Editor, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review & Graduate Research Assistant, Walt Whitman Archive), Alex Ashland (Graduate Research Assistant, Walt Whitman Archive), and Ryan Furlong (Graduate Research Assistant, Walt Whitman Archive).

The presentation was accompanied by an exhibit featuring three letters written by Walt Whitman in the 1870s and 1880s. These letters are among the many books and Whitman-related items that are held by Special Collections at the University of Iowa Libraries.

During their presentation, the Whitman Archive Correspondence team shared the digital edition of Whitman’s incoming and outgoing correspondence that they are currently building and gave the audience a behind-the-scenes look at the faculty, staff and student collaborations that make this digital project possible. All of the Correspondence team members at Iowa had the opportunity to share their work and research with the audience. In keeping with the collaborative spirit of the DH Salon, this post, like the presentation itself, reveals the roles of each member of the Whitman Archive Correspondence project team and explains how we make Whitman’s letters available to Archive users.

Walt Whitman in Camden (1891), Photographer: Dr. William Reeder, Credit: Library of Congress, The Walt Whitman Archive

Stephanie Blalock

During our talk, I discussed my role as the current project manager for the Correspondence project and my efforts to write our grant proposals, design our workflows, and train our staff, including three graduate assistants here at the University of Iowa and an additional graduate research assistant at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I outlined the need for a digital edition of Whitman’s correspondence and the advantages our editions offers over earlier printed collections. I pointed out that our digital edition not only includes the outgoing and the incoming correspondence, but it is also integrated into the overall search functionality of the Whitman Archive. I also emphasized that our digital edition can easily accommodate newly discovered letters and that it is correctable; as a result, our users often become our collaborators by helping us to catch stray errors in transcription or by providing additional information on Whitman’s correspondents.

Stefan Schoeberlein

Percentage of Letters to and from Whitman (1860-1887)

For my part of the presentation, I gave a numerical overview of Whitman’s two-way correspondence and gave some examples of how the Correspondence team is beginning to explore the letters through data visualization and topic modeling. With over 3,775 letters encoded (and most of them already published on our website), we can see some interesting trends emerge from this body of text(s) when we analyze them.

Besides noting an increase of extant Whitman-letters from the 1860s to the 1880s, we also find the ratio of surviving letters to and from Whitman shift (from the former to the latter), allowing us to trace the poet’s rise to celebrity and, hence, the collectability of his letters. I also presented some numerical visualizations of the correspondence and showed that Whitman’s letters address topics ranging from the publication of his various editions of Leaves of Grass to his declining health in his final years. I emphasized that the vast amount of information now available to us and our users makes it clear to us that we–the Walt Whitman Archive and the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review–want to engage (and encourage others to engage) with the two-way correspondence not just as individual texts and exchanges but as data.

Alex Ashland

I outlined some of the major challenges of the Correspondence project that I have encountered during the two years I have spent working with the letters. One of the most challenging aspects of creating a digital edition of the two-way correspondence is that the Archive staff must edit letters by a variety of authors writing from a variety of backgrounds, all with differing degrees of competency and literacy. Whitman received letters from doctors, university professors, book editors and publishers, but also from insane asylum patients, wounded soldiers, and the occasional obsessed fans. As a result, things like author style, syntax, and overall legibility vary drastically from one writer to the next, and the team has to work together to ensure that in the process of editing, things like words, punctuation, and paragraph divisions, remain consistent with the written letter.

I also pointed out that despite these challenges the Whitman Archive thrives precisely because of the unique opportunities it affords archivists and users alike. Because the digital platform and the infrastructure around which it is built is so adaptive and open to immediate revisions, users are always encouraged to contact and interact with members of the Correspondence Project team. And while the various personnel at Iowa have developed a rigorous process of transcribing, encoding, and checking letters, the archive allows for a level of user interactivity that is rarely seen in other digital archives.

Letter Written by Walt Whitman, February 11, 1884, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries

Ryan Furlong

For my part of the presentation, I discussed the work I have done as a first-year graduate research assistant for the Walt Whitman Archive. My primary responsibilities have included transcribing, encoding, and verifying Walt Whitman’s incoming and outgoing correspondences for 1887 and 1888. I demonstrated how this three-step process ensures precise and legible transcriptions of manuscript images are displayed for Whitman Archive readers in a user-friendly format and how I work to include pertinent biographical information, annotations, references to other correspondences, as well as the actual content of the letter itself. Ultimately, I showed how my position as a transcriber and encoder serves as a critical first step in accurately recording the contents of Whitman’s (and others’) correspondences before other members of the Archive team process and review them for publication.

Ed Folsom

I reviewed the overall workflow for letters, starting with transcriptions and encoding and extending through first and second checks before coming to me for a final “blessing,” which often involves adding further annotations, clarifying information about correspondents, and correcting transcription errors and typos that have made it through the first checks. I emphasized how the “blessing” by one of the directors serves as the final confirmation of scholarly and editorial accuracy that we can stand behind and stake our reputations as Whitman scholars on. I commented on how there’s a long “workflow” that occurs before we begin the first transcribing work, and that’s the brainstorming at our annual Whitman Archive full staff meeting in Lincoln each summer, where we decide on which projects we want to focus on, strategize about grant applications, decide whether Iowa or UNL (or somewhere else) will take the lead, then work on a grant proposal, the preparation for which often involves the first real steps in the project (generating a list of letters, deciding how many we can promise to the granting agency, and so on).

Walt Whitman in Camden (1891), Photographer: Samuel Murray, Credit: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, The Walt Whitman Archive

What our presentation revealed, and what I would like to emphasize here is that the Whitman Archive correspondence project is growing in exciting new ways. We are expanding our research to include topic modeling and data visualization, and an undergraduate intern has recently joined our team. The Correspondence team would also like to become a site where graduate students enrolled in the Public Digital Humanities certificate can complete their Capstone experiences.

Finally, the Walt Whitman Archive, which turns twenty-one this year, is one of the oldest and most comprehensive digital projects in existence, and collaboration between faculty, staff, and students has been one of the keys to its success. As digital humanists often claim, the digital humanities is collaborative in theory and in practice. The Whitman Archive Correspondence project team is one of many living embodiments of that statement on our campus, as the creation of a digital edition of Whitman’s letters depends on the combined efforts of the faculty, staff, and students that were a part of the DH Salon presentation. The Correspondence team believes that when we do not collaborate and communicate with each other, the library, our institutional partners, and even our users, then the people that suffer most as a result of those actions are those who depend on our site for their research, teaching, and pleasure reading, as well as the graduate and undergraduate students we are supposed to be mentoring toward various career options. For us, these are the people that least deserve to bear those consequences. At the end of the day, the Correspondence team firmly believes that one of our greatest strengths is that we are a faculty, staff, and student collaboration.

Workshop Wrap-Up: An Introduction to TEI/XML

sblalock

– November 10, 2015

On Saturday, November 7, 2015, I taught an introductory TEI/XML workshop for fourteen attendees, including graduate students from several disciplines and staff members at the University of Iowa Libraries. The workshop was primarily dedicated to providing an overview of text encoding or adding code to a text in order to create a machine-readable version. Text encoding involves the use of XML (Extensible Markup Language) and TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) guidelines, which constitute a standard for describing the structure of a text in machine-readable form. In short, XML is the code one uses, and TEI is a set of guidelines for representing texts digitally. Text encoding is used for a range of projects; although, it is especially useful for the creation of digital editions. The Walt Whitman Archive, for example, uses text encoding to make online editions of Whitman’s poetry and fiction available, accessible, and searchable.

My workshop was designed for teams of students and staff to work together toward encoding a particular text. Workshop participants sat at author-themed tables and practiced encoding texts by Metta Fuller Victor, Langston Hughes, and John Steinbeck, among other authors. Each team was given a scenario in which the completion of a sample text encoding was the overall goal. This collaborative environment was designed to give participants the feel of working on a digital project as part of an interdisciplinary team. Each team was responsible for making editorial decisions with respect to their texts. They were encouraged to discuss what structural elements of the text to encode, how that encoding might be best accomplished for the purposes of their assigned project, and how their decisions might impact future uses of the digital texts they aimed to create.

Through these collaborative activities, workshop participants learned how to use TEI/XML to encode the major structural and presentational features of prose, poetry, and letters. At the end of the workshop, they completed a series of challenge activities that required them to use their newly acquired TEI/XML skills to answer questions, encode excerpts of texts, and validate their work to ensure that they were following basic encoding guidelines.

As a result of attending the workshop, I hope participants began to see that text encoding is based on a series of editorial decisions. For each individual project, these editorial decisions are often shaped by the skills and expertise of team members, the funding for a particular project, and the intended audience or use of an online text. Even though text encoding involves the use of XML, it remains a largely interpretive act. Each editorial decision made by a project team results in the creation of a particular kind of text or edition and shapes how these digital resources may be used by instructors, scholars, and readers.

DH Salon Recap: The Walt Whitman Archive’s pre-Leaves of Grass Fiction Project

sblalock

– October 26, 2015

On Friday, Oct. 23^rd, 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 graduate students to the Studio for my presentation, “From Periodical Page to Digital Edition: The Walt Whitman Archive’s pre-Leaves of Grass Fiction Project.” The goal of this project, which is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, is to make Walt Whitman’s early fiction easily and freely accessible on The Walt Whitman Archive. For this project, my co-editor Nicole Gray (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) and I have been working to create a digital edition of Whitman’s fiction.

Most people know Walt Whitman as America’s poet and the author of Leaves of Grass, a volume of poetry first published in 1855. But when the poet was in his 20s, he wrote a temperance novel Franklin Evans; or, the Inebriate. A Tale of the Times and about 25 pieces of short fiction, all of which were first published in nineteenth-century newspapers and magazines.

The holdings of the University of Iowa Special Collections include several periodicals that published Whitman’s 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’s 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.

Audience members explored the digital edition of Whitman’s novel and got a preview of the short fiction that is still being edited for publication on the Archive in the summer of 2016. They were also able to interact with two of the Archive’s newest features, a bibliography of the printings and reprints of Whitman’s fiction and a map 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’s short fiction in newspapers and magazines and the earliest known printing of at least one of Whitman’s stories.

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’s current map of the printings and reprints of the fiction and using network analysis and data visualization to further examine the circulation of Whitman’s fiction and its relationship to his early journalism. I am grateful for this feedback on our digital edition, and I am excited to continue exploring the publication history and circulation of Whitman’s fiction.

Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio

About Author: sblalock

Posts by sblalock

Announcing “A Rich Revelation”: Zachary Turpin Discovers Lost Novella by Walt Whitman

The Discovery of “Manly Health and Training”: Walt Whitman’s Long-Lost Guide to Getting the Body You’ve Always Wanted

DH Salon Recap: “Whitman’s Letters—The Collaboration of the Walt Whitman Archive Correspondence team”

Workshop Wrap-Up: An Introduction to TEI/XML

DH Salon Recap: The Walt Whitman Archive’s pre-Leaves of Grass Fiction Project

More Links

Archives

Subscribe

Categories