NYU graduate students and fellows are warmly invited to participate in a workshop led by Professor Matt Cohen (University of Nebraska-Lincoln), titled "Revising the Walt Whitman Archive." Please register for the graduate workshop using this form.
The Walt Whitman Archive is one of the oldest open-access digital research sites for literary studies, accessed by half a million visitors yearly from across the globe. It is currently undergoing a major technical overhaul in an effort to make the site more accessible, interoperable, and sustainable. But the Archive's makers are also rethinking its place and activity in the world. Beyond rigorous editorial standards and a broad conception of what kinds of materials the project ought to include, what other kinds of commitments, values, activities, and engagements might the Archive entertain, in what forms and by what means?
In this workshop we will talk about the possible futures of the Archive, guided by a few readings and participants' thoughts about what's working, what's not working, and what might work.
Readings will include a brief proposal to the University of Minnesota Press for a collection of essays on "The Futures of Digital Scholarly Editing"; the Statement of Values and Strategic Plan for the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (where the Archive is housed and under whose values statement it operates); and the introduction to Michelle Caswell's 2021 book Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work.
Matt Cohen is Professor of English, affiliate faculty in Native American Studies, and Fellow of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The author of The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), he co-directs the Walt Whitman Archive and co-edits the Charles W. Chesnutt Archive. His book The Silence of the Miskito Prince: How Cultural Dialogue was Colonized will appear this fall from the University of Minnesota Press. He currently serves as President of the Society for Textual Scholarship.
This workshop will be held in conjunction with the 2022 Annual Fales Lecture. For more information, visit the event page or contact Athena Pierquet.