0.19 Civil war washington, the walt whitman archive, and some  (Page 9/12)

I responded that “there is a danger that if we developed a thesis-ridden site it would be less broadly useful than a more seemingly objective site.” We recognize that the Whitman Archive is not neutral or objective: arguments of various kinds are embodied in our editorial choices, including, fundamentally, our organizing the work around a single writer. One argument we make both explicitly and implicitly involves the genesis of Whitman’s writings. That is, we argue explicitly in critical commentary and implicitly through the very structure of the Whitman Archive that the development of Whitman’s poems through manuscript and notebook versions, periodical printings, and then multiple further incarnations and rewritings in various editions of Leaves of Grass are key to understanding his meanings. As my comments above suggest, we also believe that Whitman’s reception—including translations and appropriations—is crucial to understanding his work and its evolving meanings; our prioritizing these materials tacitly argues as much. Yet even as we make such arguments, we try to avoid presenting Whitman with a coercive editorial hand. It would be possible to create a Whitman Archive that privileged gender and sexual identity above all else, or that featured a Marxist Whitman, or that highlighted Whitman the spiritual leader, but we prefer to take less overtly contentious positions. We are creating a site that reflects our view of Whitman's writings and supports our editorial commitments but that also serves as a resource allowing others to use our material to advance interpretations potentially quite at odds with our own.

In contrast to the Whitman Archive , Civil War Washington is exploring a type of scholarship for which the conventions are only now taking shape: urban history is a well-developed field, but, despite valuable work accomplished and in progress, there is no consensus about what an online project of this sort should do or look like. There is significant work on cities that precedes Civil War Washington , of course. One of the earliest digital history projects was the Philadelphia Social History project. More recent work includes that of Philip J. Ethington on Los Angeles and Jan Reiff and James R. Grossman on Chicago. Also worth considering are projects on digital Rio, digital Virtual Shanghai, Virtual Victoria. New work underway on the Hypercities project is also very promising. Would we be better off focusing just on creating a "tool" for enabling arguments? Or just focusing on a thesis/theses? The short history of web-based scholarship might suggest one answer; conventions in our various disciplines might suggest other answers. The possibilities of digital technologies and other available resources might suggest others. Civil War Washington is a resource in that we are capturing a great deal of data and are making that data available for others to use for their own ends. Here, too, we do not claim objectivity or neutrality with regard to our work. Even a database populated with seemingly raw information is subjective in numerous ways—perhaps most significantly in that the categories chosen for selection and study reflect the biases of the investigators. In addition to developing a resource, we plan to present an argument both through the site as a whole and through interpretive essays. For example, Winkle, a quantitative historian, has expertise in using statistical data from census materials to delineate the political and social networks of communities. We anticipate that his interpretive essay on the role of the Civil War in the transformation of African American communities in Washington between 1860 and 1870 will illustrate the potential for digital scholarship to allow users to investigate the author’s claims with their own review of key primary sources and, more importantly, live data sets and interactive maps.