Peter Stallybrass, Against Thinking

[ P M L A
the changing profession
Responses to
Ed Folsom’s
“Database as
Genre: The Epic Against Thinking
Transformation peter stallybrass
of Archives”
By making “poems, essays, letters, journals, jottings, and im-
ages, along with biographies, interviews, reviews, and criticism of
1580 A
gainst Thinking Whitman” “freely” available in the online Walt Whitman Archive,
Peter Stallybrass Ed Folsom and Kenneth Price are helping to liberate Whitman from
1588 D
atabase, Interface, and the economic and social constraints that govern archival research:
Archival Fever
Jerome McGann the grants, travel money, and time necessary to visit the depositories
1592 R
emediating Whitman
where the materials are held and the credentials necessary to see the
Meredith L. McGill materials when you get there. At the same time, my sense is that the
1596 W
hitman, Database, archives are being used more widely than ever before. The difficulty
Information Culture of gaining access to at least some of the archives has been exagger-
Jonathan Freedman ated. It is a pleasure to see the wide range of people (of whom I would
1603 N
arrative and Database: guess academics are a minority) who now use the Public Record Of-
Natural Symbionts
N. Katherine Hayles
fice (PRO) in London, where they are not only allowed access to an
extraordinary range of old and new documents but are also allowed
1608 R
eply
Ed Folsom
to photograph materials without charge. Permitting photography has
had a radical effect on the use of the PRO, since it encourages readers
who may only be able to spend an hour or two in the library to work
for days or years afterward on deciphering and understanding the
materials they have photographed. Photography has also provided
one of the main bridges between database and archive. Seeing online
images of the Mona Lisa has done nothing to decrease people’s desire
to see the painting in the Louvre. Quite the contrary.
The same is true of the libraries that have begun making their
materials freely available online. The small and magnificent staff of
the Department of Special Collections at the University of Penn-
sylvania’s Van Pelt Library are overwhelmed by the clamorous de-
Peter Stallybrass is Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities and
professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the History of Mate-
rial Texts. His most recent book, cowritten with James N. Green, is Benjamin Franklin: Writer
and Printer (Oak Knoll, 2006), and he is completing a book on “printing for manuscript.”
1580 [ © 2007 by the moder n language association of america ]

122.5 ] Responses to Ed Folsom’s “Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives” 1581
mands of undergraduates, graduates, and perhaps unconsciously, what Shakespeare de-

faculty members to work on texts ranging liberately and shamelessly did in the construc-
from the medieval manuscripts generously tion of his poems and plays. He appropriated
made available by Larry Schoenberg, to a for his own use what he read or heard, as can
fifteenth-century French chansonnier, to one readily be seen in his most famous soliloquy:
of the three known copies of the poems of the
sixteenth-century Venetian poet Veronica 1573 Ralph Lever: “to be or not to bée” (67)
Franco, to the corrected typescript of Theo- 1584 Dudley Fenner: “to bee or not to be” (C1)
dore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, all of which are 1588 Abraham Fraunce: “to bée, or not to bée”
(86)
accessible through the Schoenberg Center for
1596 William Perkins: “to be or not to be” (4)
Electronic Text and Image.
1601 John Deacon: “to be, or not to be” (46)
But if database has been an incitement to
1603 Robert Rollock: “to be or not to be” (Trea-
the use of archive, it has changed our relation tise 177–78)
to the ownership of knowledge. One of the 1604 Henoch Clapham: “to be, or not to be” (A2v)
most radical aspects of database is its power 1604 William Shakespeare: “to be, or not to be”
to separate knowledge from academic pres- (G2)
tige and from its attendant regime of intel-
1585 Thomas Bilson: “That is the question” (264)
lectual property. Scholarship, as traditionally
1604 William Shakespeare: “That is the ques-
conceived, has maintained its prestige partly tion” (G2)
through its privileged relation to the protec-
tion and retrieval of scarce resources. Now, 1576 Thomas Rogers: “with a quiet minde to
however, millions of people who cannot or do suffer” (folios 32v–33)
1582 James Yates: “a patient minde to suffer”
not want to go to the archives are accessing
(folios 72v–73)
them in digital form. And digital information
1600 Robert Rollock: “with his owne mind to
has profoundly undermined an academic elite’s suffer” (Exposition 210)
control over the circulation of knowledge. 1604 William Shakespeare: “in the minde to
This circulation has created a panic among suffer” (G2)
academic gatekeepers about plagiarism. The
[1540] Desiderius Erasmus: Mare malorum,
more knowledge circulates, the more energy
Kakôn thálassa (“a sea of troubles” [1.3.28])
goes into establishing a strict accountancy of
1566 William Painter: “a Sea of troubles” (folio
mine and thine. Database and its resources 115v)
are now used to track down plagiarism that 1585 John Norden: “raging sea of troubles” (fo-
previously could only be detected by scholarly lio 92v)
labor. Academics who are more interested in 1590 Everard Digby: “a sea of troubles” (128)
producing knowledge than in reproducing the 1604 William Shakespeare: “a sea of troubles”
divide between their own knowledge and their (G2)
students’ ignorance should ask students to use 1578 Henry Bull: “sleepe of death” (182–83)
good databases and reward them for doing so 1581 John Merbecke: “the sléepe of death” (1035)
well.1 Paradoxically, database will make the 1600 John Bodenham: “sleepe of death” (233)
gatekeepers’ work increasingly problematic. 1604 William Shakespeare: “that sleepe of
New programs, like the Montaigne Project, death” (G2)
which I am using to analyze how Shakespeare
read Montaigne, will allow us to compare any Shakespeare consciously practiced his own
texts to trace the transmission of phrases. form of database. It is only in a regime of
They will also reveal the extent to which the originality that such techniques become se-
gatekeepers are themselves trespassers who do, cretive and shameful. The only shame that
1582 Responses to Ed Folsom’s “Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives” [ P M L A
should attach to such “resemblances” when the bee’s example when, in Philadelphia in
they are discovered is the extent to which the 1696, he began his massive Alphabetical Hive
gatekeepers have tyrannized those less pow- of More Than Two Thousand Honey-combs,
erful than they for trespassing. compiled from “all remarkable words, phrases,
Database renews our sense of language sentences, or matters of moment, which we
as “a tissue of quotations” from which we do hear and read” (1). The bee provided less a
cannot, even if we wanted to, remove our- metaphor for understanding than a model for
selves (Barthes 146). And while downgrading the note-taking practices and database organi-
knowledge from being the secret horde of ar- zation that were the precondition for invention
chive haunters, database will place new weight (see the table below).2 Only after reading, “col-
on inventorying as a means of structuring lecting, like Bees, from every flower,” can the
knowledge. As Mary Carruthers argues: writer “hiue their hony on [his] tongue” (1).
While I do not question Ed Folsom’s em-
Having “inventory” is a requirement for “in- phasis on the innovations of database in the
vention.” Not only does this statement assume age of the computer and Internet, it is signifi-
that one cannot create (“invent”) without a
cant that some of the most powerful modern
memory store (“inventory”) to invent from and
with, but it also assumes that one’s memory-
databases draw on the development of a mas-
store is effectively “inventoried,” that its mat- sive range of finding aids and databases in
ters are in readily-recovered “locations.” (12) the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Such find-
ing aids and databases were produced above
To rediscover the power of inventory is also all for the study of the Jewish and Christian
to rediscover the forms of pedagogy that pre- bibles. They provide a model for Web sites
cede the regime of originality. The great Re- like Calvin College’s World Wide Study Bible,
naissance tradition of commonplacing was a which contains links to commentaries on ev-
systematic practice for overcoming the origi- ery verse of the Bible. The first verse of the
nality (i.e., unacknowledged repetitiveness) of eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews
one’s own mind by organizing one’s reading alone connects to commentaries and sermons
as a database. In this pedagogy, reading is a from the Church Fathers (Ambrose, Augus-
technology of inventorying information to tine, Bernard, Chrysostom, Cyril of Jerusa-
make it reusable. lem, Gregory the Great, Gregory of Nyssa,
The major way of inventing knowledge Hilary of Poitiers, John of Damascus, Thomas
in the Renaissance grew out of new forms of Aquinas), a medieval English mystic (Walter
databases. Above all, Renaissance readers Hilton), sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
and writers followed the example of the bee. ministers and exegetes (Jacobus Arminius,
Francis Daniel Pastorius was still following Lewis Bayly, John Calvin, John Donne, Mar-
The Bee’s Work Material Support Form of Writing

1. Finding nectar in flowers 1. Books and their margins 1. Underlining, marginal
marks, and notes
2. Gathering nectar from flowers 2. Small erasable tablets or 2. “Promiscuous” notes
waste books
3. Putting pollen in the correct 3. Large commonplace books 3. Notes under proper
cell of the honeycomb alphabetical headings
4. Making honey 4. Sheets or gatherings 4. Composing, writing
tin Luther, Thomas Manton, John Owen, John WORKING is

of the Cross, Samuel Rutherford, Thomas Easy
Watson), and eighteenth- and nineteenth- Exciting, a process of discovery
century commentators and preachers (Albert Challenging
There is nothing mystical about working. I
Barnes, Adam Clarke, James Denney, Jona-
suggest breaking it down into a series of pro-
than Edwards, John Gill, Matthew Henry,
cedures. The larger the question, the greater
Charles Hodge, Robert Jamieson, Philip the need to reduce it to practical steps.
Schaff, Charles Spurgeon, Isaac Watts, John (1) Always use The Oxford English Diction-
Wesley). This for a single verse of the Bible. ary and other relevant dictionaries to develop
To make database entirely a feature of your sense of language as an active, histori-
the present is to ignore what information is cal medium. For your exercises and projects,
stored and why. Christianity has had nearly build up your own list of useful words (e.g.,
two millennia of accumulating and organiz- for Benjamin Franklin, I’ve been working
ing its databases, and there is nothing ran- with words like accounting, almanac, binding,
dom about that—not even about how and why blank, books, broadsides, composing, composi-
tor (sorts and out of sorts), copy, edition, ink,
Christians began to organize their databases
newspaper, pamphlet, paper, paper money,
alphabetically to facilitate rapid retrieval.3
press, print(er, -ing), printinghouse, publish,
Equally, there is nothing random now about publication, rags, type (typeface), uppercase,
the organization of databases around a ca- lowercase, warehouse(ing), woodcut.
nonical American poet. I do not mean this (2) After reading Franklin’s Autobiography,
as a criticism of specific databases, any more download the text from the Web and use it
than I mean to criticize Calvin College’s Web and other Web resources to generate mate-
site, which has transformed how I approach rial. (Over 25,000 books are freely available
teaching biblical texts. But databases are nei- from the Online Books Page on the University
ther universal nor neutral, and they partici- of Pennsylvania library’s Web site.)
pate in the production of a monolingual, if (3) Compare, when possible, different ver-
sions of the “same” book or image to train
not monocultural, global network.
yourself to notice large and small linguistic
But at the same time databases can help and material differences. For instance, using
free us from the tyranny of proprietary au- online resources, compare John Foxe’s Master
thors, solitary thinkers who produce knowl- Rogers story in an early edition of his Book of
edge out of their own minds. For the last Martyrs: Actes and Monuments and in several
few years, I have been experimenting with a editions of the American eighteenth-century
pedagogy that explicitly opposes proprietary New-England Primer. While teaching your-
authorship and the model of thinking that self to notice small differences, don’t overlook
supports it. The following, for instance, is one the obvious (e.g., the massive difference in
strategy I developed for a course, using data- size—and, as a result, in cost and accessibil-
ity; the primers sold in millions).
bases to disrupt thinking:
(4) Compare visual depictions of the
same text with each other and with the text
AGAINST THINKING
on which they are based. Look at images
Here is my vulgar recipe for working as op- of Genesis 3.7 (are Adam and Eve naked,
posed to thinking. wearing a fig leaf, or wearing fig leaves tied
Thinking is together?) and 3.21 (are Adam and Eve na-
Hard, painful ked, wearing leaves, or clothed when they are
Boring, repetitious expelled from Eden?). See Web sites of the
Indolent Metropolitan Museum, National Gallery in
NB. Hard and indolent. Washington, National Gallery in London,
etc. Having read Genesis 50.26 and looked at your own thoughts in the literal sense is as im-
the depiction of the verse in the online Brick possible as having your own language. It’s not
Testament, would you call the man who is only impossible; it’s silly and unnecessary to
mummified Joseph or Zaphnath-paaneah?4 attempt it. You should have better things to do
(5) Spend more time on less. Databases with your life. When I’m tempted to think, I
create information overload (Blair, “Read- commonplace Pepys or Montaigne instead.
ing” and “Note-Taking”). It’s good to browse When you’re THINKING, you’re usually star-
so as to generate information and ideas, but ing at a blank sheet of paper or a blank screen,
then you need to focus on specific passages, hoping that something will emerge from your
images, theoretical problems, etc. head and magically fill that space. Even if
When you’re WORKING, you’ll be in the something “comes to you,” there is no reason
good company of the writers we’ll be working to believe that it is of interest, however painful
on. None of them had a writer’s block. When the process has been. ORIGINALITY (an unhelp-
Shakespeare sat down to write a history ful concept connected with thinking and deep
play (say, Richard II), he made sure that his thought) is another name for repeating other
table had the right things on it: Holinshed’s people’s ideas without knowing that you’re do-
Chronicles, from which he took the plot, and ing so. What would it mean to speak with an
a commonplace book that I imagine as hav- original voice, if our voices are the (unique)
ing entries under death, Ireland, Cain and combinations of hauntings through which we
Abel, etc. Shakespeare and Anne Bradstreet speak and through which we are spoken? In
wrote. They assembled the necessary materi- this sense, originality is not only a bad concept,
als (this was called “invention” in the Renais- it’s a cruel one that would excise what makes
sance) and then got on with the job according us who we are—the voices that have taken up a
to two fundamental principles: local habitation and a name in our bodies.
(A) IMITATION: This means that you read There is no relation between the quantity
(or listen) so as to write. If you look at scenes of pain and the quality of the work produced.
of medieval writing, you cannot tell if you’re I can agonize for days—thinking—and still
looking at a scribe, a translator, or an “au- produce platitudes. The cure for the disease
thor”—all have books around them from called thinking is work.
which, in their different ways, they are tran-
scribing (or “translating” [Chartier 18–20]). Learning requires imitation and inspi-
Shakespeare (who invented in the modern ration, which today are marginalized by a
sense at most one or two of his plots) “trans- concept of originality that produces as its
lates” Holinshed and other chroniclers. In inevitable double the specter of plagiarism, a
Hamlet, Shakespeare rewrote a ten-year-old specter rooted in the fear that we might have
play called Hamlet (which doesn’t survive). In
more to learn from others than from our-
King Lear, he rewrote an earlier play called
selves. Franklin made this clear when, in the
King Lear (which does survive).
(B) INSPIRATION: This is a complex way of longest pamphlet that he ever wrote during
rethinking imitation. It means allowing your- his career as a printer, he defended Samuel
self to be “breathed into”—as your own voice Hemphill, a preacher who had been accused
has been breathed into you at school and by of religious unorthodoxy, from the subse-
parents, lovers, those whom you aspire to be quent charge of plagiarism. Franklin noted
like, etc. When you’re working, as opposed to that Hemphill’s accusers
thinking, ideas will indeed “come over you” (as
in, “I don’t know what came over me”). Think- endeavour to lessen [him], by representing
ing does, in that sense, take place, but dialec- him as a Plagiary, and say, They are apt to
tically. You are not, nor should you be, the think, that if he had honestly given credit to
origin of your own thoughts (any more than the several Authors from whom he borrowed
you are the origin of your own voice). Having much of what he deliver’d, it wou’d have made
a considerable Abatement of the Reputation of originality by which their professors mani-

he supposes he gain’d, &c. festly do not abide. If you really want to learn
But which of these Gentlemen, or their something new, ask a librarian or a conser-
Brethren, is it, that does give due Credit for vationist. Among other things, they’re busier
what he borrows? Are they beholden to no
sharing information than trying to protect it
Author, ancient or modern, for what they
from the prying eyes of their “competitors.”
know, or what they preach? . . . They chuse
the dullest Authors to read and study, and
For academics, the competitors are no longer
retail the dullest Parts of those Authors to just our colleagues; in the age of database,
the Publick. It seems as if they search’d only they are also the students whom we claim
for Stupidity and Nonsense. . . . But when to be teaching. The imperative that was once
Hemphill had Occasion to borrow, he gave us ethical is now pragmatic as well: share your
the best Parts of the best Writers of the Age. “original” knowledge if you don’t want others
Thus the Difference between him and most of to find out where you appropriated it from.
his Brethren, in this part of the World, is the Better still, think of knowledge as what we
same with that between the Bee and the Fly in share for future creations rather than as the
the Garden. The one wanders from Flower to private property of past and present authors.
Flower, and for the use of others collects from
the whole the most delightful Honey; while
the other (of a quite different Taste) places
her Happiness entirely in Filth, Corruption,
and Ordure. (Franklin, Papers 2: 96–97)5 Notes
1. If you want to hear predictable responses that you
For Franklin, ideas were a common treasury to
can buy on the Web or, worse, to hear “original” responses,
be shared by all. The problem is not imitation ask your students about “the redemption of King Lear”
or even plagiarism but the claim to intellectual or “filial ingratitude in Shakespeare’s King Lear” or “the
property, a claim that justifies itself by produc- theme of blindness in William Shakespeare’s King Lear” or
ing plagiarism (i.e., the possibility of shared “King Lear and the fatal flaw” or, best of all, “self-discovery
in Shakespeare’s King Lear,” which has the advantage of
knowledge) as its moral and legal antithesis. being the topic of a free paper, beginning, “Through the
Franklin argued that the immorality lay in course of the play, King Lear goes through a process of
the fences that intellectual property erected, attaining self-knowledge, or true vision of one’s self and
which, preserving knowledge for the rich and the world. With this knowledge, he goes through a change
of person, much like a caterpillar into a butterfly” (“Self-
powerful, prevented its free circulation. Discovery”). It’s easy to avoid such essays by asking your
Database is beginning to make scholarly students to plagiarize better databases, like The Oxford En
work (previously the mystified privilege of an glish Dictionary or the online “Shakespeare in Quarto” at
elite) available to anyone who’s interested in the British Library or the First Folio and promptbooks at
the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image. If
doing it. One group (much despised by the you ask silly questions, you deserve silly answers.
academy) doing such work is amateur gene- There is nothing silly in writing about blindness in
alogists who have trained themselves in pa- King Lear. What is silly is for a teacher who has read, say,
leography, codicology, databases, and a range Stanley Cavell’s brilliant analysis of the topic to expect
students to come up with original versions of it, which
of other subjects that academics do not have
will be judged by the degree to which they depart from
the time to learn because they are too busy Cavell and the degree to which they reproduce Cavell;
accrediting students (and one another) and they will inevitably fall short on both counts. It would be
tracking down cases of plagiarism. I am no a better exercise to ask students to commonplace “eyes,”
particular fan of genealogy. But it certainly “blind,” etc., in King Lear and to see which passages
Cavell has not commented on and what difference they
produces more substantial knowledge than might make to his argument.
ranking academics and universities and per- 2. For my discussion of the material practices of
secuting students who are held to a standard commonplacing, I am deeply indebted to Francis Goyet’s
account of Philip Melanchthon in an unpublished essay That Franklin had no intention of deception in this, as in any
on Hamlet. of his other borrowings, is made clear by his proud claim to

3. Folsom quotes Lev Manovich’s “most provocative be imitating Plutarch for the modern age. For his other bor-
claim” that “the database represents the world as a list rowings, see for instance Poor Richard’s defense of the fact
of items, and it refuses to order this list.” But it’s worth that “not many of [my verses] are of my own Making”:
noting the profound shock caused to Christianity by the I know as well as thee, that I am no poet born; and it
alphabetization of knowledge in the Middle Ages. The is a trade I never learnt, nor indeed could learn. . . .
alphabet, as a technology of ordering knowledge, cre- Why then should I give my readers bad lines of my
ates “a list of items” whose only principle of order is its own, when good ones of other people’s are so plenty?
randomness. When theologians and scholars alphabet- ’Tis methinks a poor excuse for the bad entertain-
ized knowledge, they sacrificed a sense-making hierarchy ment of guests, that the food we set before them,
(from God to the angels to humans and so on down the though coarse and ordinary, is of one’s own raising,
scale) for the sake of the easy retrieval of information. off one’s own plantation, etc. when there is plenty of
Indeed, the alphabetical system that we take for granted what is ten times better, to be had in the market.
was at first resisted, because it led to arbitrary relations (Poor Richard 2)
between words, to logical inversions in which the created
preceded the creator (filia ‘daughter’ coming before pater For a fuller account of Franklin’s writing practices, see
‘father,’ angelus ‘angel’ before deus ‘God’), and to inver- Green and Stallybrass 3–23.
sions of social hierarchy (filia ‘daughter’ coming before
filius ‘son,’ mater ‘mother’ before pater ‘father’ [Daly
69–84]). The battle between narrative and database is a
general structural problem in the ordering and retriev-
Works Cited
ing of knowledge, not a specific historical event. And the Barthes, Roland. I mage-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen
desire to transform persistent synchronic tensions into a Heath. London: Fontana, 1977.
single moment of diachronic rupture replaces historical Bilson, Thomas. The True Difference betweene Christian
difference with a phantasmatic historicism. Subiection and Vnchristian Rebellion. Oxford: John
4. See Genesis 41.41–45: “And Pharaoh said unto Jo- Barnes, 1585.
seph, See, I have set thee over all the land of Egypt. And Blair, Ann. “Note-Taking as an Art of Transmission.”
Pharaoh took off his ring from his hand, and put it upon Critical Inquiry 31 (2004): 85–107.
Joseph’s hand, and arrayed him in vestures of fine linen, ———. “Reading Strategies for Coping with Information
and put a gold chain about his neck; And he made him to Overload, ca. 1550–1700.” Journal of the History of
ride in the second chariot which he had; and they cried Ideas 64 (2003): 11–28.
before him, Bow the knee: and he made him ruler over Bodenham, John. Bel-vedére; or, The Garden of the Muses.
all the land of Egypt. And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, I London: Hugh Astley, 1600.
am Pharaoh, and without thee shall no man lift up his Bull, Henry. Christian Praiers and Holie Meditations.
hand or foot in all the land of Egypt. And Pharaoh called London: Henry Middleton, 1578.
Joseph’s name Zaphnath-paaneah; and he gave him to Carruthers, Mary. The Craft of Thought: Meditation,
wife Asenath the daughter of Poti- pherah priest of On. Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200. New
And Joseph went out over all the land of Egypt.” For the York: Cambridge UP, 1998.
relevant scenes in Lego in The Brick Testament, see Smith Cavell, Stanley. “The Avoidance of Love. A Reading of
(“Pharaoh’s Dream” and “Jacob”). King Lear.” Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shake-
5. I am deeply indebted to Michael Warner for draw- speare. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. 39–123.
ing this passage to my attention and for his brilliant Chartier, Roger. Forms and Meanings: Texts, Perfor-
observations on it and on Franklin more generally. mances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer.
Franklin’s account of the bee and the fly is itself “plagia- Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1995.
rized,” as he would have been the first to acknowledge, Clapham, Henoch. Henoch Clapham His Demaundes and
from Plutarch’s Moralia: Answeres Touching the Pestilence. Middelburg: Rich-
[L]ike as Bees have this propertie by nature to finde ard Schilders, 1604.
and sucke the mildest and best honie, out of the Daly, Lloyd W. Contributions to a History of Alphabeti-
sharpest and most eager flowers; yea and from among zation in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Collection
the roughest and most prickly thornes: even so chil- Latomus 90. Brussels: Latomus, 1967.
dren and yoong men if they be well nourtured and Deacon, John. A Summarie Ansvvere to Al the Material
orderly inured in the reading of Poemes, will learne Points in Any of Master Darel His Bookes. London:
after a sort to draw alwaies some holesome and profit- George Bishop, 1601.
able doctrine or other, even out of those places which Digby, Everard. Euerard Digbie His Dissuasiue. London:
moove suspition of lewd and absurd sense. (43) Robert Robinson and Thomas Newman, 1590.
Erasmus, Desiderius. Adages I.i.1 to I.v.100. Trans. Mar- 31 Jan. 2001. Dept. of Hist., Gettysburg Coll. 18 May

garet Mann Phillips. Annotated by R. A. B. Mynors. 2007 <http://w ww3.gettysburg.edu/~tshannon/his341/
Collected Works of Erasmus. Toronto: U of Toronto colonialamer.htm>. Path: New England Primer 1805.
P, 1982. New-England Primer Improved: For the More Easy At-
Fenner, Dudley. The Artes of Logike and Rethorike. Mid- taining the True Reading of English. Boston: A. Elli-
delburg: R. Schilders, 1584. son, 1773. Religion and the Founding of the American
Foxe, John. John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs: Actes and Monu- Republic. Lib. of Cong. 18 May 2007 <http://w ww.loc
ments of Matters Most Speciall and Memorable. Hu- .gov/e xhibits/religion/>. Path: Object Checklist; Mr.
manities Research Inst. U of Sheffield. 18 May 2007 John Rogers.
<http://w ww.hrionline.ac.uk/johnfoxe/>. Norden, John. A Sinfull Mans Solace. London: Richard
Franklin, Benjamin. Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography. Jones, 1585.
Ed. J. A. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall. New York: Nor- Online Books Page. U of Pennsylvania. 26 Apr. 2007
ton, 1986. <http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/>.
———. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin. Vol. 2. Ed. Leon- Painter, William. The Palace of Pleasure. London: Rich-
ard W. Labaree et al. New Haven: Yale UP, 1959– . 37 ard Tottell and William Jones, 1566.
vols. to date. Pastorius, Francis Daniel. Francis Daniel Pastorius, His
———. Poor Richard, 1747. Philadelphia: Benjamin Frank- Hive, Melliotrophium Alvear; or, Rusca Apium, Begun
lin, [1746]. Anno Do[mi]ni; or, In the Year of Christian Account
Fraunce, Abraham. The Lawiers Logike. London: Thomas 1696. Ms. 726. Dept. of Special Collections, Van Pelt
Gubbin and T. Newman, 1588. Lib., U of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
Goyet, Francis. “Hamlet and the Commonplace Tradi- Perkins, William. A Discourse of Conscience. Cambridge:
tion.” Trans. Yvonne Freccero. Unpublished essay, John Legate, 1596.
Mar. 1999.
Plutarch. “How a Yoong Man Ought to Heare Poets, and
Green, James N., and Peter Stallybrass. Benjamin Frank- How He May Take Profit by Reading Poemes.” The
lin: Writer and Printer. New Castle: Oak Knoll; Phila- Morals. Trans. Philemon Holland. London: J. Kirton,
delphia: Lib. Company of Philadelphia; London: 1657. 17–50.
British Lib., 2006.
Rogers, Thomas. A Philosophicall Discourse. London: An-
Holy Bible. King James Vers. New York: Meridian, 1974.
drew Maunsell, 1576.
Lever, Ralph. The Arte of Reason. London: H. Bynneman,
Rollock, Robert. An Exposition vpon Some Select Psalmes
1573.
of David. Edinburgh: Robert Walde, 1600.
Merbecke, John. A Booke of Notes and Common Places.
———. A Treatise of Gods Effectual Calling. London: Felix
London: Thomas East, 1581.
Kingston, 1603.
Metropolitan Museum of Art. 2007. 18 May 2007 <http://
Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image. U of
www.metmuseum.org/home.asp>.
Pennsylvania. 26 Apr. 2007 <http://d ewey. library
Montaigne Project. U of Chicago. 18 May 2007 <http://
.upenn.edu/s ceti/flash.cfm?CFID=2314660&CF TOKEN=
www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/montaigne/>.
38054303>.
National Gallery. 18 May 2007 <http://w ww.nationalgallery
“Self-Discovery in King Lear.” 123HelpMe.com. 2005. 26 Apr.
.org.uk/collection/default.htm>.
2007 <http://www.123helpme.com/view.asp?id=17315>.
National Gallery of Art. 2007. 18 May 2007 <http://w ww
Shakespeare, William. The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet,
.nga.gov/>.
Prince of Denmarke. London: Nicholas Ling, 1604.
New-England Primer Improved: Being an Easy Method
to Teach Young Children the English Language. New Smith, Brendan Powell. “Jacob and Joseph Die.” The Brick
York: Daniel D. Smith, 1807. History 341: Colonial Testament. 18 May 2007 <http://www.thebricktestament
America Homepage. Comp. Timothy J. Shannon. .com/genesis/jacob_and_joseph_die/gn50_26b.html>.
31 Jan. 2001. Dept. of Hist., Gettysburg Coll. 18 May ———. “Pharaoh’s Dream.” The Brick Testament. 18 May
2007 <http://w ww3.gettysburg.edu/~tshannon/his341/ 2007 <http://w ww.thebricktestament. com/g enesis/
colonialamer.htm>. Path: New England Primer 1807. pharaohs_dream/gn41_43.html>.
New-England Primer Improved: For the More Easy At- World Wide Study Bible. Calvin Coll. 26 Apr. 2007
taining the True Reading of English. Albany: Whiting, <http://w ww.ccel.org/w wsb/>.
Backus, and Whiting, 1805. History 341: Colonial Yates, James. The Castell of Courtesie. London: John
America Homepage. Comp. Timothy J. Shannon. Wolfe, 1582.
Database, Interface, and
Archival Fever
jerome mcgann emerges from a core framework consisting of
two parts: an inline markup structure (XML)
and an XSL-generated interface. Together
[ i ] they allow users to access and—through an
X-query-based search engine—manipulate
Ed Folsom’s presentation of Whitman’s The Walt Whitman Archive in the ways that
work as many-faceted and multidimensional Folsom rightly celebrates.
is true and important. “[H]is work resists You will think I am being pedantic, and
the constraints of single book objects.” In- in a certain respect I am. But accuracy here is
deed. “[T]he entity we call Leaves of Grass important. Folsom’s central double theme—
is actually a group of numerous things. . . .” that database is a genre displacing book-based
Just so. These are some of the characteris- narrative genres and that The Walt Whitman
tics not only of Whitman’s work but of all Archive exhibits this displacement—misrep-
imaginative works, which are by their nature resents both the archive and the functional
multidimensional. Some—like Whitman’s character of works of this kind, which are
works—foreground their multidimensional now fairly widespread and will only grow
qualities. Folsom and Ken Price undertook more so. No database can function without
their project because they registered the truth a user interface, and in the case of cultural
of Whitman’s f launting declaration: “I am materials the interface is an especially crucial
large, I contain multitudes.” element of these kinds of digital instruments.
But then Folsom, happy with the schol- Interface embeds, implicitly and explicitly,
arly opportunities made possible by digital many kinds of hierarchical and narrativized
technology, goes on to construct a tale (dare organizations. Indeed, the database—any da-
I say a narrative?) about the The Walt Whit- tabase—represents an initial critical analysis
man Archive as an example of “a new genre, of the content materials, and while its struc-
the genre of the twenty-first century.” This ture is not narrativized, it is severely con-
genre is “database,” and the Whitman archive strained and organized. The free play offered
is one of its incarnations: the “archive is, in to the user of such environments is at least as
actuality or virtuality, a database.” much a function of interface design as it is of
This statement is seriously misleading— its data structure—whether that structure be
more accurately, it is metaphoric, like Derri- a database structure or, as in the case of The
da’s use of the term archive in his well-known Walt Whitman Archive, a markup structure.
book of 1995, Archive Fever, which has been so As humanities scholarship and its inher-
important for the story Folsom is telling. The ited archives migrate into their digital condi-
Walt Whitman Archive is not—in any sense tions and sets of practices, it’s crucial to be clear
that a person meaning to be precise would about what is involved and how we want to
use—a database at all. What Folsom calls shape the changes that are under way. I honor
the archive’s “rhizomorphous” organization Folsom’s enthusiasm about our “twenty-first
does not emerge from a database structure. It century” opportunities and his adventurous
Jerome McGANN, the John Stewart Bryan University Professor, University of Virginia, is the director of NINES (Networked Infrastruc-
ture for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship [www.nines.org]) and the editor of The Rossetti Archive (www.rossettiarchive
.org). His two most recent books are the companion volumes The Scholar’s Art: Literature and Scholarship in an Administered World
(U of Chicago P, 2006) and The Point Is to Change It: Poetry and Criticism in the Continuing Present (U of Alabama P, 2007).
scholarly spirit in collaborating on the Whit- .org])—now evolved into XML—became a

man archive. But Folsom’s essay introduces a standard for digitizing literary works for a
loose way of thinking about our paper-based reason. There are good reasons why The Walt
inheritance as well as about these new digital Whitman Archive is not a database.
technologies, and that looseness endangers the Let’s be clear. The TEI and XML do not
work he has committed himself to. adequately address the problem of knowledge
This looseness does not originate in Fol- representation that is the core issue here—that
som, however; its source is Lev Manovich’s is, how do we design and build digital simula-
The Language of New Media, often cited by tions that meet our needs for studying works
humanists who get excited about digital tech- like Whitman’s?—but they get a lot further
nology. Folsom extrudes his idea that the along with that task than do database models.
database is “the” genre of the twenty-first They are better because they model some of
century from passages like the following: the key forms of order that are already embed-
ded in textual works like Whitman’s. They are
After the novel, and subsequently cinema, better because they understand that works like
privileged narrative as the key form of cul- poems and novels are already marked data.
tural expression of the modern age, the A deeper problem with Manovich’s in-
computer age introduces its correlate—the fluential commentary comes from his ideas
database. Many new media objects do not
about the “privileged narrative” order of pre-
tell stories; they do not have a beginning or
digital works like poems and novels. So in
end; in fact, they do not have any develop-
ment, thematically, formally, or otherwise place of “grand Narratives of Enlightenment”
that would organize their elements into a se- like, say, Clarissa or Don Juan or War and
quence. Instead, they are collections of indi- Peace, we are to imagine a future—a twenty-
vidual items, with every item possessing the first century—democratically liberated from
same significance as any other. their single-minded clutches. Folsom’s es-
say wavers on the question of whether our
This kind of talk debases our understand- received literary works are “privileged nar-
ing of the matters being discussed, which are ratives” requiring fractal redemption, as we
far more interesting and complex than such see when he writes that “database begins to
a pronouncement suggests. “Narrative,” even reveal that it has been with us all along, in the
“privileged narrative,” is as ancient a form of guises of those literary works we have always
cultural expression as we know. And so far as had trouble assigning to a genre—Moby-Dick,
narrative goes, “the modern age”—presum- ‘Song of Myself,’ the Bible.”
ably, here, the modernist twentieth century— Perhaps there are sheep and goats, and
is famous for the inventive ways it fractured these are examples from the sheepfold. But
and overthrew narrative, especially “privi- in this context we want to remember Walter
leged narrative.” But Manovich needs an easy Benjamin’s trenchant remark “Every docu-
binary to install the progressivist story that ment of civilization is at the same time a doc-
underpins The Language of New Media. ument of barbarism.” The point is that all our
For scholars interested in migrating our documents are always multiply coded and that
cultural inheritance to digital environments, scholarship preserves and studies the multiple
databases are by no means the most useful meanings. If pressed, Folsom would surely
tools for the task—or for the related critical agree that anyone could reach back into our
tasks of investigating and rediscovering those cultural inheritance and pluck out, in place
materials. The inline markup approach of the of his three examples, three others. For the
Text Encoding Initiative (TEI [www.tei‑c truth is that imaginative work, as an imitation
of life, is necessarily n‑dimensional, protean, erization and textual criticism. His remarks
shifting: as another poet said, “Changeable addressed two ways that scholars were using
too, yet somehow idem semper” (Byron 17.11). digital tools: for electronic storage of large
Is the “democratic beauty” of Whitman’s work corpora and for the dynamic modeling of
any more complex or open than the God- textual materials. McKenzie saw modeling
haunted and authoritarian Bible or than the as the more interesting prospect, even if it
savage and aristocratic beauty of the Iliad? would “represent a radical departure” from
I pose that rhetorical question because it his central “article of bibliographical faith”:
exposes a second large problem with Folsom’s “the primacy of the physical artifact (and the
essay. Drawing on Derrida’s representation of evidence it bears of its own making)” (259).
books and the archives that house them, Fol- McKenzie was a great theorist of the ar-
som contrasts what he sees as the flexibility chives in which he spent his radiantly dryas-
of database with the rigidity of museums and dust life as a scholar. “Rigidity is a quality of
libraries. Riffing on Derrida’s “archive fever” our categorical systems . . . ,” Folsom tells us,
as an infection spawned by the archive’s phys- and in celebrating the idea of a transgeneric
icalities, Folsom tells us that database he looks to escape those categori-
cal imperatives. But databases and all digital
archives reify the period they record. They instruments require the most severe kinds of
contain not only the records of a period but its categorical forms. The power of database—of
artifacts as well, their dust the debris of tox- digital instruments in general—rests in its abil-
ins and chemicals and disease that went into
ity to draw sharp, disambiguated distinctions.
making the paper and glue and inks, that went
Libraries and museums—let’s call them
into processing the animal skins that wrap the
books we open and, in the dusty light, read archives—also deploy categorical systems and
and inhale. When we emerge from an archive, subsystems (“cross-references”). No more than
we are physically and mentally altered. databases do these complex systems exhaust,
or define, the multiple possible paths through
Such fulsome prose is partly a Folsom jeu. But which we may negotiate and (so to say) narra-
Folsom isn’t just kidding around; this view of tivize our way(s) through these great towers of
an archive as reified knowledge (and data- Babel. The power of a database is a function of
base as liberated knowledge) runs as a theme its elementary abstract structure. But therein
through his essay. Implicit in the idea is a now lie the advantage and the disadvantage of a
common but lamentable misunderstanding database compared with an indexing system
about libraries, museums, and the works they like a card catalog. The physicality of an ar-
preserve and transmit. The misunderstanding chive’s categorical system shows a flexibility
is especially dismal in this context because that a database does not have, because a card
we will not design and build effective digi- catalog is itself an interfaced database.
tal tools and archival repositories—a task we Moreover, the physicality of the card cat-
now have clearly before us and that Folsom alog allows useful interventions in the “rigid-
and Price have themselves embarked on—un- ity” of the library’s categorical substructure.
less we work from an adequate understanding The notations, typed or written, added to hand
of our paper-based inheritance. catalogs graphically demonstrate the histori-
cal dimensions licensed by these traditional
archival systems. Leaves of Grass will have
[ ii ] many card entries in the catalog, and each of
In a late lecture, “What’s Past Is Prologue,” those cards will not only carry basic metadata,
D. F. McKenzie speculated briefly on comput- each will carry as well cross-references and the
notations of various archivists. In addition, anything threatens to “reify” the human ma-

because even the most well-established nota- terials we organize through systems like data-
tion systems undergo changes over time, the bases, it is the latter. The threat is avoidable, or
cards and entries bear the evidence of their can be mitigated, if we think carefully about
historical passage and making. Of course, we the character of the materials we are trying to
have to learn to use such instruments, as we model. A network of devices is needed—not
have to learn how to design and use databases. just hypermedia environments, imaging soft-
But that only brings us back to the basic point: ware, markup systems, databases, and search-
these tools are prosthetic devices, and they ing and data-mining tools but the complex
function most effectively when they help to administrative apparatuses that will control,
release the resources of the human mind—in as much as possible, the limitations as well as
short, when their interfaces are well designed. the capacities of these devices. Leaves of Grass
Archival-system design must build interfaces is many-splendored because of its complex
that allow user-initiated annotations to enrich production and reception histories, because it
the underlying data structure without com- has been repeatedly mediated and remediated.
promising its formal stability. “It” is more than one thing because people,
In considering how to design and build including Whitman, have continually sought
effective digital systems, we want to think and found different ways to use it and read it.
back through the physicality of card catalogs Toward the end of his essay, Folsom re-
to the materials these catalogs are designed marks on his “surprising realization” that a
to organize for our use. The dust and toxins “less visible database, the database of users”
and chemicals—every material aspect of “the has been growing along with the archive’s core
records of a period [and] its artifacts”—are data content. I don’t know if this “database
the minutest surviving particulars of the his- of users” is a fact or another figure of speech
torical process “that went into making” the for The Walt Whitman Archive. The last time
preserved work. And from that level we move I looked, the archive had not set up a data-
up to higher levels of historical facticity—for base to track its users and their types of use,
example, to the histories of the depositories though such a database would be an excellent
and of those who have made and used them. addition. Because the Whitman archive par-
Any system that intends to preserve and or- ticipates in the Networked Infrastructure for
ganize materials for critical analysis must do Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship
everything it can to “save these appearances” (NINES [www.nines.org])—an online, peer-
(see Barfield), integrate them, and make reviewed aggregation of nineteenth-century
them accessible for critical study. Databases British and American scholarship—it belongs
are useful parts of the digital systems we are to a digital environment designed to integrate
moving toward. Like pawns in chess, they are users into the intellectual life of a larger sys-
essential elements of the game. tem, which necessarily includes the intellec-
Everyone is impressed—or should be—by tual life of The Walt Whitman Archive. NINES
the n-dimensionality of literary works, and we materials exist in a distributed network of
are always developing tools, digital or not, to servers, not a central location, but its design is
analyze how they work, to help us think about such that (a) all these materials are aggregated
them critically. McKenzie understood, better for searching, collection, analysis, and reme-
than most, that the n-dimensionality of a lit- diation and (b) the individuals using NINES
erary work is a function of its historical char- and its materials are formally looped into
acter and that its historical dimensions are the system so that their activities can also be
coded in the work’s material circumstances. If searched, collected, analyzed, and remediated.
These critical operations are enabled not by a the agents who were involved in making and
database or a set of databases but by an open- transmitting the document. Folsom is right
source toolset, Collex, that represents data as when he says that “Leaves of Grass is actu-
a function of the histories of their use. ally a group of numerous things. . . .” This is
Reflecting on digital technology, McKen why databases cannot model such complex
zie saw that its simulation capacities were works. Scholars do not edit or study self-
forcing him to rethink a “primary article of identical texts. They reconstruct a complex
[his] bibliographical faith,” the material self- documentary record of textual makings and
identity of the archival object. He did not live remakings, in which their own scholarly in-
to undertake an editorial project in digital vestments directly participate.
form. Had he done so, he would have found
that his “social text” approach to scholarly
work was greatly and practically advanced by
the resources of digital technology. He would
have seen and embraced these technologies
Works Cited
because he understood the dynamic structure Barfield, Owen. Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idola-
try. New York: Harcourt, 1965.
of all archives and all their materials.
Byron. Don Juan. The Complete Poetical Works. Ed. Jerome
Editors and scholars engage with works McGann. Vol. 5. Oxford: Clarendon, 1980–93. 7 vols.
in process. Even if only one textual witness Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.
were to survive—say that tomorrow a manu- Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Religion and Postmodernism.
script of an unrecorded play by Shakespeare Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge:
were unearthed—that document would be
MIT P, 2001.
a record of the process of its making and its McGann, Jerome. “Marking Texts in Many Dimensions.”
transmission. Minimal as they might seem, A Companion to Digital Humanities. Ed. Susan
its user logs have not been erased, and they Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. Ox-
are essential evidence for anyone interested ford: Blackwell, 2004. 198–217.
McKenzie, D. F. “‘What’s Past Is Prologue.’” Making
in engaging with the work. We are interested Meaning: “Printers of the Mind” and Other Essays. Ed.
in documentary evidence because it encodes, Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez. Amherst:
however cryptically at times, the evidence of U of Massachusetts P, 2002. 259–75.
Remediating Whitman
meredith l. mcgill
such as The Walt Whitman Archive offer to
scholars and critics: unprecedented access to
Ed folsom’s prediction that digital data- rare or inaccessible materials; comprehensive-
bases will produce an “epic transformation” ness—that is, their seemingly infinite capac-
of archives is based on his firsthand knowl- ity to collect scattered texts and commentary,
edge of the benefits that new-media projects a capacity so much vaster than a book’s that
Meredith L. McGill, associate professor of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, is the author of American Literature and
the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (U of Pennsylvania P, 2003) and the editor of The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and
Transatlantic Exchange (Rutgers UP, 2008). She is working on a study of the circulation of poetry in the antebellum United States.
it holds out the promise of completeness; tographs, engravings, and printed editions

consolidation of different media, such as that are rare, expensive, unwieldy, or out of
manuscripts, images, and printed texts, into print. The general availability of these texts
a single, easily navigable digital format; and in digital form will undoubtedly transform
the open-endedness of the digital medium Whitman scholarship. As Michel Foucault
itself, a quality that points toward a utopian observes in describing the classificatory func-
future in which archival scholarship is bound tion of the author’s name,2 the addition of a
not by financial or physical constraints but significant number of texts to the oeuvre—
by the imaginations of its creators and users. making them newly or more readily part of
While Folsom does not claim that we have the canon—cannot help changing fundamen-
arrived at this future, he thinks we are con- tally what we mean by “Whitman.”
siderably further along this trajectory than But will the availability of these texts on
I do. Folsom sees the digital database as an a single digital platform transform our ways
opportunity to liberate Whitman’s writing of reading, permitting readers to follow “the
from “the constraints of single book objects,” webbed roots” of Whitman’s writing as they
and yet, as I hope to demonstrate, digital “zig and zag with everything”? Whatever
projects such as The Walt Whitman Archive centripetal forces might be unleashed by the
are significantly more dependent on print poetry itself, The Walt Whitman Archive re-
conventions than they need to be. Weighing lies on the centrifugal force of the idea of the
Folsom’s claims against the example of the book in order to consolidate and make coher-
Whitman archive, I will argue that Folsom ent a far messier archive of printed works.
describes not a transformation but a “reme- While this database is a work in progress and
diation” of archives. Jay David Bolter and the editors promise to add Whitman’s other
Richard Grusin coined this term to point to a published writing as time and funding per-
persistent characteristic of new media—their mit, the archive is currently organized around
imitation and incorporation of the medium the six major American editions of Leaves of
they seek to supersede. Despite the revolu- Grass (1855, 1856, 1860, 1867, 1871–72, 1881–
tionary capacities of the new technologies, 82, 1891–92). It is perhaps easiest to perceive
pioneering digital projects such as The Walt the consolidating force exerted by this series
Whitman Archive hew surprisingly closely to of identically titled books by considering the
normative ideas of the author and the work, a numerous other freestanding volumes that
conceptual and structural horizon that keeps might otherwise be listed under the heading
such projects from functioning in the radical Books: Whitman’s temperance novel Franklin
ways that Folsom describes. Evans (1842); the Civil War poetic sequences
I am a long-term, devoted user of The Drum-Taps (1865) and Sequel to Drum-Taps
Walt Whitman Archive. I simply can’t imag- (1865); the prose treatise Democratic Vistas
ine studying or teaching nineteenth-century (1871); Passage to India (1871), a collection of
American literature without it.1 But however poems published as a supplement to the 1871
grateful I am for its existence and however in- edition; the chapbook As a Strong Bird on
vested I am in its future, I don’t think that the Pinions Free (1872); and the prose-heavy later
archive delivers on the claims Folsom makes work, such as Memoranda during the War
for digital databases. Folsom is right to assert (1876), Two Rivulets (1876), Specimen Days
that his archive offers scholars, teachers, stu- and Collect (1882), November Boughs (1888),
dents, and ordinary readers unprecedented and Good-Bye My Fancy (1891). While detailed
access to Whitman’s texts, from dispersed, headnotes to each of the archive’s editions of
remote, and inaccessible manuscripts to pho- Leaves of Grass specify how poems from these
other volumes were incorporated and rear- ventions of the book, intensifying rather than
ranged within them, the effect of the archive’s sundering the ties between the two media.
design is to streamline Whitman’s writing so The digital medium doesn’t necessar-
that it begins with, gravitates toward, or or- ily deliver us from the perceived rigidities of
bits around the masterwork Leaves of Grass. print.3 Indeed, the editors of The Walt Whit-
The example of The Walt Whitman Archive man Archive have reproduced in the architec-
suggests that digital databases cannot in and ture of their site many of the constraints that
of themselves realize Wai Chee Dimock’s vi- Folsom claims in his essay to want to leave be-
sion of “an archive that errs on the side of hind, including mass culture’s reductive treat-
randomness rather than on the side of un- ment of genre. Far from providing an antidote
due coherence” (qtd. in Folsom). Indeed, the to the identification of Whitman with poetry,
promise of comprehensiveness and the sense the archive fosters this equation by failing to
of simultaneity produced by digital databases signal its own partiality, its noninclusion of the
pose problems for scholars interested in re- vast corpus of Whitman’s prose. The editors’
capturing the provisionality of Whitman’s decision to amplify the section of the Web site
writing—the experiments that were ventured devoted to Whitman’s biography before editing
and abandoned—as well as Whitman’s con- the prose suggests how mutually reinforcing
viction at various points in his career that a and productive the closed circuit of life-and-
particular edition of Leaves of Grass would be work criticism can be. Consider by contrast
his last. The comprehensiveness of the data- the “rhizomorphous” connections that might
base is a liability as well as a strength. Digitiz- have been encouraged by providing hyperlinks
ing archives makes it harder to see the partial to Whitman’s editorials in the Brooklyn Daily
nature of the printed record, the limited reach Eagle (www.brooklynpubliclibrary.org/eagle)
of print at any moment in history, and the su- or to his short fiction that is available through
persession of one edition by another. public-domain Web sites such as Making of
There are good reasons for the editors of America (cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/).4 Ex-
The Walt Whitman Archive to have focused on panding its purview beyond Leaves of Grass,
Leaves of Grass in the project’s initial stages. The Walt Whitman Archive recently added a
In an essay written to commemorate the tenth section on Whitman’s poems published in pe-
anniversary of the project (and posted on riodicals, complete with an image of the page
the Web site), Folsom’s codirector, Kenneth on which each poem appeared. And yet this
M. Price, details how the editors launched welcome addition to the site doesn’t really en-
The Walt Whitman Archive with threadbare able readers to “follow other root systems into
funding, struck deals to acquire digital texts the unknown.” Readers of the archive can
at minimal cost so that they could continue summon an image of a poem as it appears on
to offer free access to the site, won grants, a page of the Atlantic Monthly or the New York
recruited contributors, and substantially re- Herald, but they cannot turn that page. Peri-
designed the site in response to improved odicals are marshaled as important contexts
technologies and changing digital standards. for Whitman’s texts, but they are not indepen-
Their editorial choices have clearly been dent nodes capable of launching a new inves-
shaped by such contingencies but also by the tigation. The Walt Whitman Archive gestures
need to make the project legible and valuable toward the world outside Whitman’s writing
to scholars, teachers, and students still oper- but zigs and zags mostly within itself.
ating in a codex-dominated world. In reme- What would it take to realize Folsom’s
diating Whitman, they have staked the value vision of a database that allows readers to
of the digital database on fidelity to the con- follow Whitman’s writing as it “darts off in
unexpected ways”? New ideas about database “cloud visualizations” of related search terms

architecture and new developments in tech- created by other readers, terms that invite the
nology promise to take the digital humanities reader to use the database in unanticipated
beyond the familiar confines of the author ways. Readers can also create their own tags
and the work. Take, for example, The Vault for the items they retrieve. The system’s incor-
at Pfaff’s (digital.lib.lehigh.edu/pfaffs), a Web poration of the connections that readers con-
site that focuses on the literature and social struct between and among texts produces a
commentary of a group of nineteenth-century distributed database, one that responds to the
bohemians, including Whitman, who met at ways it is used. The Collex interface promises
Pfaff’s beer cellar to drink, cruise, argue, and to decenter the architecture of the database.
exchange ideas. This digital project is built These are still early days for the digital hu-
around the Saturday Evening Press, a literary manities. It seems premature to call database
weekly that published the writing of many of a genre—to assimilate it to a system of liter-
the Pfaff’s bohemians. The site is designed not ary classification—when we are only just dis-
only to provide access to this rare periodical covering what databases can do for the study
but also to encourage readers to track the in- of literature. Rather than take Whitman’s
tersecting lives of more than 150 individuals interchangeable lines to be the primary data
who crossed paths at the beer hall and to call of a poetic algorithm that boldly defies narra-
critical attention to the handful of literary tive, why not use hypertext to enable readers
and social groups that formed or met there. to identify and compare the many rhetorical
The Vault at Pfaff’s provides access not to the structures, both smaller and larger than the
works of an author but to the social locations line, that Whitman uses to hold his poem
of culture, drawing readers’ attention to the together? Scholars such as Folsom who have
jostling of coteries and to points of overlap done the hard work of marking up Whitman’s
between and among discourses. In The Vault texts know better than anyone how complexly
at Pfaff’s, a reader encounters Whitman’s po- organized—at multiple levels—they are. Digi-
ems alongside other poems, tales, and social tal technology could be used to create an edi-
commentary; one can follow his response to tion of Leaves of Grass that would allow the
criticism, imitations, and parodies and catch comparison of modes of address in the poems,
the poet in the process of developing a rec- or one that would track Whitman’s shifting
ognizable style. The Vault at Pfaff ’s breaks of poems into different sections and subsec-
new ground by venturing beyond the mutu- tions, his construction and dismantling of
ally stabilizing categories of author and work, clusters and enumerated series. Or a database
mapping cultural and social connections that that would place the 1856 edition in the com-
have yet to be adequately traced in print. pany of other books published and sold by the
More dramatically, the Collex interface phrenologists Fowler and Wells—if a group of
developed at the University of Virginia and scholars willing and able to take on the task
launched as part of Jerome McGann’s NINES of producing one could be found. Like their
project (www.nines.org) is designed to break printed predecessors, digital scholarly tools
down barriers between digital databases. Ac- are limited by financial and physical con-
cessing The Walt Whitman Archive through straints as well as by the imaginations of their
the Collex interface allows readers to search creators and users. If we misconstrue media
relevant databases, such as The Rossetti Ar- shift as liberation, we are likely to settle for
chive and The Swinburne Project, at a single less than the new technologies can offer us.
stroke. When a user conducts a search with
the Collex interface, the program generates
Notes scription database American Periodical Series (APS)
suggests that there are significant material obstacles to

1. In the interests of full disclosure and of collegial tying the threads that digital media can weave so well.
encouragement, I should also note that I am a financial And yet including a bibliographic list of Whitman’s prose
contributor to the archive. At some point last fall when fin- fiction in The Walt Whitman Archive would help counter-
ishing an essay on Whitman, I realized I had depended so act its emphasis on Whitman’s poetry and might encour-
heavily on this database that it was only appropriate to sup- age readers with access to APS to toggle back and forth
port it financially. I would encourage all regular users of the between the two sites.
archive to help the editors meet the three-to-one matching
requirements of the grant they were recently awarded by
the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Web site
makes contributing easy by including a link to the Univer- Works Cited
sity of Nebraska Foundation on the home page. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Un-
2. Foucault delineates some of the relations we might derstanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT P, 1999.
expect critics to find between and among texts that are Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” The Foucault Reader.
marked by the author’s name: “homogeneity, filiation, Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon, 1984. 101–20.
authentication of some texts by the use of others, recip- Jackson, Virginia. Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric
rocal explication, or concomitant utilization” (107). Reading. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005.
3. Virginia Jackson argues that even experimental elec- Price, Kenneth M. “The Walt Whitman Archive at Ten: Some
tronic editions of the writing of Emily Dickinson rely on and Backward Glances and Vistas Ahead.” The Walt Whit-
perpetuate assumptions about printed lyric poems (50–53). man Archive. Ed. Ed Folsom and Price. 10 Apr. 2007
4. That a good deal of Whitman’s early prose is digi- <http://w ww.whitmanarchive.org/articlesAboutArchive/
tally available only to those who have access to the sub- anc.00008>.
Whitman, Database,
Information Culture
organizing bits and bytes of knowledge but as
jonathan freedman the basis of a new genre—a contemporary ver-
sion of epic—that generates a new process of
cultural, social, and (it seems) global commu-
I’m writing these words from my office at nity making. Indeed, Google has come in for
the University of Michigan, next door to the some trenchant criticism of late, most notably
massive Harlan Hatcher Memorial Library, from the Society of Authors, worried about the
somewhere in whose bowels (no one knows violation of copyright laws, and from the chief
exactly where) books are being carted off to— librarian of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Jean-
well, again, no one knows exactly where—to be Noël Jeanneney, who complains that Google’s
digitized by the new thousand-pound gorilla endeavor extends the imperatives of the mar-
of the American high-tech industry, Google. ket and of United States cultural imperialism
The cloak-and-dagger quality of the project into the information society of the future. But
(also under way at seven other libraries around Google’s aspiration—and much of its rheto-
the world) might strike us as oddly antitheti- ric—has the same utopian ring as Folsom’s.
cal to the celebratory spirit of Ed Folsom’s in- According to Mark Sandler, a researcher at the
vocation of database not just as a new way of University of Michigan, the digitizing project
jonathan freedman, professor of English and American studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, is the author of books
on Henry James and British aestheticism, Jews and the making of Anglo-American high culture, and, most recently, Klezmer
America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity, forthcoming from Columbia University Press.
will replicate and extend the success of a pi- bilities, marked by exhilarating new forms

lot project to digitize ten thousand “low use” and vehicles of knowledge, made accessible to
monographs, which elicited everyone on the planet with an Internet con-
nection. On the other, it generates an ever-
between 500,000 and one million hits per i ncreasing need for guidance, classification,
month. In the past, these works were accessible or just plain ordering: how else are we going
to a base population of 40,000 students, faculty, to make sense of all the stuff that bombards
and staff. That’s about four readers for each book
us from every possible source? The more data
included in the project. When electronic ver-
we have access to, the more we need aggre-
sions of these works were made accessible to the
entire world, suddenly 40,000 potential readers gators and entrepreneurs of information like
became 4 billion, and the odds of consumer in- Folsom and the Googlizers; the more we are
terest jumped from 4:1 to 400,000:1. (18) freed to experience and construct our own
world of knowledge through Google searches
Underneath the cool technologese, the aspi- and Web crawling, the more dependent we
ration is clear: today the Harlan Hatcher Li- become on the ways in which those searches
brary, tomorrow the world! and databases are constructed for us. To cel-
Let me be clear: I find both projects, Fol- ebrate the branching, rooting, rhizomic, pro-
som’s and Google’s, incredibly useful. Surely liferating quality of database—to celebrate
no one teaching Whitman for the first (or database as a kind of autonomous form, root-
even the seven hundredth) time would want ing and branching by a logic of its own—is
to forgo The Walt Whitman Archive, with its (in this case, somewhat weirdly) to downplay
easy access to insights into the texts and vari- the inclusions, exclusions, choices that have
ants that compose the poet’s massive corpus, gone into the making of databases and hence
its masterly biographical sketch, and its mul- to occlude the possibilities for questioning
titude of links to the criticism of Whitman’s those choices. Not to get too Frankfurt school
contemporaries (not to mention those sample about it, but the seeming conditions of our
syllabi!). Just as surely, no one doing research freedom—our increasing access to a world of
would want to forgo the amazing search ca- information—only conceal our greater con-
pacities that Google puts literally at one’s fin- straint. Quis ipsos custodiat the databasers?
gertips: hours spent at the library or, at best, How we might negotiate this conun-
searching concordances now telescope into drum remains an open question, one that I
microseconds; the Boolean ability to link het- want briefly to address with respect to Walt
erogeneous subjects and find once-occulted Whitman, the source of Folsom’s enterprise.
connections and interconnections makes Folsom’s own rhetoric is remarkably Whit-
scholarship invigoratingly fun. Yet the rheto- manesque, in its ever-expanding aspirations,
ric used in both cases makes me, as utopian its attempt to argue for a new creative form as
rhetoric always does, a tad nervous, and I conveying a new mode of apprehension that
want briefly to explore the sum and substance reinvigorates the older modality of epic, and
of my skepticism. These visions, impressive its vaunting self-celebration. The same expan-
in their sweep and totalizing in their ambi- sive ambition (although not the same concern
tions, celebrate the contours of experience with new literary forms) is evident in the
in an information society—a world in which rhetoric of the Googlizers. There is, I think,
cascades of data make greater and greater a reason for this: the deep continuity between
claims on our lives and those of our students. Whitman’s experience and our own. No less
But such a world is paradoxical. On the one than we do, Whitman lived in the midst of an
hand, it is a space of ever-expanding possi- information revolution, one that can be (and
has been) dated as early as the invention of the In Whitman’s city, newspapers are not just one
printing press but that spun with increasing potential subject of interest; since virtually ev-
rapidity in mid-to-late-nineteenth-century ery topic Whitman cites as fascinating to his
America, as high literacy rates, extensive (but fellow citizens and himself would have been
not universal) education, the rise of steam- mediated through these papers, the city seems a
driven printing presses, the move to pulp and palimpsest of print—in Folsom’s terms, a gigan-
hence to cheap paper all combined to make the tic database, accessible to all. Whitman’s vision
production and dissemination of information is also Google-like in its understanding that the
a national and—somewhat problematically interests of others determine what becomes in-
to foreign copyright holders—a worldwide teresting, the way Google’s subjects are ordered
industry. The United States became an enor- by a complex algorithm that records the num-
mous market for letters, a place where books ber of links to (and in) any given Web site, so
sold in the tens or hundreds of thousands, that what one receives and the order in which
where new publishing houses like Harper’s one receives it come constructed by the interests
found innovative ways to publish and mar- and preferences of one’s fellow Net citizens.
ket books, where mass-market magazines But what we might, adapting Manuel
like Godey’s Lady’s Book and newspapers like Castells’s term, call Whitman’s “informa-
the New York Herald—or, for that matter, the tional city” is also a place where the profusion
Brooklyn Daily Eagle—circulated news, opin- of data renders the conditions of acquir-
ions, advertisements, and announcements, ing knowledge—here defined in purely op-
creating in their wake new publics with new erational terms, as the shaping of data into
demands for new products as periodicals were patterned or ordered structures of signifi-
borne across an expanding nation by the new cance—problematic.2 Note how in the lines
railroad-augmented postal service. in which Whitman describes this city, cas-
I rehearse these well-known facts to re- cading data, heterogeneous objects, events,
mind us that Whitman was an intensely and social facts are brought together into
one amalgamated yet mobile agglomeration:
engaged participant in this information
wars, stocks, schools, banks, tariffs, personal
revolution—a “huckster author,” Folsom ob-
and real estate all wheel into one another,
serves, but much more as well. He was, after
jostle about, command attention and then
all, a reporter, an editor of many newspapers,
yield it to the next item on the list. The effect
a published author who was aware of the vi-
is simultaneously to blur the distinction be-
cissitudes of copyright,1 and, most impor-
tween the items in the catalog—in these lines,
tant, a public intellectual whose relation to
at least, a war is of no more consequence than
the cosmopolis—and to the social landscape
a real estate transaction—and to establish the
for which it serves as a prototype—was pro-
sense of a contingent, vague, metonymic rela-
foundly mediated by the burgeoning new print
tion between the objects, topics, and sources
media. As he writes in “Song of Myself”:
of speculation thereby enumerated. Whit-
man observed, according to Horace Traubel,
This is the city, and I am one of the citizens,
Whatever interests the rest interests me,
that “[t]he newspaper is so fleeting, is so like a
politics, wars, markets, newspapers, thing gone as quick as come; has no life so to
schools, speak, its birth and death coterminous”—so
The mayor and councils, banks, tariffs, too the city, or at least the city considered
steamships, factories, stocks, stores, (and responded to) as database (qtd. in Larson
real estate and personal estate. 106). The urban locus, and, by extension, con-
(lines 1075–77) temporary experience itself, is for Whitman
a space where information flows—not only a ment enacted by the elision of the verb in the

place (as David Henkin has argued) articu- last clause, a Whitmanism profoundly ex-
lated by buildings and street signs, by vagrant pressive in the context of database; the verb,
scraps of newsprint and books or pamphlets, being nowhere, is everywhere, the world ren-
but an infoscape where encoded bits of data dered in process and motion (“Chants” 155).3
imprint themselves successively on the avid Such a development, Whitman knew, would
subject seeking to make sense of the world. create not only a new American infoscape but
Whitman’s poetry offers a phenomenol- also a transnational (or at least transatlantic)
ogy of experience in a world organized by the one. Indeed, this possibility of an enlarged
relentless flood of information and offers it- global culture made possible by the alliance
self as a kind of a mimesis of such a world. It of print and telegraph is articulated most
offers as well a critical understanding of the fully in “Passage to India” (1871), where the
technological changes that make these pro- “seas inlaid with eloquent gentle wires” are
cesses happen in the first place. Information one of the three great world-unifying “mod-
flow is not merely an inevitable result of the ern wonders” that Whitman celebrates, along
extension and burgeoning of print culture but with the completion of the Suez Canal and of
also a consequence of the rise of the telegraph, the transcontinental railroad (346).
which facilitated—even demanded—the dis- To be sure, we are now in view of the par-
semination of a wide variety of data across a ticular combination of cultural imperialism
broad swath of the world. As a contemporary and desire for universal knowledge that Jean-
British observer wrote: neney attributes to the Google project. Seeing
the genealogical connection here might be one
The American telegraph, invented by Professor way of culturally placing database and Google
Morse . . . employed in transmitting messages rhetoric, of seeing them as American projects,
to and from bankers, merchants, members at least in the scope of their imaginative am-
of Congress, officers of government, brokers, bitions. But more useful to us now, perhaps, is
and police officers; parties who by agreement Whitman’s attempt to register in the form as
have to meet each other at two stations, or well as the matter of his poetry what it means
have been sent for by one of the parties; items to live in a world of eddying information.
of news, election returns, announcements Consider, for example, the device that Folsom
of deaths, inquiries respecting the health of appropriately cites as the one that takes Whit-
families and individuals, daily proceedings of
man closest to internalizing database into his
the Senate and the House of Representatives,
work: catalog. Here Folsom is on his strongest
orders for goods, inquiries respecting the sail-
ing of vessels, proceedings of cases in various
ground in his Whitmanesque suggestion that
courts, summoning of witnesses, messages database represents the renovation of a differ-
for express trains, invitations, the receipt of ent, collective genre into epic, for epic catalog,
money at one station and its payment at an- as Eric Havelock suggested, had an informa-
other; for persons requesting the transmis- tional agenda, serving, as it were, as the ency-
sion of funds from debtors, consultation of clopedia or even the (nonsearchable) database
physicians. . . . (qtd. in Standage 61) of knowledge for preprint culture. A similar
encyclopedic impulse seems to run throughout
All these sing across (in Whitman’s words) Whitman’s work, as he moves consistently to
“the wires of the electric telegraph stretched inventory, name, define, and (partially) order
on land, or laid at the bottom of the sea, and the city, country, and world, enumerating per-
then the message in an instant from a thou- son, place, and thing in long flowing lines that
sand miles off”—the rapidity of the develop- may well remind us of the list rhetoric of the
celebrator of telegraph culture quoted above. in the tent just behind him; by the same to-
Whitman’s catalogs do many things at once: ken, it’s the poet as cataloger, cramming into
they inventory the manifold and various fac- his lines an entire social panoply in which the
ets of his habitat (and habitus); they begin to parts imply a social whole. But it’s also the
arrange them into some kind of poetic order poet as modern subject attempting to come
(much critical ink has been spilled on just how to terms with the sheer imperative of includ-
successfully he does so); and by their very pro- ing everything—the country and the city, the
liferation—catalog upon catalog upon catalog— machine and the garden, the factories and the
they testify to the impossibility of doing either shops, the masses from whom, in democratic
of these two.4 Most important for our purposes, culture, emerge the arbiters of knowledge
Whitman not only asserts but also dramatizes (“philosophs”) and wisdom (“judges” in every
his will to database, the affective charge that ac- sense of the word). The poet’s response to this
companies (or perhaps mandates) his desire to informational flood, however, is not only to
enumerate and catalog. Here is a fine example, enumerate and list (and list and list and list); it
from “Starting from Paumanok”: is also to appropriate. All these manifold ob-
jects and beings are identified as belonging to
See, pastures and forests in my poems—see, or, at least, placed in the book for which these
animals wild and tame—see, beyond lines serve as prologue, enticement, and ad-
the Kaw, countless herds of buffalo vertisement. The effect is particularly striking
feeding on short curly grass, with respect to the era’s definitive technology.
See, in my poems, cities, solid, vast, inland, The telegraph and the printing press—which
with paved streets, with iron and stone
bring the flood of data to the poet’s attention
edifices, ceaseless vehicles, and
and impel his work out into a world of poems,
commerce,
novels, newspapers, ladies’ magazines, and
See, the many-cylinder’d steam printing-
press—see, the electric telegraph the like—are made an effect of Whitman’s
stretching across the continent, text, not the other way around: we are invited
See, through Atlantica’s depths pulses to come and see these powers and forces “in
American Europe reaching, pulses of my poems,” not to see the poems as entities
Europe duly return’d, shaped and transmitted by the powers and
See, the strong and quick locomotive as it forces that make and unmake them.
departs, panting, blowing the steam- Not to put too fine a point on it, I also
whistle, see this self-valorizing impulse in Folsom’s
See, ploughmen ploughing farms—see, Whitmanism and in the imperial language of
miners digging mines—see, the Google. I point this out not so much to cri-
numberless factories, tique Folsom and the Googlizers as to stress
See, mechanics busy at their benches with
something crucial about psychic responses
tools—see from among them superior
to the information economy that enmeshes
judges, philosophs, Presidents, emerge,
drest in working dresses,
Whitman, Folsom, the Googlizers, and, for
See, lounging through the shops and fields of that matter, the reader of this piece and me:
the States, me well-belov’d, close-held the need or urge to identify with, and ulti-
by day and night mately to introject the power of, the technol-
Here the loud echoes of my songs there—read ogy that makes database not only possible but
the hints come at last. (257–65) necessary. But while Whitman hyperbolizes
his will to database, Folsom and the Googl-
This is the poet not just as huckster but as izers veil theirs in favor of privileging the
sideshow barker, pointing out the attractions genre or medium itself. In Folsom’s account
of his own work, the dialectic between da- The ecstatic mode of wholesale identifica-

tabase and narrative (in which, as in all diation is only one possible response to the info-
lectics, the terms keep collapsing into each world, even in Whitman—notoriously, a poet
other) is less revealing than the simultane- of many modes and moods—and I want to
ous treatment of The Walt Whitman Archive close by turning to one of the other responses
as product of inspired editorship by Folsom we have found in his work. In the first passage
and his colleagues and elevation of database I quoted, from “Song of Myself,” Whitman
into a self-maintaining, self-sustaining, gen- opens up a different possibility—one also
uinely collective, genre-transcending human familiar throughout his oeuvre: that of the
agency—including, ultimately, the editors’ somewhat skeptical but deeply sympathetic
own agency. So too with Google, which, as observer, avidly scanning the informational
Jeanneney observes, orders and arranges its city not only as an end in itself but also as a
links on the basis of a mysterious, proprietary way to engage with the interests, desires, and
algorithm preserved with all the magic (and needs of other people. Information society
capitalist razzle-dazzle) of the McDonald’s brings us this openness to the experiences
special sauce. In both cases, the choices and of others, Whitman suggests: the tidings of
decisions, inclusions and exclusions, that go “wars,” of “stocks, stores, real estate and per-
into making the database are occluded or sonal estate,” that take us out of ourselves and
even excluded in favor of a veneration of the engage us with the lives of those around us.
database as a reified entity entire unto itself, Whitman pursues these not as a poet or even
a genre that works, as genres do, by laws and as an observer but as a citizen: an intensely en-
logic of its own. The effects of such a romantic gaged member of a political community who
view of information production can be seen never loses sight of the “personal estate”—the
when we question some of the choices that needs of his fellow citizens—as well as the
the databasers make for us. The creators and “real estate,” structures of economic power
maintainers of The Walt Whitman Archive and authority. That engaged but slightly dis-
don’t include much contemporary criticism tanced, skeptical but sympathetic stance, I’ve
(largely, one assumes, because of copyright been arguing, gets all but obliterated by the
rather than predilection) but link extensively flood of data the Whitmanesque subject is
to Whitman-era responses; the result is to forced to encompass; and it’s negated as well
institutionalize certain versions of Whitman by that subject’s desire to identify with the
while effacing others. The opposite tendency technological forces that unleash the flood.
is evident in Google’s linking technology, But it’s a stance worth adopting as we reflect
which, as Jeanneney observes, is biased by on the brave new world we are entering, one
its nature toward pushing forward recent re- in which we might properly neither sing and
sponses (second under “Walt Whitman,” after celebrate the new art of database nor turn our
the inevitable Wikipedia, is none other than backs on the new ways of organizing and ap-
The Walt Whitman Archive) and those from prehending knowledge that it brings us but
the Euro-American (or English-speaking?) rather affirm the heightened importance of
world, where the majority of linking subpages a detached but engaged response (dare I say
originate, while ignoring more recondite, his- both in and out of the game?) to the informa-
torically distant, or non-Western links. One tion culture in which we live and to which,
can choose to quarrel, or not, with both out- no less than Whitman, we are compelled to
comes—I’m fine with the first, worried by the make imaginative response.
second—and still wish for a little less celebra-
tion, a little more transparency.
Notes Castells, Manuel. The Informational City: Economic Re-
structuring and Urban Development. London: Black-

1. For a study of just how seriously Whitman took well, 1991.
these issues, see Buincki. Havelock, Eric. Preface to Plato. Cambridge: Belknap,
2. I’m appropriating Castells’s phrase and his empha- 1963.
sis on the city as a “space of flows” but not the specifics of Henkin, David. City Reading: Written Words and Public
his argument, in which this new species of urban experi- Spaces in Antebellum New York. New York: Columbia
ence (which, in my view, is already there in Baudelaire, UP, 1998.
or at least Benjamin’s Baudelaire, as well as in Whitman) Jeanneney, Jean-Noël. Google and the Myth of Universal
develops in the urban crises of the 1970s, when cities Knowledge: A View from Europe. Trans. Teresa La-
become reorganized as spaces of knowledge and capital vander Fagan. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006.
production and dissemination. Larson, Kerry. Whitman’s Drama of Consensus. Chicago:
3. Whitman added these lines in his 1856 edition. In U of Chicago P, 1988.
helping with matters like this, The Walt Whitman Archive Sandler, Mark. “Disruptive Beneficence: The Google
is invaluable. Print Program and the Future of Libraries.” Librar-
4. The best treatment of Whitman’s catalogs remains ies and Google. Ed. William Miller and Rita Pellin.
that of Buell, who embeds Whitman in the transcendental- Binghamton: Haworth, 2006. 5–22.
ist rhetoric of cataloging the world as a way of enumerat- Standage, Tom. The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable
ing and celebrating its multifariousness (166–78). But Buell Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s
also begins to get at the problematics I’m trying to address On-line Pioneers. New York: Berkley, 1998.
here with his suggestion that what makes Whitman’s Whitman, Walt. “Chants Democratic and Native Ameri-
catalogs unique is their refusal (or, as I would put it, their can.” Leaves of Grass: Facsimile Edition of the 1860
failure) to organize the world into a determinate form or Text. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1961. 105–94.
pattern, a failure for which Whitman more than compen- ———. Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. Ed. Michael
sates, in Buell’s reading, by his enthusiastic poetry making: Moon, Sculley Bradley, and Harold W. Blodgett. Nor-
“the spirit triumphs over chaos by sheer energy” (178). ton Critical Ed. New York: Norton, 2002.
———. “Passage to India.” Whitman, Leaves 345–56.
———. “Poem of the Daily Work of the Workmen and
Works Cited Workwomen of These States.” The Walt Whitman
Archive. Ed. Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price. 2006.
Buell, Lawrence. Literary Transcendentalism. Ithaca: 12 June 2007 <http://www.whitmanarchive.org/published/
Cornell UP, 1973. LG/1956/poems/4>.
Buincki, Martin. “Walt Whitman and the Question of ———. “Song of Myself.” Whitman, Leaves 26–78.
Copyright.” American Literary History 15 (2003): ———. “Starting from Paumanok.” Whitman, Leaves
248–75. 15–25.
Narrative and Database:

Natural Symbionts
Ah, the power of metaphors—especially
those that propagate with viral intensity
n. katherine hayles
through a discursive realm. At issue here is
Lev Manovich’s characterization of narrative
ally beneficial relation. For example, a bird
and database in The Language of New Media
picks off bugs that torment a water buffalo,
as “natural enemies” (228), a phrase Ed Fol-
making the beast’s existence more comfort-
som rehearses in his generous and enlighten- able; the water buffalo provides the bird with
ing discussion of The Walt Whitman Archive. tasty meals. Because database can construct
The metaphor resonates throughout Folsom’s relational juxtapositions but is helpless to in-
essay in phrases such as “the attack of data- terpret or explain them, it needs narrative to
base on narrative,” culminating in his figure make its results meaningful. Narrative, for
of database’s spread as a viral pandemic that its part, needs database in the computation-
“threatens to displace narrative, to infect and ally intensive culture of the new millennium
deconstruct narrative endlessly, to make it re- to enhance its cultural authority and test the
treat behind the database or dissolve back into generality of its insights. If narrative often
it.” In this imagined combat between narrative dissolves into database, as Folsom suggests,
and database, database plays the role of the database catalyzes and indeed demands nar-
Ebola virus whose voracious spread narrative rative’s reappearance as soon as meaning and
is helpless to resist. The inevitable triumph of interpretation are required. The dance (or,
database over narrative had already been fore- as I prefer to call it, the complex ecology) of
cast in Manovich’s observation that “databases narrative and database originates in their dif-
occupy a significant, if not the largest, terri- ferent ontologies, purposes, and histories. To
tory of the new media landscape.” Indeed, so understand more precisely the interactions
powerful and pervasive are databases for Ma- between these two cultural forms, let us con-
novich that he finds it “surprising” narratives sider these characteristics.
continue to exist at all in new media (228). As Manovich observes, database parses
In Manovich’s view, the most likely explana- the world from the viewpoint of large-scale
tion of narrative’s persistence is the tendency data collection and management. For the late
in new media to want to tell a story, a regres- twentieth and early twenty-first centuries,
sion he identifies with cinema. Even this, he this means seeing the world in terms that the
suggests, is being eradicated by experimental computer can understand. By far the most
filmmakers such as Peter Greenaway (237–39). pervasive form of database is the relational,
Rather than natural enemies, narrative which has almost entirely replaced the older
and database are more appropriately seen hierarchical, tree, and network models and
as natural symbionts. Symbionts are organ- continues to hold sway over the newer object-
isms of different species that have a mutu- oriented models. In a relational database, the
N. Katherine Hayles, Hillis Professor of Literature and Distinguished Professor in the departments of English and design / me-
dia arts at the University of California, Los Angeles, teaches and writes on the relations among science, technology, and literature
in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her books include How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Lit-
erature, and Informatics (U of Chicago P, 1999), which won the René Wellek Prize for the best book in literary theory for 1998–99,
and Writing Machines (MIT P, 2002), which won the 2003 Susanne K. Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of
Symbolic Form. Her most recent book is My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (U of Chicago P, 2005), and
her new project is Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (U of Notre Dame P, forthcoming Feb. 2008).
data are parsed into tables consisting of rows outside the database to see what it contains. As
and columns, where the column heading, or David Kroenke and David Auer put it in Da-
attribute, indicates some aspect of the table’s tabase Concepts, the “structure of the database
topic. Ideally, each table contains data per- is contained within the database itself,” so that
taining to only one “theme” or central data the database’s contents can be determined just
concept. One table, for example, might con- by looking inside it (13). Its self-describing na-
tain data about authors, where the attributes ture is apparent in SQL commands. For the
might be last name, first name, birth date, database mentioned above containing infor-
death date, book titles, and so on; another mation about authors, books, and publishers,
might have publishers’ data, also parsed ac- for example, a typical SQL command might
cording to attributes; another, books. Rela- take the generalized form “SELECT AUTHOR
tions are constructed among data elements .AuthorName, BOOK. BookTitle, BOOK
in the tables according to set-theoretic opera- .BookDate, BOOK. Publisher, PUBLISHER
tions, such as “insert,” “delete,” “select,” and .Location,” where the table names are capi-
especially “join,” the command that allows talized in full (as are SQL commands) and
data from different tables to be combined. the data elements are categorized according
Common elements allow correlations be- to the attributes, with a period separating
tween tables to be made; for example, Whit- table name from attribute. The database’s self-
man would appear in the authors table as an description is crucial to being able to query it
author and in the books table correlated with with set-theoretic operations, which require a
the titles he published; the publishers table formally closed logical system on which to op-
would correlate with the books table through erate. This is also why databases fit so well in
common elements and through these elements computers; like databases, computers employ
back to the authors table. Working through formal logic as defined by the logic gates that
these kinds of correlations, set-theoretic oper- underlie all executable commands.
ations also allow new tables to be constructed The self-describing nature of database
from existing ones. Different interfaces can be provides a strong contrast with narrative,
designed according to the particular needs of which always contains more than indicated by
users. Behind the interface, whatever its form, a table of contents or a list of chapter contents.
is a database-management system that em- Databases can, of course, also extend outward
ploys set-theoretic notation to query the da- when they are linked and queried as a net-
tabase and manipulate the response through work—for example, in data-mining and text-
SQL and related languages (SQL is commonly mining techniques—but they do not lose the
expanded as Structured Query Language and formal properties of closure that make them
pronounced “sequel”). self-describing artifacts. Nevertheless, the
The great strength of database, of course, technologies of linking databases have proved
is the ability to order vast data arrays and to be remarkably powerful, and the relations
make them available for different kinds of revealed by set-theoretic operations on net-
queries. Two fundamental aspects typically works of linked databases can have stunning
characterize relational databases. One, indi- implications. For example, data- and text-
cated above, is their construction of relations mining techniques allowed the epidemiology
between attributes and tables. The other is a researchers Don Swanson and N. R. Smal-
well-constructed database’s self-containment heiser to hypothesize causes for rare diseases
or, as the technical literature calls it, self- that hitherto had resisted analysis because
d escription. A database is said to be self- they occurred infrequently at widely separated
describing because its user does not need to go locales.1 Even in this case, however, the mean-
ing of the relations posited by the database re- forty percent fail or are abandoned (270). An-

mains outside the realm of data techniques. ticipating such problems, database textbooks
What it means that Whitman, say, used a cer- routinely advise students to obscure subop-
tain word 298 times in Leaves of Grass while timal performance by keeping the database
using another word only three times requires design confidential and confining discussions
interpretation—and interpretation, almost in- with the paying client to what the interface
evitably, invokes narrative to achieve dramatic should look like and how it should work.
impact and significance. Many data analysts The indeterminacy that databases find
and statisticians are keenly aware of this sym- difficult to tolerate marks another way in
biosis between narrative and data. John W. which narrative differs from database. Nar-
Tukey, in his classic textbook Exploratory ratives gesture toward the inexplicable, the
Data Analysis, for example, explains that the unspeakable, the ineffable, whereas databases
data analyst “has to learn . . . how to expose rely on enumeration, requiring explicit artic-
himself to what his data are willing—or even ulation of attributes and data values.2 While
anxious—to tell him,” following up the lesson the concatenation of relations might be sug-
by later asking the student what story each da- gestive, as Folsom remarks in discussing the
taset tells (21, 101). new kinds of knowledge that the Whitman
Database and narrative, their interde- databases can generate, databases in them-
pendence notwithstanding, remain different selves can only speak that which can explicitly
species, like bird and water buffalo. Databases be spoken. Narratives, by contrast, invite in
must parse information according to the logi- the unknown, taking us to the brink signified
cal categories that order and list the different by Henry James’s figure in the carpet, Kurtz’s
data elements. Indeterminate data—data that “The horror, the horror,” Gatsby’s green light
are not known or that elude the boundaries of at pier’s end, Kerouac’s beatitude, Pynchon’s
the preestablished categories—must either be crying of lot 49. Alan Liu, discussing the
represented through a null value or not be rep- possibilities for this kind of gesture in a post
resented at all. Even though some relational industrial, information-intensive era, connects
databases allow for the entry of null values, it with “the ethos of the unknown” and finds
such values work in set-theoretic operations as it expressed in selected artworks as a “data
a contaminant, since any operation contain- pour,” an overflowing, uncontainable excess
ing a null value will give the same as its result, that he links with transcendence (esp. 81).
as multiplying any number by zero yields zero. Whereas database reflects the computer’s
Null values can thus quickly spread through ontology and operates with optimum effi-
a database, rendering everything they touch ciency in set-theoretic operations based on
indeterminate. Moreover, database operations formal logic, narrative is an ancient linguistic
say nothing about how data are to be collected technology almost as old as the human species.
or which data should qualify for collection, As such, narrative modes are deeply influenced
nor do they indicate how the data should be by the evolutionary needs of human beings ne-
parsed and categorized. Such decisions greatly gotiating unpredictable three-dimensional en-
influence the viability, usefulness, and opera- vironments populated by diverse autonomous
tional integrity of databases. Thomas Con- agents. As Mark Turner has argued in The Lit-
nolly and Carolyn Begg in Database Systems erary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Lan-
estimate that for corporate database software guage, stories are central in the development
development projects, eighty to ninety percent of human cognition. Whereas database allows
do not meet their performance goals, eighty large amounts of information to be sorted,
percent are delivered late and over budget, and cataloged, and queried, narrative models how
minds think and how the world works, projects Manovich touches on this contrast when
in which temporality and inference play rich he perceptively observes that for narrative, the
and complex roles. Extending Paul Ricoeur’s syntagmatic order of linear unfolding is actu-
work on temporality and Gérard Genette’s on ally present on the page, while the paradig-
narrative modalities, Mieke Bal analyzes nar- matic possibilities of alternative word choices
rative as requiring, at a minimum, an actor are only virtually present. For databases, the
and narrator and consisting of three distinct reverse is true: the paradigmatic possibili-
levels, text, story, and fabula, each with its own ties are actually present in the columns and
chronology (6). To this we can add Brian Rich- the rows, while the syntagmatic progress of
ardson’s emphasis in Unlikely Stories: Causality choices concatenated into linear sequences
and the Nature of Modern Narrative on causal- by SQL commands is only virtually present.
ity and inference in narrative.3 I would add to this observation that time and
Why should narrative emphasize these as- space, the qualities Kant identified as intrin-
pects rather than others? Bound to the linear sic to human sensory-cognitive faculties, in-
sequentiality of language, narrative compli- evitably coexist. While one may momentarily
cates it through temporal enfoldings of story be dominant in a given situation, the other
(or, as Genette prefers to call it, discourse) and is always implicit, a natural symbiont whose
fabula, reflecting the complexities of acting existence is inextricably entwined with that
when knowledge is incomplete and the true of its partner. It should be no surprise, then,
situation may be revealed in an order different that narrative and database align themselves
from the one logical reconstruction requires. with these partners or that they too exist in
Narrator and actor inscribe the situation of symbiosis with each other.
a subject constantly negotiating with agents Given this entwinement, is it plausible to
who have their own agendas and desires, while imagine, as Manovich and Folsom imply at
causality and inference represent the reason- various points, that database will replace nar-
ing required to suture different temporal rative to the extent that narrative fades from
trajectories, motives, and actions into an ex- the scene? A wealth of evidence points in the
planatory frame. These structures imply that other direction: narrative is essential to the
the primary purpose of narrative is to search human lifeworld. Jerome Bruner, in his book
for meaning, making narrative an essential significantly entitled Acts of Meaning, cites
technology for human beings, who can argu- studies indicating that mothers tell their chil-
ably be defined as meaning-seeking animals. dren some form of narrative several times each
Bound to the linear order of language hour to guide their actions and explain how
through syntax, narrative is a temporal tech- the world works (81–84). We take narrative in
nology, as the complex syncopations between with mother’s milk and practice it many times
story and fabula demonstrate. The order every day of our lives—and not only in high-
in which events are narrated is crucial, and culture forms such as print novels. Newspa-
temporal considerations are central to narra- pers, gossip, math story problems, television
tology, as Ricoeur’s work, among others’, il- dramas, radio talk shows, and a host of other
lustrates. Datasets and databases, by contrast, communications are permeated by narrative.
lend themselves readily to spatial displays, Wherever one looks, narratives surface, as
from the two-dimensional tables typical of ubiquitous in everyday culture as dust mites.
relational databases to the more complex What has changed in the informative-
n‑dimensional arrays and spatial forms that intensive milieu of the twenty-first century is
statisticians and data analysts use to under- the position narrative occupies in the culture.
stand the stories that data tell. Whereas in the classical Greek and Roman
era narrative was accepted as an adequate allow the order of the rows and columns to

explanation for large-scale events—the cre- vary without affecting the system’s ability to
ation of the world, the dynamics of wind and locate the proper elements in memory. This
fire, of earth and water—global explanations flexibility allows databases to expand without
are now typically rooted in data analysis. If limitation (subject, of course, to the amount
we want to understand the effects of global of memory storage allocated to the database).
warming or whether the economy is headed Narrative in this respect operates quite differ-
for a recession, we likely would not be con- ently. Sensitively dependent on the order in
tent with anecdotes about buttercups ap- which information is revealed, narrative can-
pearing earlier than usual in the backyard or not in general accommodate the addition of
Aunt Agnes’s son not finding a job. Data, the new elements without, in effect, telling a dif-
databases that collect, parse, and store them, ferent story. Databases tend toward inclusivity,
and the database-management systems that narratives toward selectivity. Harry Mathews
concatenate and query them are essential for explores this property of narrative in The Jour-
understanding large-scale phenomena. At the nalist: A Novel, where the unnamed protago-
global level, databases are essential. However, nist, intent on making a list of everything that
narrative enters even in the interpretation of happens in his life, thinks of more and more
the relations revealed by database queries. items, with the predictable result that the list
When Alan Greenspan testified before Con- quickly tends toward chaos as the interpola-
gress, he typically did not recount data alone. tions proliferate. The story of this character’s
Rather, he told a story, and it was the story, life cannot stabilize, because the information
not the data by themselves, that propagated that constitutes it continues to grow exponen-
through the news media because it encapsu- tially, until both list and subject collapse.
lated in easily comprehensible form the mean- That novels like The Journalist should be
ing exposed by data collection and analysis. written in the late twentieth century speaks to
In contrast to global dynamics, narra- the challenges that database poses to narrative
tive at the local level remains pervasive, al- in the age of information. No doubt phenomena
beit increasingly infused by data. As Folsom like this explain why Manovich would charac-
indicates, in the face of the overwhelming terize database and narrative as “natural ene-
quantities of data that database-management mies” and why thoughtful scholars like Folsom
systems now put at our fingertips, no one nar- would propagate the metaphor. Nevertheless,
rative is likely to dominate as the explanation, the same dynamic also explains why the expan-
for the interpretive possibilities proliferate sion of database is a powerful force constantly
exponentially as databases increase. In this spawning new narratives. The flip side of narra-
respect, the advent of the Internet, especially tive’s inability to tell the story is the proliferation
the World Wide Web, has been decisive. Never of narratives as they transform to accommodate
before in the history of the human species has new data and mutate to probe what lies beyond
so much information been so easily available the expanding infosphere. No longer singular,
to so many. The constant expansion of new narratives remain the necessary others to data-
data accounts for an important advantage base’s ontology, the perspectives that invest the
that relational databases have over narra- formal logic of database operations with human
tives, for new data elements can be added to meanings and that gesture toward the unknown
existing databases without disrupting their hovering beyond the brink of what can be clas-
order. Unlike older computer database mod- sified and enumerated.
els in which memory pointers were attached
directly to data elements, relational databases
Notes
Liu, Alan. “Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural His-

tory and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse.”
1. See, for example, Swanson and Smalheiser, “Inter-
active System” and “Assessing.” Critical Inquiry 31 (2004): 49–84.
2. The exception is the null value, which has its own Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge:
problems, as discussed above. MIT P, 2001.
3. Discussing narrative, Bruner also emphasizes the Mathews, Harry. The Journalist: A Novel. Boston: Go-
importance of causality, identifying crucial components dine, 1994.
as agency, sequential order, sensitivity to the canonical Richardson, Brian. Unlikely Stories: Causality and the
(or context), and narrative perspective (77). Nature of Modern Narrative. Newark: U of Delaware
P, 1997.
Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Vol. 1. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1990.
Works Cited Swanson, Don R., and N. R. Smalheiser. “Assessing a Gap
Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of in the Biomedical Literature: Magnesium Deficiency
Narrative. 2nd ed. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1998. and Neurologic Disease.” Neuroscience Research Com-
Bruner, Jerome. Acts of Meaning: Four Lectures on Mind munications 14 (1994): 1–9.
and Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002. ———. “An Interactive System for Finding Complemen-
Connolly, Thomas, and Carolyn Begg. Database Systems. tary Literatures: A Stimulus to Scientific Discovery.”
New York: Harlow; Essex: Pearson Educ., 2002. Artificial Intelligence 91 (1997): 183–203.
Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Tukey, John W. Exploratory Data Analysis. Reading: Ad-
Method. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983. dison, 1977.
Kroenke, David M., and David J. Auer. Database Con- Turner, Mark. The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought
cepts. 3rd ed. New York: Prentice, 2007. and Language. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.
Reply
ed folsom
And, as Hayles makes clear, the meta-
phors are essential. The term database itself is
Ah, the power of metaphors indeed! To a metaphor, a base onto which we put things
describe the relation between narrative and that are given (data). The word is less than
database, N. Katherine Hayles offers an astute fifty years old and has mutated in meaning
alternative to Lev Manovich’s “natural en- over the decades. Few of us (certainly not I)
emies” metaphor: she suggests “natural sym- can approach a database without an array of
bionts,” a metaphor I plan to appropriate and metaphoric terms that make it seem some-
use from now on. Her claim that “database thing it is not. Years ago, when I used to hit
catalyzes and indeed demands narrative’s a key on my old typewriter, I could follow
reappearance as soon as meaning and inter- and even explain the mechanical process that
pretation are required” incisively articulates struck an inked ribbon with a typebar to im-
what she calls the “dance” of narrative and press a letter on a page. Now, when I hit a key
database. I’ve thought of the relation as an on my computer keyboard, my knowledge of
endless battle (once narrative begins to win, the process that makes a letter appear on my
database rallies, and vice versa), but Hayles’s screen is hazy, to say the least, not to mention
metaphor more efficaciously captures what the process that transfers it to paper. How
she rightly characterizes as “the complex this sentence I’m writing gets preserved on
ecology” of these two modes of organizing my USB stick and in what form is a mystery
and accessing the represented world. to me. Without the metaphoric apparatus that
allows us to save, open, cut, paste, and create Discussing the standard markup ap-

files that can be read by other computers, this proaches used for encoding textual data, Mc-
world of data entry and retrieval would be in- Gann admits that the “TEI and XML do not
accessible to most of us. It’s no accident that adequately address the problem of knowledge
the term user-friendly followed database by a representation that is the core issue here—that
decade or so and that we all now depend on is, how do we design and build digital simula-
user interfaces, where many of our most use- tions that meet our needs for studying works
ful metaphors reside. like Whitman’s?” and, again, I agree. All our
So when Jerome McGann complains that careful tagging and markup (further sugges-
my referring to The Walt Whitman Archive as tive metaphors) of the texts on the Whitman
a database is “seriously misleading—more ac- archive reveal more and more features that
curately, it is metaphoric,” I accept his second our tagging codes cannot adequately describe.
(more accurate) characterization. But when That’s the wild excess, and it’s one reason we
he says the archive “is not—in any sense that have insisted on including in the archive
a person meaning to be precise would use—a high-quality scans of the material that we en-
database at all,” I have to disagree. Of course ter into the database as tagged text, so that
it’s a database. It is, in fact, several data- users can test and challenge our embedded
bases—the thousands of bibliographic entries hierarchies and interpretive decisions. On
are stored in one, the photographic images in every page of manuscript that we transcribe,
another, and so on. A database, as defined in there are features that we either name as an
The Oxford English Dictionary, is “a structured instance of some category or ignore. For some
collection of data held in computer storage; user sometime, what we ignored will turn out
esp. one that incorporates software to make to be important; what we tagged as one thing
it accessible in a variety of ways.” McGann’s will seem to be something else. The images
insistence that “[n]o database can function linked to the tagged text (it’s all data; it’s all
without a user interface” that “embeds . . . on the base at once) serve as checks. Already,
many kinds of hierarchical and narrativized as I mention in my essay, some users of the
organizations” is certainly true, because, for archive have been able to piece together man-
most of us, that’s what a database is: a vast uscripts that had been physically separated
vault of unseen data that are retrieved and and scattered among different archives; they
organized by our metaphoric commands, have done so by examining the untagged de-
which, as Hayles explains, prompt a database- tails (glue marks, needle holes, small tears) on
management system to employ “set-theoretic scans of the pages. There’s a great deal in this
notation to query the database and manipu- database, in other words, that escapes the edi-
late the response through SQL and related torial markup and yet is still retrievable and
languages. . . .” My interest in database as valuable for users who wish to explore instead
an emerging genre, however, has more to do of simply searching for results.
with the wild and unpredictable intersec- What is true for the myriad bewildering
tions of the data that the interface allows us markings on one of Whitman’s manuscript
to generate, what Wai Chee Dimock in her pages is also the case in his printed texts.
introduction to this issue calls “[t]he links Take the first edition of Leaves of Grass: vir-
and pathways that open up [and] suggest that tually all students of Whitman know (be-
knowledge is generative rather than singu- cause they’ve been told so many times) that
lar, with many outlets, ripples, and cascades, the twelve poems in that edition are untitled.
randomized by cross-references rather than But when we prepared to tag the text of the
locked into any one-to-one correspondence.” first edition, we were confronted with the
jarring typographic fact that, while the fi- Jonathan Freedman, like McGann, worries
nal six poems have no titles, the first six do. that “to celebrate database as a kind of auton-
Each of the first six poems is entitled “Leaves omous form” is “to downplay the inclusions,
of Grass.” Now, Leaves of Grass is the book’s exclusions, choices that have gone into the
title, so most readers, editors, and critics have making of databases and hence to occlude the
apparently assumed this repeated title must possibilities for questioning those choices.”
be some kind of running head, even though But this points, once more, to the endless
it clearly occupies the position of a title. The battle between—the symbiosis of—narrative
New York University Press’s three-volume and database. It is possible to try to build a
variorum edition ignores these titles, as do database toward inclusiveness rather than ex-
most reprintings of the book, like the Library clusiveness, and the more we do so, the better
of America edition. But in tagging this mate- the users’ chances of questioning and chal-
rial to enter it into a database, we needed to lenging whatever narrative the creators have
describe this stubborn printed phrase. Since attempted to tag onto the data.
in later editions of Leaves of Grass Whitman I’ve learned a great deal of what I know
would again use repeated titles, including about textuality from Jerome McGann (that’s
“Leaves of Grass,” it seemed reasonable to truly Folsom praise), and I take to heart his
conclude that he had started this practice with cautions about how database is but one step in
his first edition. And since in the 1860 edition an endless process of mediation and remedia-
Whitman includes a cluster of twenty-four tion. I am optimistic about the possibilities of
numbered poems called “Leaves of Grass,” electronic editions, but, as a frequent dweller
is it also reasonable to conclude that the final in physical archives, I am also viscerally aware
seven short poems in the first edition are ac- of what does not get translated into the virtual
tually his first cluster, all contained under the archive. I’ve held that little notebook where
sixth “Leaves of Grass” title? Or, in his desire Whitman first teases out the voice (and the
to fit everything into twelve eight-page signa- attitude) that would generate Leaves of Grass,
tures, did he begin to drop this title to save where you can see something like the DNA of
space? We editors have to make a hierarchi- his future work: there’s an endless amount of
cal decision in cases like this, but the scanned information in the feel of the pages, the stubs
pages of each edition stand in the database of the cut-out leaves, in the way the book rests
as visual checks on every tagging decision in the palm of the hand, not to mention in the
we make. Our decision in this case will af- story of how it sat in an attic for half a century
fect title searches, but no matter what we call after it was stolen from the Library of Con-
a particular feature, the image scans of each gress. By examining the binding and signa-
page will continue to portray the feature in its ture construction of the first edition of Leaves
raw, untagged, wild state. of Grass in multiple physical archives, I’ve
When McGann says, then, that “data- learned many things about its making that
bases and all digital instruments require the I never could have discovered on the virtual
most severe kinds of categorical forms” and archive. But I love the challenge of trying to
that the “power of database—of digital in- figure out how we can now remediate as much
struments in general—rests in its ability to of that information as possible onto the Whit-
draw sharp, disambiguated distinctions,” man archive, to try to grow the database so
he’s right (tagging requires it), but for me the that the surprises of searching and juxtapos-
real power of database rests in its equal abil- ing will become richer and more frequent.
ity to generate the materials that allow users Freedman teams me up with the “Googl-
to question each sharply drawn distinction. izers”: if The Walt Whitman Archive had only
a fraction of one percent of Google’s resources, and thrives on revision, addition, and supple-

we could grow our holdings quickly and make mentation. McGill’s exciting suggestion of
the archive more like the vast and inclusive how “‘rhizomorphous’ connections . . . might
database that I fantasize about in my essay have been encouraged by providing hyper-
and that Meredith McGill would understand- links to Whitman’s editorials in the Brooklyn
ably like to see more of now. McGill finds the Daily Eagle” sounds like the continual discus-
archive “not a transformation but a ‘remedia- sion among archive staff members about how
tion’ of archives.” Here we come back again we need to include a history of translations
to the metaphor of the symbionts: database of Whitman’s work from around the world,
cannot remediate archives without in some scans of the issues of the periodicals in which
key sense transforming them (as McGann’s he published, all the biographies of him, the
comments on markup make clear), but there letters he wrote and all known letters to him.
is no doubt that a vital part of the The Walt . . . The list is endless.
Whitman Archive is the collection of scans of And database can handle it all. What are
books, manuscripts, and photographs, which, needed are time, energy, resources, talented
taken by themselves, are a remediation (and a scholars, and the inevitable improvement in
combining) of archives. I’m not sure, though, software and hardware that has made so much
why McGill believes that “[d]igitizing archives digital scholarship thinkable today that was
makes it harder to see the partial nature of unthinkable ten or even five years ago and
the printed record, the limited reach of print that will make the unthinkable today doable a
at any moment in history, and the superses- decade from now. Freedman notes, for exam-
sion of one edition by another.” We will soon ple, that “[t]he creators and maintainers of The
be including in the archive the results of the Walt Whitman Archive don’t include much
first complete census of extant copies of the contemporary criticism (largely, one assumes,
first edition of Leaves of Grass, including their because of copyright rather than predilec-
known original owners and the variations tion) but link extensively to Whitman-era re-
from copy to copy. Even now, users can for sponses; the result is to institutionalize certain
the first time put side by side on their screen versions of Whitman while effacing others.”
the same poem as it appears in each edition That was true when he wrote his response, but
of Leaves of Grass, creating a visual image of it is less true now, because the University of
“supersession” of editions unlike anything Iowa Press generously agreed to let us put on-
possible before, short of opening actual origi- line the entire Iowa Whitman Series (currently
nal copies of all the editions. fifteen books of criticism from 1989 to the
McGill makes the valid point that, in its present, three of which are already available),
current stage of development, the archive re- and we are working with authors and presses
produces “mass culture’s reductive treatment to arrange for more copyrighted material to
of genre” by offering all the poetry and little appear. If my rhetoric is, as Freedman sug-
of the prose. But, as she accurately notes at gests, “utopian,” my experience in working on
the end of her response, “[t]hese are still early the archive is anything but utopian. It’s slow
days for the digital humanities.” Yes indeed. and frustrating work, but database invites big
Kenneth Price and I initially thought we’d be imagining, and, as more and more humanities
done with this project in five or six years; now, scholarship becomes digitally based, the pos-
more than a decade later, we realize that if we sibilities will grow exponentially.
can keep it supported it will continue to grow Database is a genre that the next gen-
long after we’re gone, because database does eration of humanists will take for granted.
not handle completion well—it is voracious Universities that haven’t yet adjusted their
scholarship and research expectations to al- stretching back to the first epics. Like Hayles,
low for and encourage digital scholarship will I believe that narrative is “an essential tech-
soon do so. Digital research requires collabor- nology for human beings,” but I also believe
ative enterprise of the sort that has been rare that database is the equally essential counter-
in humanities scholarship. As with any emerg- technology, the innate desire to pile up and
ing genre, it’s anybody’s guess where it will go absorb experiences and ideas and material
and what range of effects it will have. As Peter things that don’t sort themselves immediately
Stallybrass notes, however, already “millions into narrative—items we can access later as
of people who cannot or do not want to go pieces of a narrative if and when they fit the
to the archives are accessing them in digital story, history, or syntax of meaning we are
form. And digital information has profoundly seeking to construct. Keeping a commonplace
undermined an academic elite’s control over book edges toward database; keeping a jour-
the circulation of knowledge.” Just as my work nal, toward narrative. Our greatest and most
with an electronic archive has helped me dis- evocative narratives, including the novels we
cern in Whitman’s work aspects of what I teach, paradoxically become database when
think of as database, so has Stallybrass found we write our interpretive narratives about
“Shakespeare consciously practic[ing] his them, using bits of the data to construct a
own form of database.” He goes on to point meaning that is always exceeded by the data
out how “some of the most powerful modern that do not fit the narrative we construct. The
databases draw on the development of a mas- hermeneutical enterprise finds databases ev-
sive range of finding aids and databases in the erywhere—even in narratives—and accesses
Middle Ages and Renaissance.” Stallybrass re- them to create meaning. Database, in an age
veals how database has fundamentally altered of computers, provides increasingly quick ac-
his pedagogical approach, since our schol- cess to increasingly vast realms of thought,
arly competitors are “no longer just our col- language, facts, and works.
leagues; in the age of database, they are also
the students whom we claim to be teaching.”
This overturning of “proprietary authorship”
is one of many emerging realizations of the
still-dawning age of database. Work Cited
Like Stallybrass, I believe this age of “Database.” Def. 1. The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd
database has a long, precomputer history, ed. 1989.

Peter Stallybrass, Against Thinking

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Peter Stallybrass, Against Thinking

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

[ P M L A

the changing profession

1580 [ © 2007 by the moder n language association of america ]

mands of undergraduates, graduates, and perhaps unconsciously, what Shakespeare de-­

the changing profession

The Bee’s Work Material Support Form of Writing

tin Luther, Thomas Manton, John Owen, John WORKING is

the changing profession

a considerable Abatement of the Reputation of originality by which their professors mani-­

the changing profession

on Hamlet. of his other borrowings, is made clear by his proud claim to

the changing profession

scholarly spirit in collaborating on the Whit-­ .org])—now evolved into XML—became a

the changing profession

the changing profession

the changing profession

the changing profession

suggests that there are significant material obstacles to

the changing profession

the changing profession

the changing profession

structuring and Urban Development. London: Black-­

Narrative and Database:

the changing profession

the changing profession

Liu, Alan. “Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural His-­

the changing profession

the changing profession

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen

mands of undergraduates, graduates, and perhaps unconsciously, what Shakespeare de-

a considerable Abatement of the Reputation of originality by which their professors mani-

scholarly spirit in collaborating on the Whit- .org])—now evolved into XML—became a

structuring and Urban Development. London: Black-

Liu, Alan. “Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural His-