Matt Cohen

Below are brief descriptions of the latest work in Matt Cohen's humanities laboratory.  For fuller accounts, white papers, samples of the projects, and a full list of the research assistants who make all of this possible, see

http://asmodeus.ws/cohenlab/staff.htm

http://asmodeus.ws/cohenlab/annotations.htm

Whitman's marginal annotations--his annotations and other scribblings on or about other writers' printed works--show the poet responding to a broad swath of literary, historical, philosophical, and scientific antecedents, and sometimes take extraordinary physical shapes. They've never been edited as a group before, and most have never even been reprinted in any form. They are an astonishingly rich resource for students of Whitman, of nineteenth-century American literature, and of textual studies more broadly.

In 2007-08, Cohen Lab received a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop software tools and protocols for digital representation of static multimedia documents. We have built prototype tools for marking up such documents as well as for displaying interactive search results for such documents using images and text.

In the next phase of this project, supported by an NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant from 2012-2014, we are building a demonstration site gathering scans from the archives that hold large or particularly rich collections of Whitman's annotated material, including Duke University's Special Collections, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, and Middlebury College Special Collections; and transcribing and encoding 800 pages' worth of these documents for free public web-based access.

Current staff:

• Lauren Grewe, Assistant Editor
• Mike Speriosu, Developer
• Brett Barney, Consultant

Credits:

Nicole Gray, Assistant Editor, Project Manager 2010-2012

Elizabeth Frye, Editorial Assistant, 2012

In the summer of 2011, the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa hosted a Research Seminar, “Walt Whitman International: Literary Translation and the Digital Archive.” Whitman scholars and translators working in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, and Polish gathered to consider Whitman's poems in comparative translation and to speculate about what an electronic edition of such a comparison might look like.

The group decided to find all translations of one poem, Whitman's "Poets to Come," and present them online. Cohenlab completed a set of Spanish translations in the fall of 2011, published at the Walt Whitman Archive in Fall 2012.

Credits:

• Nicole Gray, Project Manager and Assistant Editor
• Rey Rocha, Assistant Editor

TextGrounder is a system that processes texts to identify the places and times that are mentioned in them and disambiguates them to points on Earth or on the timeline. The system uses a number of natural language processing components, plus unsupervised machine learning methods for disambiguation. The output of the system can be used to create various geotemporal visualizations of texts and text corpora, for example, on Google Earth.

Textgrounder is the brainchild of Jason Baldridge (Linguistics, UT Austin), and is supported by the New York Community Trust. Matt Cohen and Jason Baldridge are co-PIs of a grant to develop Textgrounder for pedagogical uses from Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services at UT Austin. We're trying to make it easy to pull geolocations from literary texts, focusing on frequently taught texts from nineteenth-century American literature.

See http://code.google.com/p/textgrounder/ for more information and a glimpse of the state of the project.

http://www.whitmanarchive.org/criticism/disciples/traubel/index.html

In summer 2012, we completed a digital edition of Horace Traubel's nine-volume work, With Walt Whitman in Camden. This set of books is a treasure trove of Whitman's opinions on all things both trivial and important. Making them available in an electronically searchable form will advance Whitman studies, since few libraries have a complete set and they are cumbersome to use because of their inadequate indexing.  This edition combines fully searchable electronic text of the nine volumes with selected facsimile digital images of the ephemera (letters and poetry drafts, for example) that were reproduced in the original books. We are currently at work on an introduction sketching the literary and material contexts from which Traubel's text emerged.

For full credits, see the links to the individual volumes here.

The first known edition of Walt Whitman's poems in Spanish translation, titled Poemas, appeared in 1912 in Valencia. Translated by Uruguayan poet and socialist Álvaro Armando Vasseur, the text was based largely on a previously published Italian translation and other foreign editions.

This digital edition is freely available at the Walt Whitman Archive (http://www.whitmanarchive.org), offering both the opportunity to teach Whitman's poetry from its first widely distributed Spanish translation and to consider the larger questions of translation, both literary and cultural, raised by its complex translation history. An introduction by Rachel Price and Matt Cohen traces what is known of the bibliographical genealogy and critical discussion of the text, situates Poemas in its contemporary international literary and political context, and briefly sketches important or unusual features of Vasseur's translation.

http://www.whitmanarchive.org/criticism/bibliography/index.html

The Whitman bibliography is one of the most powerful and important tools on the Walt Whitman Archive. This critical bibliography of Whitman, dating back to the earliest reviews of his work, represents the only such online, searchable resource available for a major American author. With the generous permission of Donald Kummings, editor of Walt Whitman, 1940-1975: A Reference Guide (G.K. Hall, 1982), we expanded the database back to 1940; in 2009-10 we completed the automated updating of the database with entries from Scott Giantvalley's bibliography, dating back to Whitman's time. These bibliographies will, as part of the ongoing work of the Archive, be edited and supplemented with newly discovered entries.

Staff:

• Matt Cohen
• Travis Brown
• Erica Fretwell
• Bethany Allen

During the 2010-11 academic year, I was co-director, with Lars Hinrichs, of the Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies (TILTS). TILTS is a series of year-long institutes with changing themes, hosted by the UT English Department. The 2010-11 theme was "The Digital and the Human(ities)."

We held three symposia: February 3-5; March 10-12; and May 26-28. Each symposium focused on a different aspect of the digital humanities that's getting a lot of attention lately.

Please visit our website, which features streaming video of the keynotes, a full program, and audio files of many of the panels; and follow us on Twitter.