Retrospect and Prospect: Walt Whitman and the Study of Periodicals Kenneth M. Price “ Walt Whitman, Free Love, and the Social Revolutionist,” American Periodicals1, no. 1(1991): 70–82. Looking back on the inaugural 1991 issue of American Periodicalsand on my contribution, I am struck by how much scholarship has changed in the intervening years. My essay resulted from a familiar method of research: the onsite exploration of an archive. When examining Whitman’s papers at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, I was intrigued to discover that the poet had preserved—and marked with characteristic underscorings—a copy of a free love journal, the Social Revolutionist. Since the language of the Social Revolutionistresonated with Whitman’s own eroticized language, the discovery raised intriguing questions about Whitman’s relationship with the free love movement. The emergence of American Periodicalsprovided a space in which to explore this discovery in some detail. I relied on print to study another print-based object because, at the time, print seemed natural and inescapable. In the years since then, I have helped build a digital resource, The Walt Whitman Archive(begun in 1995), which treats Whitman’s writings in manuscripts, books, and periodicals. Now, with the emergence of so many digital resources, print often seems denaturalized. Nevertheless, Whitman and periodical studies continue to intersect in a time of changing media, when a great deal of analog material is being reconstituted in digital form. My experience editing Walt Whitman: The Contemporary Reviews—a collection that first appeared as a book published by Cambridge University Press in 1996 and then shortly thereafter online at the Whitman Archive—may be illuminating. I located reviews by relying on Scott Giantvalley’s Walt Whitman: A Reference Guide, 1838–1939, supplemented by leads gleaned from other print-based sources. Were I to undertake a comparable project now, I would [End Page 35]of course depend primarily on electronic searches. Electronic searches have their own shortcomings (incomplete coverage plus high error rates in transcriptions generated from optical character recognition processing of scanned documents, a technique that has generated a vast amount of muddied content skewing search results). Yet, even with these problems, the digitization of massive numbers of nineteenth-century newspaper and magazine sources—still only a fraction of the total produced—has eased and advanced research. Just since the publication of the Contemporary Reviews, nearly one hundred additional reviews have been identified and added to the Walt Whitman Archive, and this number will no doubt increase as more periodicals are digitized. The nineteenth-century reviews of Whitman are in the public domain, so we seized the opportunity to make them freely available on the Whitman Archive. Yet to transfer content prepared for a print publication into an electronic environment is not always ideal. As a convenience and because of other pressing obligations, we accepted many of the print-based practices that shaped the book publication (and the larger series of books of which it was a part). The book series was focused on the reviews themselves, not on the periodicals in which they appeared, resulting in the presentation of detached chunks of content, with little contextualization. Given our focus at the Archive, we also tilt toward author-centeredness, yet we recognize that a rich and nuanced understanding of any review requires knowledge of its context. Had circumstances been more favorable, we would have provided more information about the situated nature of each review so that readers could see how it functioned within an individual page and within the context of a particular magazine or newspaper. Possibly, we will later find time to enrich our presentation on the Whitman Archive: a key characteristic of digital publishing is the ever-present potentiality of modification and enhancement. We quickly improved our presentation of periodical texts in a digital environment, however. Under the aegis of the Whitman Archive, Susan Belasco and Elizabeth Lorang edited Whitman’s poems in periodicals. From the outset, they conceived of their project as resulting in digital publication, and thus they were freed from some of the space and format constraints that often limit possibilities in print publication. Belasco and Lorang could offer facsimile images of the newspaper and magazine...