Putting Students “In Whitman’s Hand”

Catherine Waitinas leads readers step-by-step through a digital manuscript project on Walt Whitman’s poetry that she created for a variety of courses from general education to graduate seminars. Using handwritten manuscripts digitized in the Walt Whitman Archive, Waitinas’s students meld old and new technologies, placing penmanship in conversation with big data analysis and The Walt Whitman’s Archive’s tools like the archive’s search engine. Waitinas describes how archival assignments like these are infinitely scalable; they can be used in relation to many other archives, and Waitinas gives suggestions for one-day to full-unit versions of the assignment.