Visitors: Please read this title page, then enter the critical edition. Each page is a prototype of the structure I am creating in SGML for electronic publication using the Panorama SGML browser. Each of the items under "Commentaries" will eventually constitute an active link. After arriving at the second page of this edition, choose from the visual icons. Note: Within the "Index to Poems" page, select number 2--"Scented Herbage of my Breast," then follow the link to the "Barrett Manuscript" for a demonstration of this hypertext structure.

Partial Reading List

• Calamus-Lovers--Walt Whitman's Working Class Camerados by Charles Shively
• A New Introduction to Bibliography by Phillip Gaskell
• Leaves of Grass--A Textual Variorium of the Printed Poems edited by Sculley Bradley,et al.
• Walt Whitman--A Descriptive Bibliographyby Joel Myerson
• Leaves of Grass--Comprehensive Readers Edition edited by Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley
• Leaves of Grass--A Parelell Text by Fredson Bowers
• Walt Whitman's America by David S. Reynolds
• TEI Guidelines
• Metaphors We Live By by George Lakeoff

Project synopsis:

Walt Whitman's "Calamus" Revisions: A Hypermedia Critical Edition is a work-in progress created by Tom Lukas. The purpose of this project is to satisfy the undergraduate senior thesis requirement of the Distinguished Majors and American Studies programs at the University of Virginia.

Scope of Project:

In its completion, this hypertext will compose an archive representing Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass "Calamus" cluster of poems in all of its documentary forms and textual variants, as well as providing literary, historical, biographical and cultural commentaries on Leaves of Grass and Calamus. For the purposes of satisfying the senior thesis requirement, however, my senior project will compose a model of the larger archive, and will also serve as a representitive model of large literary archives.

My senior thesis project will, then, focus on the following objectives:

• familiarization with SGML Text Encoding Initiatives
• creation of a digital facimile of the 1860 "Calamus" poems and the Whitman "Calamus" manuscripts
• creation of 1860 "Calamus" files in TEI-2 SGML (the e-text standard) and Rosetti SGML, and for the purposes of comparison of these two DTD's as instruments of literary analysis
• familiarization with principles and practices of textual editing necessary to represent the 45 "Calamus" poems of the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass in the Rosetti DTD SGML format
• adaptation of the Rosetti hypertext archive structure to accomodate Whitman's printed texts and manuscripts
• digitization of the Fredson Bowers' collation of the Barrett Collection of 1860 Leaves of Grassmanuscripts as found in both the Barrett Collection physical archive and Bowers publication Whitman's Manuscripts--Leaves of Grass: A Parallel Text
• A continuation of Bowers' Descriptive Bibliography work to incorporate current bibliographical practices
• representation of "Calamus #1:" (In Paths Untrodden) and "Calamus #2:" (Scented Herbage of My Breast) in each of its genetic forms and textual varients
• design of an information structure to represent the provenance of Whitman's manuscripts