0.19 Civil war washington, the walt whitman archive, and some  (Page 8/12)

In print-based forms of editing, contextualizing commentary is nearly always relegated to a scholarly apparatus that is subordinate to the text and is often miniaturized through various space-saving means affecting introductions, textual histories, appendices and so forth. These methods developed for understandable practical and intellectual reasons. It has seemed wise to be economical both financially and in the presentation of information. But the reasoning that guided the development of scholarly apparatus for the page need not circumscribe our understanding of how such commentary will look, and more importantly how it will function, in digital space. The limits of print scholarship in the kind and amount of contextual material that can be provided need not obtain in the digital realm. Arguably, in the past, when the apparatus and annotations were not miniaturized, they became articles and monographs. A new kind of edition that doesn’t require miniaturization would fold those kinds of print categories into the edition itself. Of course, being freed from the constraints of space further heightens challenges that we've always had about what to emphasize and how to make ourselves intelligible to audiences. The magnitude of the scholarly resources we can now build makes it all the more urgent that clear navigation and other aids to users (who come in all stripes) will keep them from getting lost. Electronic editing and criticism provide the opportunity to reimagine the relationships between three categories that converge: primary texts, context, and interpretive commentary or annotation.

The seemingly endless possibilities enabled by working in digital space also present further problems. For example, what is the relationship between providing context and advancing an argument? This question is difficult, as we know from working on the Walt Whitman Archive . Recently, a library and information science graduate student studying digital thematic research collections asked me about the relationship between the Whitman Archive and a companion project, “Sex, Politics, and ‘Live Oak with Moss,’" one of a number of pedagogical sites developed in connection with the Dickinson Electronic Archives and the Whitman Archive in the late 1990s. These sites, created in HTML rather than XML, have a different technical basis and a different look than the rest of the Whitman Archive . Some of these sites are closely related to the Whitman Archive while others are related to it hardly at all. It has seemed best to link from the Whitman Archive to this material, material that is in some ways apprentice work, but we have the sites open in a separate window to visually reinforce the idea that they are not part of the Whitman Archive proper. Detecting this separation, the library science student asked a key question:

Is there a concern with thematic research collections, which of course require a large institutional investment, of avoiding very specific lines of interpretation, including potentially controversial ones? It seems to me that bringing critical controversies and historical contexts into the single author thematic research collections would enhance their research value, but also potentially endanger the projects, make them appear less objective and authoritative. Email sent from Eric Peterson to Kenneth Price, November 27, 2008.