Project Staff page and Donate page updated

 I have updated the Whitman Archive "Project Staff" page to reflect the current staff across all institutions. This included creating a new section for "Past Co-Director," for former project co-director Matt Cohen. I have also updated the text at the top of the "Donate" page, including adding a "Donate Here" button.

- Kevin 

Typos corrected in 1867 Leaves of Grass and Sylvester Baxter reminiscence

Transcription errors in the 1867 Leaves of Grass poem "We Two--How Long We were Fool'd" and in "Walt Whitman in Boston" have been corrected. We thank Kelly E. Miller, Ph.D., for drawing our attention to the typo in the poem.

Fixed incorrect links in Whitman biography

The links to "Lorenzo Fowler" and "New Orleans" in the WWA's biography of Whitman both took users to the incorrect page (they linked to entires in the The Walt Whitman Encyclopedia, but not the correct entires). The links in the biography have now been fixed. We would like to thank Archive user and Whitman scholar Martin Klammer for pointing out the errors.

- Kevin

Links corrected on "Other Books" index page

 The links to the introductions for Drum-Taps and Sequel to Drum-Taps on the "Other Books" index page were not linking to the correct page. These errors have been corrected. Our thanks to Dr. Kelly Scott Franklin for pointing out this error.

- Kevin 

Two new books added to Selected Criticism

Kevin has added two U of Iowa Press publications to the "Books" section of Selected Criticism at https://whitmanarchive.org/commentary/selected-criticism: Caterina Bernardini's Transnational Modernity and the Italian Reinvention of Walt Whitman, 1870–1945 and David Grant's "The Disenthralled Hosts of Freedom:" Party Prophecy in the Antebellum Editions of Leaves of Grass. 

~ Brett 

Typo fixed in Traubel; donors page updated and added to "About" index

 Ed Folsom noticed a typo in Volume 5 of Horace Traubel's With Walt Whitman in Camden; a passage from April 21, 1889, had originally read "But if is of a piece with Harrison—the shit-ass! God damn 'im!" The "if" has been corrected to "it": "But it is of a piece . . ."

We have also updated our donors page, adding the dollar amounts of each contribution level to the main page (rather than only appearing on the "Donate" index page). 

We have also added a link to the donors page from the "About" index page on the site.  

- Kevin 

Transcription of letter updated/corrected

 A Whitman Archive user, Byron Strom, noticed an error in our transcription of a January 8, 1862, letter from Silas S. Soule to Whitman. Our transcription of the letter's first sentence had previously read "Perhaps you have forgotten a wild farmer's scarecrow [illegible] man..." The transcription has been corrected to read "Perhaps you have forgotten a wild harum scarum yound man..." (with the word "young" misspelled). We thank Byron Strom for bringing the error to our attention and offering a correction.

- Kevin

Incorrect links to Whitman Encyclopedia entries corrected

Antedated November 2024:

 Links to some entries in the Whitman Encyclopedia were directing users to the wrong entry. This problem has now been corrected.

- Kevin

New journalism material published

 Antedated June 2024:

We are pleased to announce the publication of nearly 800 newspaper editorials, likely authored by Whitman, that appeared in the Brooklyn Daily Times in the late 1850s. This project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, marks the first time that most of these editorials have appeared in print since their initial publication and represents a major reconsideration of Whitman's work during this period.

- Kevin

Large-scale infrastructural changes to WWA site

Much has changed since we last posted on the Whitman Archive Changelog. In March 2024 we unveiled our redesigned website, the work of several years and many individuals, and made possible by the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Users may notice changes, large and small, including reorganization of the site's major sections; improvements to image browsing, searching and faceting of results, and support for mobile devices; as well as new content. Other changes and improvements will be less obvious but are important for the sustainability of the project. 

The most substantial change was the migration of the site architecture from the Apache Cocoon framework to the Ruby on Rails programming framework. The new site also makes use of a storage and processing system named Datura, developed by Nebraska's Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH), which is a set of scripts to pre-generate HTML from the TEI XML and sore the derived HTML along with the data in a defined structure on the server. This has several advantages: it is less resource intensive for the production site, it allows us to track changes to the front end (generated) code as well as the back end, and it allows us to make our transformed HTML easily available to others who don’t have the technical infrastructure to work with TEI XML. These sets of scripts utilize several programming languages, among them XSLT, which means we’ll be able to use much of the existing custom programming. The set of scripts also pulls data from the TEI XML and creates an intermediary JSON file which can push data to a search engine such as Elasticsearch. 

Our infrastructure work also involved the creation of an Application Programming Interface (API) for all the WWA data, and it is from the data in the API that the new site is built. The API draws data from an Elasticsearch instance and reformats it into a generalized format, which will be described by the OpenAPI specification, an emerging standard for web APIs and generated documentation. For the front end, the CDRH has created a Rails Engine which connects to the API, creates browse and search interfaces, and displays pre-generated HTML. These three pieces together—a storage and processing system, an API, and a front end—constitute the building blocks our new, sustainable infrastructure for making the Whitman Archive’s rich data available, searchable, and browsable.

On the front end, the site will likely appear much as it did before; however, some of the major site sections have been renamed or reorganized. The site's search pages—both the full-site search page and separate, section-specific search pages—have also been updated and improved. We have also added a new sub-section containing an "Index of Works," allowing users to see all instances (either manuscript or print) of a given work (poem or other Whitman-authored text) across the Archive. We have also added pages for several more Whitman "Disciples." 

- Kevin