CONTACT ADDRESS: Kenneth M. Price, Dept of English, Univ. of Nebraska, Lincoln, Andrews 202, PO Box 880333, Lincoln, NE 68588-0333 FAX NUMBER: 402-472-9771 PHONE NUMBER: 402-472-0293 The individuals listed below have expressed a readiness to attend the conference and to deliver presentations: TYPE OF PROPOSAL: session TITLE: "What's Interesting About Whitman's Poetry Manuscripts?" KEYWORDS: sgml-encoding, EAD TITLE: Moderator KEYWORDS: tagging, project management AUTHOR: Kenneth M. Price AFFILIATION: University of Nebraska, Lincoln E-MAIL: kprice@unlnotes.unl.edu TITLE: Whitman's Manuscripts in Scholarly Context KEYWORDS: TEI, scholarly editing AUTHOR: Ed Folsom AFFILIATION: University of Iowa E-MAIL: ed-folsom@uiowa.edu TITLE: Developing a Whitman DTD and Database at IATH KEYWORDS: database, project support AUTHOR: John Unsworth AFFILIATION: IATH at University of Virginia E-MAIL: jmu2m@virginia.edu TITLE: Containing Multitudes: Getting Control of Whitman KEYWORDS: DTD, unique identifiers AUTHOR: Alice Rutkowski AFFILIATION: University of Virginia E-MAIL: air7e@virginia.edu TITLE: EAD records and Whitman Research KEYWORDS: Encoded archival description AUTHOR: Terry Catapano AFFILIATION: New York Public Library E-MAIL: tcatapano@nypl.org (tcatapano) TITLE: "Each part and tag of me is a miracle": Encoding Whitman KEYWORDS: TEI AUTHOR: Brett Barney AFFILIATION: University of Nebraska, Lincoln E-MAIL: barney@unlserve.unl.edu PROPOSAL: The full title of this session is "What's Interesting for Humanities Computing About Whitman's Poetry Manuscripts?" This panel session, featuring work of people associated with the Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive <http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/whitman/>, argues that editing Whitman poses questions of general interest for computing humanists. It would be especially fitting to feature this session on the great poet of Manhattan and Brooklyn at a conference held in New York City. The panel opens with a presentation from one of the foremost Whitman scholars, Ed Folsom. Folsom was the lead author for a recent three-year NEH grant earmarked for support of the editing of Whitman's poetry manuscripts. These fundamentally important documents have never been transcribed and encoded, and they are scattered at various libraries. Applying the TEI to manuscripts is something of a challenge, a topic various participants in this session explore from a variety of angles. John Unsworth's talk will discuss how we are attempting to exert control over this vast project undertaken by dispersed editors. He will discuss the use of a PHP/Mysql database to manage the assignment and collection of manuscript transcriptions, the deployment of an NT-based, Web-accessible Access database for controlling the unique identifiers assigned to individual objects within the Whitman archive, the implementation of the Astoria document management system for the project, and Astoria's integration with the Epic SGML editing software. Alice Rutkowski will discuss her efforts in developing encoding guidelines suited specifically for Whitman's manuscripts and the challenges they pose. She will discuss how Whitman's method of composition causes both scholarly and technical problems for editors interested in his manuscripts. Terry Catapano will discuss his work in developing EAD records for the Berg collection at the New York Public Library. Catapono is also exploring with Ken Price the possibility of creating a virtual EAD of Whitman's poetry manuscripts, a centralized finding aid that would pull together finding records for all institutions holding Whitman manuscripts. There is no single finding aid that will allow scholars to discover where all the manuscripts related to, say, "Song of Myself" can be found. (In fact the manuscripts tied to the gestation of that poem number close to seventy and can be found at New York Public Library, Duke University, University of Virginia, the Library of Congress, and the University of Texas at Austin. This, fortunately, is an unusually complicated case in the Whitman canon.) By working cooperatively with many libraries Catapano hopes to help establish standards through open discussion. Brett Barney will describe some of the choices he has confronted in the actual tagging of Whitman's poems. This work has forced an examination of questions of basic structure and intention in Whitman's poetry and at the same time illuminated some of the difficulties of applying and adapting SGML encoding "best practices" to those poems, some of which have enormously complicated genealogies. Whitman stands as one of the four or five greatest American poets and his work presents textual questions of extraordinary complexity. These textual questions can best be addressed via the careful and sophisticed use of the tools made available by humanities computing. We look forward to a frank discussion of our victories and defeats thus far, and will welcome the insights of the audience as we face new and challenging questions.