0.19 Civil war washington, the walt whitman archive, and some  (Page 12/12)

The collaboration raises problems of crediting, and in an academic context the tie of this type of work to editing and collecting can carry a taint of being insufficiently analytic, or even “pre-interpretive.” Such a view is shortsighted, since a project like Civil War Washington engages everywhere with interpretive questions, as I've suggested above. It is also by no means clear that a typical scholarly monograph contributes more knowledge to the world than a well-done edition, regardless of the media in which they're published. In any event, the shelf life of the former won’t approach that of the latter.

Nonetheless, editorial work has a problematic place in the academy. There is, I believe, a difference in the reception of editorial work on U.S. topics in the fields of history and English. On the whole, monumental scholarly editions are not valued adequately by either English or history departments, though I’d say they have somewhat higher standing in English departments. In the field of U.S. history most of the excellent work done on large-scale print editions over recent decades has been conducted by people on soft money. These are people, often Ph.D.s, living grant to grant—very rarely do they hold tenure-line appointments in history departments. Even as employment for most of these individuals has been tenuous, the NHPRC, the granting agency they have most relied on, has been under siege, having been "zeroed out" several years in a row by the second Bush administration. Charlene Bickford, “Founding Fathers Face the Senate,” Documentary Editing 30 (2008), 58-59. In contrast, in the field of U.S. literary studies, by far the greatest part of the editorial work recently accomplished or now under way is by people holding tenure-line positions. Most of this literary editing has been done by senior faculty, with few relying on (that is, risking) editing as a route to tenure.

If we move from a departmental view to a broader view, we can see that most digital humanists are affiliated, one way or another, with a digital center. Such a model of doing scholarship is new in the humanities, and thus far it is developing as a problematically exclusive one. That is, while certain scholars have ready access to expertise, others don't. For a very large portion of the academic community—those working at small colleges, for example, or at underfunded universities—the possibility of active participation in digital scholarship is blocked or at least severely limited by infrastructure limitations—often as much a lack of human infrastructure as of hardware and software. At the Whitman Archive , where we have a large team of people with a considerable amount of expertise and where we enjoy direct access to Nebraska’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities and ongoing relationships with experts at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, the Women Writers Project, and other centers, we still find such things as the conversion of our texts from TEI P4 to P5 dauntingly difficult. Other matters, such as the migration of our data from one problematic database to a more robust document tracking system, have been difficult as well. I mention these points not to complain but to underscore how difficult it is for a novice—no doubt less well supported—to enter a field constituted in this way. How can isolated scholars, even those with terrific ideas, compete in such a system? How can graduate students?

The difficulties facing digital editing and editors are, then, legion and formidable, and I have few concrete proposals for their resolution. Even so, I continue to work on the Walt Whitman Archive and Civil War Washington projects, believing that experimentation—and no doubt a certain number of failures—by this generation of scholars will ultimately yield a robust framework for digital editions. Since, at this time, the future of the new digital edition is still wide open, the possibilities for moving editing in a topic-based direction as well as for experimenting with its form, are promising. In digital scholarship of the future—whether it is called an edition or a digital thematic research collection or something else—we may find a form that can harmonize editorial work with more obviously interpretive work, thus bringing the editorial enterprise back into the mainstream in the academy.