Walt Whitman at the Aurora: A Model for Journalistic Attribution

Relatively little manuscript material exists to definitively tie Walt Whitman to the bulk of the journalistic writing attributed to him, particularly the writing in the early years of his career. Because the vast majority of his early journalistic work was unsigned, attribution is most often based on the knowledge of Whitman’s involvement with a given paper, coupled with the identification of some sort of Whit- manic voice or tone in a given piece of writing. However, a writer’s style and tone are often affected by the form and context in which they are writing, meaning that Whitman’s journalistic voice is often quite different than his poetic voice, which is in turn different than his prose fiction voice. Furthermore, certain similarities of style and tone are found across a given genre; many nineteenth-century newspaper editorials sound quite similar, for example, making any discussion of authorship in nineteenth-century periodicals rife with uncertainty. Therefore, even for the most knowledgeable scholars, a belief that Whitman was the author of a given piece of journalism generally rests upon a trust in the tradition of attributing a piece to Whitman, with skepticism arising only in the face of strong evidence to the contrary. Last year, the editorial team overseeing the treatment of Whitman’s journalism for the Walt Whitman Archive decided to add an editorial note to the metadata at the top of each text file, explaining the Archive’s rationale for attributing a piece to Whitman. In the note, we lay out all of the factors—including the piece’s attribution history—that influenced our decision to present the piece as likely authored by Whitman. We also embedded, within the TEI encoding, an expression of our level of certainty in Whitman’s authorship. Finally, we noted in the metadata whether and how the piece was signed by Whitman in the original publication. These measures are an attempt to foreground for users the inherent uncertainty of authorship in nineteenth-century periodical materials. But they also offer the opportunity to begin thinking about how we might move beyond traditional methods of attribution

Interaction of forced Orr-Sommerfeld and Squire modes in a low-order representation of turbulent channel flow

A resolvent-based reduced-order representation is used to capture time-averaged second-order statistics in turbulent channel flow. The recently proposed decomposition of the resolvent operator into two distinct families related to the Orr-Sommerfeld and Squire operators [Rosenberg and McKeon, Efficient representation of exact coherent states of the Navier-Stokes equations using resolvent analysis, Fluid Dyn. Res. 51, 011401 (2019)] results in dramatic improvement in the ability to match all components of the energy spectra and the uv cospectrum. The success of the new representation relies on the ability of the Squire modes to compete with the vorticity generated by Orr-Sommerfeld modes, which is demonstrated by decomposing the statistics into contributions from each family. It is then shown that this competition can be used to infer a phase relationship between the two sets of modes. Additionally, the relative Reynolds number scalings for the two families of resolvent weights are derived for the universal classes of resolvent modes presented by Moarref et al. [Moarref, Sharma, Tropp, and McKeon, Model-based scaling of the streamwise energy density in high-Reynolds-number turbulent channels, J. Fluid Mech. 734, 275 (2013)]. These developments can be viewed as a starting point for further modeling efforts to quantify nonlinear interactions in wall-bounded turbulence

The design of a common lunar lander

The Austin Cynthesis Corporation was formed to respond to a Request for Proposal for the design of a Common Lunar Lander (CLL) capable of carrying lightweight (less than 500 kg), unspecified payload to the moon. This Final Design Report Document includes information on the requirements for the design project; the ideas proposed as solutions to the design problem; the work which has been completed in support of the design effort; justifications, validations, and verifications of decisions made during the project; and suggestions for future work to be done in support of the project. A project schedule, including current status of the items included on the schedule, as well as cost and management summaries is also included

Walt Whitman, Editor at the <i>New-York Atlas</i>

The Walt Whitman Archive&nbsp;journalism grant team introduces a new discovery and proposes a new theory of Whitman as an editor at the New-York Atlas.&nbsp