Since the mid-1990s, the Walt Whitman Archive has been engaged in an ambitious project to digitize Whitman’s notebooks, manuscripts, essays, letters, journals and key contextual resources into an integrated and user-friendly website. In 2007, the Archive moved to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and under the co-direction of Ed Folsom and Kenneth Price, has made exciting developments into both the public understanding of Whitman, as well as the potential for digitization in the future of academia.

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“We’ve been going around to more than 30 different libraries and other kinds of repositories around the country and to some extent around the world. We’re gathering all of those poetry manuscripts, purchasing high-quality scans of them, putting them up on the web, transcribing those sometimes very messy manuscripts, and then providing annotations, explaining them and dating them.”

This process is laborious, to be sure, but represents what is likely a massive switch in scholarly research. In Price’s mind, the advent of technology allows machines to zero in on linguistic, cultural and textual patterns we were previously unaware of throughout history.