More than just football fans are looking forward to the Big Ten.
When the University of Nebraska-Lincoln joins the conference next year, it also will join an academic network that is expected to strengthen the effort to construct a massive digital archive of the works of 19th-century American poet Walt Whitman.
Kenneth Price, a UNL English professor, and Ed Folsom, an English professor at the University of Iowa, began working together in 1995 to gather and publish Whitman's manuscripts, notebooks, letters and essays. The two started the project before Price's move to UNL from the College of William and Mary in Virginia in 2000.
“We're a couple of the leading (Whitman) scholars,” Price said. “You wouldn't want to take on a project like this unless you felt you had the qualifications to do it.”
Their other common interest was digital humanities, a relatively new focus on digitizing academic works and scholarly journals. This not only makes information more accessible to an international audience, but also can enhance it by linking to photographs, videos and other articles.
UNL's Center for Digital Research in the Humanities houses the Whitman archive.
Once UNL is part of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, the shared network involving Big Ten schools and the University of Chicago, UNL can join the Hathi Trust, a digital collection of more than 6 million volumes from libraries at universities across the country.
That would expose the Whitman Archive to a wider audience and “hopefully it would give it a higher visibility and higher use,” said Kim Armstrong, deputy director of the Center for Library Initiatives, an office within the network.
Folsom said UNL's digital research center, a joint initiative of UNL Libraries and the College of Arts and Sciences, “will bring the most developed digital humanities center to the CIC.”
In return, UNL's membership in the network could draw more scholars in the pool — now 20 — working on the Whitman Archive. Collaborations are strong among network institutions, giving Price and Folsom more access to professors and graduate students with expertise on Whitman or valuable technical skills.
“Any time you're doing interdisciplinary work, you bring a lot more minds to bear on a problem,” said Katherine Walter, co-director of the digital research center.
When Price and Folsom started the Whitman project 15 years ago, Folsom said, they thought they'd finish in about five years and move on. But as the work progressed, “we realized this was a project that would go beyond our careers,” Folsom said.
Whitman left a vast amount of written material. His major work, “Leaves of Grass,” has six different editions.
In April, Price and Folsom announced the digital archive's addition of more than 600 Civil War letters, some never published before. For the first time, both sides — outgoing and incoming — of Whitman's correspondence are presented together, and the letters are annotated, linked and searchable.
Thousands of people from all over the world visit www.whitmanarchive.org each day — and not just professors and grad students.
“We found that we have readers of all ages and readers outside of academia and readers who are just Whitman fans and love reading Whitman,” Folsom said.
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