The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) shared an update on a new project related to the Walt Whitman Archive, a longstanding DH project that “sets out to make Whitman’s vast work, for the first time, easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers.”
Working in collaboration with the University of Texas at Austin and the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, the project team is using the tools developed for MITH’s Shelley-Godwin Archive to build a digital publication that “will allow users to read semi-diplomatic transcriptions of the texts alongside facsimile images, as well as visually distinguish regions of text annotated by Whitman.” The topical focus of the project is “Whitman’s annotations and commentary about history, science, theology, and art being discussed during his time,” which have been closely encoded according to TEI standards. As MITH research programmer Raffaele Viglianti writes in the update: “By adapting our Shelley-Godwin tools for Whitman, we found that Open Annotation was particularly suited for modeling Whitman’s own annotations, as the data model offered a basic and open system to represent generic annotation acts (for example by relating a piece of Whitman’s commentary to the specific portion of text that it annotates).” The project launch date should be announced in a few weeks.
