0.19 Civil war washington, the walt whitman archive, and some

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The theoretical possibilities of digital scholarship oblige us to boldness—we ought to see our current circumstances, when electronic scholarship is still nascent and the boundaries are still capable of being moved, as an invitation to push those boundaries. More than most types of humanistic study, editing has been significantly affected by the digital turn, though perhaps even editing has not been sufficiently altered. The monumental scholarly edition, our marvelous inheritance from print culture, still tends to focus on individual figures. Generally speaking, editing work in American literary and historical studies focuses on canonical writers and political leaders—that is, on white male writers and the founding fathers and other prominent political figures. Literary editing projects—whether digital or print—still usually fit the familiar "collected works" model, focused on single authors, with the most prominent of these devoted to solidly canonical writers such as Twain, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson. The scope of projects eligible to apply for funding from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) includes editing projects that "cover broad historical movements" as well as those that "focus on the papers of major figures from American life." However, the great majority of NHPRC funds have been awarded to support the editions of individuals' papers. Yet these emphases run counter to an ongoing revisionist trend in both fields—in literary studies the standing of the “author” has been questioned, cultural studies has flourished, and the canon has dramatically expanded, while in history a bottom-up view of change and significance has led in recent decades to an emphasis on social history (and of course a de-emphasis on "great men"). In these circumstances, editing runs the risk of appearing stodgy. Further complicating matters, as editors we can feel torn by the differing priorities of two groups from whom we often seek support: our colleagues in the disciplines of literary and historical study who tend to support experimentation in methodology (except when it comes to technology) and funding agencies who tend to support mainstream topics the “significance” of which goes without saying (even as they endorse the use of new technologies in editorial work).

A focus on individual writers or political figures need hardly be the focus of editorial efforts, of course. Electronic editing would, in fact, be more congruent with recent developments in the humanities disciplines generally if it were to evolve away from solely writer-based approaches to accommodate topic-based approaches that employ a tightly integrated combination of editing, collecting, interpreting, and tool building. We might even end up producing scholarship that could restore the standing of editing in English and History departments, whose faculty, paradoxically, often use and admire scholarly editions even while they are unwilling to hire, tenure, or promote a scholar who produces that work. The type of enhanced editing I am imagining could help realize a potentiality in scope and expressiveness now available to editors and result in work so useful and enlightening that they could once again thrive in academic departments where they must explain themselves, vie for internal funding, seek promotions, and otherwise survive. If we in fact witness a move toward problem or topic-based editing, it will not be a result of some type of technological determinism. Topic-based editing was of course possible in a pre-digital age. To cite just one example, in the 1970s the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) funded the Papers of the Women's Trade Union League , an organization that helped forge alliances between working-class, often immigrant, women in factory jobs and upper-class progressive women in order to organize unions, resist exploitation, and increase safety in the workplace. For a discussion of this project and an intriguing meditation on possible new directions in editing, see Ann D. Gordon, “Experiencing Women’s History as a Documentary Editor,” Documentary Editing 31 (2010), 1-9. (Interestingly, this project was marked as of secondary status in its own time when it was funded as a microfilm rather than a print edition. Let’s hope that topic- or theme-based editing need not be so marked in our time.)