For a project such as Civil War Washington , whose broad conception could validate the pursuit of almost infinite amounts of data about innumerable lines of inquiry, distinguishing between content and context is a key editorial responsibility. Based on my experience with this project, it is a responsibility not quickly or easily met. Civil War Washington developed out of a conversation at the annual meeting of Whitman Archive staff and in discussion with UNL professor of history Kenneth Winkle in the summer of 2005. When the idea for the project was raised as a potential addition to the Whitman Archive , we discussed whether this kind of project could overwhelm the Archive . Would Civil War Washington fold into the Whitman Archive , and what resources would it take? The Whitman Archive staff recognized the value of interactive maps of all Whitman locales, though there was no unanimity of opinion on whether Civil War Washington should be a companion project of the Whitman Archive or a freestanding project. Several years later, the relationship between the two projects continues to evolve. For the most part, Civil War Washington has developed as a stand-alone project. However, there are times (when I’m entirely enmeshed in a Whitman Archive -based view of the world) that I think of the whole of Civil War Washington as a type of enhanced annotation, a new, digital-era form of gloss that clarifies not a crux word or passage but instead the entirety of Whitman’s Washington-based Civil War writings, which the Archive is currently editing. If the nature of an "edition" is being profoundly reshaped by the digital turn, we can expect the accompanying "commentary" or contextualization to be just as profoundly re-envisioned and expanded. Seen this way, Civil War Washington is a type of scholarly apparatus on steroids, if you will. But, more typically and I think more accurately, I do not regard this project as subservient to the Whitman Archive but as one with its own goals and imperatives. Civil War Washington can have as a by-product the illumination of some aspects of Whitman’s life and writings, though that really is the least it could do if realization ever begins to approximate vision. (I wouldn’t be surprised, conversely, if my historian friends regard the Whitman Archive as a long footnote on war-time Washington, D.C.!)
We would have created something different and more narrow if we had a created a project called, say, "Washington D.C. as a context for Whitman's Drum-Taps ." Such a project—with all data collected being sifted for its relevance to Whitman's work—would have a direct but narrow usefulness. Instead, we are interested in creating something with a broader usefulness than just a Whitman or Lincoln Papers site (however valuable those can be), something that could answer questions of interest to people in many fields. Yet what should our "sifting" criteria be? Without, say, Whitman or Lincoln as a center by which to gauge what constitutes the project's "content," how do we decide what is relevant to Civil War Washington ? Ultimately, Civil War Washington makes problematic any distinction between "materials" (the content we're "editing") and "information" that subserves those materials. In digital space, text need not be separate from context; rather than a separate apparatus, we can think about interaction and layering, where the boundaries between text and context begin to become more porous. Ideally, a digital thematic research collection allows not only for the creation of an electronic scholarly edition but for the study of cultural contexts.