Editing Walt Whitman’s Marginalia Today: Digital Humanities Methods at the Edge

Abstract

This talk is about methodology in the humanities. It begins with a discussion of the most basic practice of humanities research: note-taking. Annotations, marginalia, all of the methods of sifting, highlighting, and gathering: these are the substrate of our larger claims and discoveries. Such is the case even when we are working with “big data,” topic modeling, natural language processing, and other automated techniques for what Franco Moretti has called “distant reading.” The talk then reflects on the claims for methodology in and as what is being called the digital humanities. These observations emerge at the junction of two occasions. The first is a project to digitize the poet Walt Whitman’s annotations and marginalia, his personal metadata on his reading. This NEH-funded project is at the end of its first phase, and will be published later this year for free access at the Walt Whitman Archive (http://www.whitmanarchive.org/). The second spur is the active conversation about the digital humanities as a methodological crucible or fountain; both the tenor and the content of that conversation are occasions for considering the status of method in the humanities.