Reconfiguring “Song of Myself” Using the Walt Whitman Digital Archive

I’ve had a lot of negative emotion surrounding the assignments for this poem. As acknowledged by Professor Hanley and greatly addressed by the class, Diigo, while a great idea in theory is terrible in execution. Just thought I’d join the collective – done and done.

During lab on Tuesday I “explored” the Whitman Archive by mostly peeking over Joseph’s computer because my “workstation” (can you believe that’s what office people call it?) was slow. One of the things that I saw him try was using Token X to do word searches. The results would show the line in one row after another with the highlighted keyword within the line centered so that the lines on either side would be asymmetrical. Here’s a picture to better illustrate what I just said:

LEAVES OF GRASS [1855]

... probably the fullest poetical	nature	. The United States ...
... The largeness of	nature	or the nation were ...
... the citizen. Not	nature	nor swarming states nor ...
... and the motion of	nature	and of the throes ...
... sea, Master of	nature	and passion and death ...
... flow out of the	nature	of the work and ...
... of the oneness of	nature	and the propriety of ...
... my soul reflected in	nature	. . . . as I see ...

This was a cool way to recreate the poem. It was automatic – no printing out a hardcopy, no manual highlighting, cutting and pasting. Seeing how lines were broken up, what was included and what was left out by ellipses was interesting as well. I’m sure there’s some logical way the computer figures it out using punctuation but hey, I enjoy a lot of science fiction so why not think that a computer (or compy as I like to call it- thanks, Strongbad) can create something that would make me go, “interestiiing.” Talk about FREE VERSE, having a keyword centered wherever it occurs in the line?! On a side note I was surprised by how little some of the keywords that we tried came up in the poem – “Kiss,” for example only had ___ lines.

There’s a lot of well-organized material on this digital archive. Well-organized and digital archive doesn’t go hand in hand very often, either. Stephanie was looking at some poetry where the original scanned manuscript was on the left side of the window and the typed, legible version was on the right, which is a simple idea that would make exploring digitized documents A LOT easier and more interesting. This should be essential for the people working with archives and primary documents online. Yes, Leaves of Grass is a long one, but it would be very cool to read the poem in such a format rather than have a clickable icon above each section to get to the original page – I want to see that pretty handwriting that is much better than mine.

The BIG question we have on our Wiki is, “What is the relationship between the self and the other, the you and the me, etc.?” The first thing (and kind of obvious) idea that popped in my head was to use word searches to take all the lines in the poem where Whitman talks about himself (or uses the I/me pronoun) and do a sort of conversational, call-response weaving of the poem with all the mentions of the you. Somewhere the blending sections of “we,” “us,” and “all” would get pushed somewhere, maybe at the end. Then again, if this idea were put to music, I’d have all those we/us/all’s as a chorus with one consistent melody, the you’s to another melody and the I/me’s to another – hmmm, that was very tangential.

This project got me thinking about the quality of digital archives and how much better it could/should be. I did a lot of competitive analysis one summer for an online advertising company, which sounds fancier than it is – looking at similar websites and reviewing them. We looked at online archives and it seems like the better they are (Whitman archive) the more one could do with the work – reconfigure “Song of Myself.” I can’t imagine doing something like this with a poorly constructed site with non-enlarging images, side by side comparisons of primary and typed versions, and keyword searches.