Text/Context part 1: As Cultural Object

When reading a certain work through a New Historicist lens, not only am I interested in the cultural objects mentioned directly or invoked through certain actions, but even more so I am interested in how the actual text itself works as a cultural object. For instance, in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, there are various references to writing, printing/publishing, and books:

Writing and talk do not prove me,
I carry the plenum of proof and every thing else in my face,
With the hush of my lips I confound the topmost skeptic.

[...]

To walk up my stoop is unaccountable . . . . I pause to consider if it really be,
That I eat and drink is spectacle enough for the great authors and schools,
A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.

[...]

My words are words of a questioning, and to indicate reality;
This printed and bound book . . . . but the printer and the printing-office boy?

But, while these lines inspire me to think about these literacy objects as cultural ones that may inform meaning in/of this work, I find it much more challenging to think about how the poem's written form, in its various contexts, functions culturally--i.e. how it functions in its original form, vs. a facsimile, vs. print in a hard copy today, vs. electronic print as part of an archive, etc.