NEH awards 'We the People' grant to UNL Whitman project

The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded a $500,000 "We the People Challenge Grant" to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to support the Walt Whitman Archive.

Kenneth Price, Hillegass Chair of 19th Century American Literature and professor of English at UNL and co-director of the Whitman Archive, is principal investigator on the challenge grant.

"We the People" is an NEH initiative launched in 2002 to explore significant events and themes in the United States' history, and to share these lessons with all Americans. The "We the People" project emphasizes information about the founding of the United States and exploring principles of democracy. Previous grants have frequently emphasized the Revolutionary War period, Price said.

Price said that past "We the People" grant projects often have gone toward support of institutions such as libraries, museums and other "bricks and mortar" projects. He believes the Whitman Archive is the first American literary project to receive an NEH challenge grant.

"My goal was to argue successfully that Walt Whitman is a fundamental and foundational figure in American history and literature," Price said. "He is the poet of democracy. He articulates fundamental American principles. He speaks to and about a diverse culture."

The Whitman Archive is an electronic research and teaching tool that makes Whitman's huge body of work easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers. Whitman amassed a huge volume of work during his life. Some 70,000 manuscripts are housed in about 80 locations, although the bulk is known to be in just five libraries. But the logistics of finding these various documents, let alone assessing and comparing their relevance and content, are daunting. The Archive allows scholars to search the entire body of Whitman's writings and scholarship on those works.

The beauty of the Archive, Price said, is that it is not a slice of scholarship frozen in time. As new materials are found they can be added to the Archive, enriching the scholarship. "This material can be integrated seamlessly into our work," Price said.

Additions and improvements are important because future scholars will have different research interests than current researchers, Price said. "The intellectual questions being asked now are not what people will be asking 30 years from now because the focus changes for each generation of scholars."

The Archive has been on the leading edge of digital research, Price said. It has been built in accordance with international standards for electronic texts, which allows the Whitman Archive to be searched and compared to similarly developed archives.

"We can interact with works by other authors," he said. "This can't be done unless you adhere to standards. Books have been around since Gutenberg, but electronic texts are still in their infancy. We are keeping abreast of changes in a rapidly advancing technical environment."

Electronic archives can also contain a richer volume of materials than a print edition, Price said. Sound, movies, images of manuscripts with hand-written notations, artwork and explanations can be added to the archive. The Whitman Archive is unique, Price said, because of the great fit between Whitman's work and the electronic medium.

"Whitman was an endless and obsessive reviser who never believed that a poem was finished," Price said. "The static quality of print can't do justice to the fluidity of his writing." For example, Whitman extensively rewrote his masterwork Leaves of Grass, Price said. There are six published versions and multiple manuscripts and notebook versions with annotations and changes.

"That could throw one into despair," Price said. "But because of the special strengths of computers you can handle massive amounts of information quite speedily."

In addition to Price, others working on the archive are: Brett Barney, research assistant professor, UNL Libraries; Susan Belasco, professor of English, UNL; Matt Cohen, assistant professor of English, Duke University; Ed Folsom, co-director of the Whitman Archive and Carver Professor, University of Iowa; Ted Genoways, general faculty and editor, University of Virginia; Andy Jewell, assistant professor of digital projects, UNL Libraries; and Katherine L. Walter, chair of the UNL Libraries' Digital Initiatives and Special Collections and co-director of UNL's Center for Digital Research in the Humanities.

The grant requires a 3-to-1 match on the part of the university. That means that the university must raise in the next several years at least $1.5 million from external sources in order to fully realize the $500,000. If successful, the entire $2 million would form an endowed fund within the University of Nebraska Foundation and the annual interest income would provide the bulk of the archive's annual permanent operating budget. Currently the Archive relies on a patchwork of grants and other monies. The endowment would ensure the archive's permanent existence.

Contact: Kenneth Price, English, co-director of Whitman Archive, (402) 472-0293