The ADE E-Newsletter
The Association for Documentary Editing's E-News
Special Edition: Digital Conversions
Nov 12th
by Susan H. Perdue, Director, Documents Compass
The three editors who describe their experiences below have all undergone what you might call conversion experiences in the realm of digital documentary editing. Sabra Statham, a young scholar, began with an idea to do a straightforward database of the composer George Antheil’s correspondence and ended up at the far end of the spectrum, with a multi-stage and multi-faceted project. Her enthusiasm for her project and its implications for the profession of musicology suggest how complete her conversion has been. David Radcliffe was an early adopter of technology but found that he has had to reshape his approach and methods more than once as that technology changed. In the end, it changed him. Holly Shulman was a convert to documentary editing after her early studies in media history. She recognized the potential of the new medium when she began in a new profession that changed her as she changed it. Frequently it happens that as we convert technologies over time, that same technology converts us. Here are their three stories.
Sabra Statham, Digital Conversions: The George Antheil Digital Edition
David Radcliffe, Digital Conversions: David Radcliffe
Holly Shulman, Digital Conversions: Dolley Madison Digital Edition
Digital Conversions: Dolley Madison Digital Edition
Nov 12th
by Holly C. Shulman, University of Virginia
I began work on the Dolley Madison Digital Edition (DMDE) about eight years ago, but my roots in media history and digital technology go back to the 1980s and 1990s. In the 1980s I was a graduate student at the University of Maryland, writing a dissertation on short wave radio as a medium of international communication, and the creation and wartime experience of the Voice of America (VOA). I come from a media family. All of us, my parents, my siblings, at some time in our lives have been journalists, written books, or produced radio or television shows (or some combination of all of these). My father had gone into broadcasting in the 1930s, not quite at the beginning of radio, but close to it. During the war he had worked for the Office of War Information, and become head of the Overseas Branch and director of the VOA. So it seemed a family-friendly decision to write about radio broadcasting, and logical to include a discussion of how the various forms of media shaped the content they provided. Short wave radio was a good instance of that problem: radio is a unique medium, and shortwave imposes distinct limits on what you can produce (to begin with, forget about production values, you can’t achieve that level of sound quality). What the Voice could accomplish in the midst of war was not only a function of diplomatic policy, domestic political maneuvering, and military context, but of the very nature of the medium of radio and how the VOA writers and producers chose to deploy their own artistic goals. When I finally discovered the World Wide Web, I’d thought about media, about form and content, about how television was not simply radio with pictures nor were movies plays on celluloid. It meant that I never considered web publication a process of simply moving print from paper to screen.
In 1993 I took a job as associate director of an honors program at the University of Maryland in Science, Technology, and Society. The very first day I walked into my new office and sat down at my new computer, I encountered Mosaic. Mosaic was the precursor of Netscape and its release in many ways began the web (not the internet) revolution. At my new job I was surrounded by undergraduates majoring in engineering and computer science. I could not have been in a more adventurous or fruitful environment. By 1994 I had organized workshops and internships on the World Wide Web, and off we went, exploring HTML, and what impact the Web would make in local, regional, national, and international communications.
When I moved to Charlottesville at the beginning of the century I decided to shift my historical focus and work on Dolley Madison. I had married the editor of the Papers of James Madison, and Dolley was the perfect Virginia project. Initially I thought I’d simply set about writing a biography of her. But I soon realized that exploring the history of someone who lived in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was going to be a very different experience than writing 20th-century history. For my original work I went to archives around the United States and Britain, interviewed the participants in three countries, and listened to VOA broadcasts and BBC sound recordings. But my ability to work with these materials was shaped by proximity to the events. I was old enough to share, if not the experience, at least something of the worldview of the writers, producers, and broadcasters of the wartime VOA. I knew them both imaginatively and literally. I grew up in the shadow of the war, and my very notions not only of the importance of mass media, but of social justice and world order were rooted there. And my father’s name (he was already dead by the time I began work on my dissertation) was my calling card. I had access to those about whom I was writing; some of them even spent days with me and shared their old letters and papers.
I experienced the world of Dolley Madison as a shock. As I approached Dolley’s letters I knew I could not read them as I had the letters of the head of the French Desk of the Voice of America, or one of its writers, or an assistant secretary of state. I had encountered a different country: the past. I made the decision, therefore, to edit a documentary edition, and examine the letters one by one, exploring each person mentioned and working out each political, literary, diplomatic, or personal reference. I realized I could not leap through this material; I had to crawl, spyglass to the ground. I began by apprenticing myself to a master in the craft of documentary editing, David Mattern, and together we produced the Selected Letters of Dolley Madison. But that book contained only three hundred letters, and Dolley wrote or received nearly ten times that number. And so the idea of doing a supplement to the book as an electronic edition surfaced. I was excited; I could unite my old interest in media with my new one of the Early Republic. I would edit a born-digital documentary edition in the field of history.
My web experience in 2001 and 2002 was still pretty much confined to HTML and hyperlinks, so it was not clear to me how to make an edition of which I would be proud and to which I could devote the next decade of my life. I turned out to be extraordinarily lucky as the University of Virginia Press got funding at about the same time to create an electronic imprint, soon called Rotunda, and to my delight and amazement I – or the Dolley Madison Digital Edition – became its first publication. I soaked up the attention.
I brought to the DMDE what I think are three important convictions. The first was that no two media present ideas in the same way. I understood that the web was not simply paper delivered by digits, that reading would be a different experience on line. The second was a conviction that the World Wide Web was a communications revolution in which historians would have to participate. The third was that most readers, even scholars and certainly college and graduate students, would not be able to make a lot more sense of these documents than I did without my identifying the cast of characters and the many political, literary, social, economic, and family references.
Most documentary editions in the field of history do not strive to identify everyone (and every place, title, and so on) mentioned in every letter. I set out to encompass them all and to make sure that when the reader learned that a Mrs. T was talking to a Mrs. S, they could quickly ascertain that Mrs. T was Anna Maria Thornton and Mrs. S was Margaret Bayard Smith. That has taken me a great deal of time. Moreover, that decision had two distinct implications. One was that no annotations would be tied to a single letter, as footnotes are to a document in a print volume. There are few alternatives in the world of print; there are more in the World Wide Web. That is not to say that traditional annotations are not sometimes the most efficient way to communicate a comment or explain a letter, but I wanted to explore how the web could create new ways of visualizing information and communicating ideas.
Thus my annotations became discrete modules of information, independent chunks of text, which the reader could access independent of any other material. This reshaped the very writing of notes and identifications (IDs). Glossary entries would change and grow over time as they clarified a reference while simultaneously explaining that reference within the text of the ID. I also became aware of how many different Mr. Smiths were mentioned. Technically, this required a database and a way to generate unique identifiers. That way I could be certain that the reader would get the correct John Smith, of whom I might have seven – or even the right James Madison, who shared his name with several of his contemporaries, including his cousin, the Bishop James Madison. Over the years I have increasingly come to appreciate the importance not only of identifiers, but also of building a system for name authority into which all of us could tap. It has yet to happen, but it will be a great leap forward when it does.
At no point was I tempted to experiment with non-linear order; however messy the contingency of life as we live it is, moment by moment. We need order and we write according to linear, structured, arguments. In a documentary edition letters are relatively discrete blocks of text. That is a tremendous advantage in the world of digital editions. But to do this, I needed a more powerful tool than HTML.
Rotunda introduced me to XML, and to the luxury of working with a MarkLogic server that was created to provide just the right tools. I could now tag, and the press could create query structures that would enable the reader to call up letters and texts that would have an inner, linear, coherence, no matter now complicated the search. Readers can now browse though letters in the DMDE by chronology, author, recipient, topic, and so on. They can flip through the pages as they would a book, if they wanted to try to replicate that experience. They can pull up all the letters Dolley wrote her sisters, or Anna Maria Thornton wrote her. They can move deeper into the text and search for every time a person was mentioned – even if they are looking for Margaret Bayard Smith and the letter simply says Mrs. S. They can limit that search by location or chronology or type of document. They can pull up all the letters that relate to slavery or friendship, and so on. In each of these examples, the reader gets results that are ordered and logical.
The result of all this is the Dolley Madison Digital Edition. Since the first installment appeared in 2004 I have changed some of my thinking and expanded the documents I choose to include. A graduate student at the University of Virginia, Jean Bauer, created a database template for me to convey ideas about Dolley’s social networks derived from her invitations. I now include legal documents, newspapers, and third-party correspondence — but I am now editing Dolley’s letters as a widow, and so new strategies are called for to explore her problems as she navigated her world alone, without her beloved husband. I have confronted the problems of financial documents, and vastly improved my original database so that it is now an authoring as well as management tool. But all of these developments have been built on my original decisions, a product of my experiences.
Holly C. Shulman, of Documents Compass, is editor of the Dolley Madison Digital Edition and Research Professor in the Department of History at the University of Virginia.
Digital Conversions: David Radcliffe
Nov 12th
by David Radcliffe,Virginia Tech
Certainly I never intended to become an editor. Literature students of my cohort in the 1970s and 1980s took a lively interest in Hegel and hermeneutics and had little patience with collation exercises: the grand contest between structuralism and post-structuralism would not be determined by empirical reasoning. Odd as it may sound, when I was a graduate student at the University of Virginia there was no required coursework in research methodology or bibliography. What we knew about textual editing (the subject was not entirely avoidable in Fredson Bowers’ department) made it sound only slightly less complicated than particle physics. We pretty much left it alone.
Yet traditions can be stubborn affairs. Despite all that immersion in critical theory most of my peers, intentionally or unintentionally influenced by their teachers, emerged as literary historians. Before long I was in full reaction, disillusioned by the aporias of high theory and curious about what happened in literary history and why. Animated by a desire for empirical knowledge, if not yet an inclination towards textual editing, I undertook a long study of the evolution of literary forms that fifteen years later would take the form of a database, English Poetry 1579-1830: Spenser and the Tradition. <http://spenserians.cath.vt.edu/>
The project involved tracking series of literary imitations, enumerating missing links and incremental changes in long and complex sequences of poems overlooked in histories of literature based upon anthologies and received accounts as opposed to the undigested mass of poetry reposing in unread books and periodicals. Believing that the “punctuated equilibrium” model of change favored by cultural historians was belied by the fossil record, I ground through, among other things, the Burney Collection of newspapers. Twice.
I had become a bibliographer with a vengeance; it was during the 1980s and 1990s when information technology was beginning to revolutionize scholarship. What began as a stack of three-by-five cards migrated to a word-processing document, and from thence to a database and a wonderful program some readers will remember, called HyperCard. Among other things, HyperCard enabled one to create “links” between records. Imagine that! In the years before web browsers, the capacity to link documents was heady stuff.
Did I mention documents? Another benefit of the digital revolution was that it became very easy to append text to one’s bibliography. I began with sample stanzas and short quotations. But the advent of desktop OCR made it practical to include entire documents, and who could say no? Ten years into the project I was hard at work on a full-text poetry database, copiously illustrated with contemporary biographies and critical essays, all cross-linked and searchable by demographic and bibliographic links. It would top out at nearly thirty thousand records. But a textual editor? Not me.
The coming of the internet provoked an existential crisis as it gradually became apparent that my HyperCard project could not and would not be ported to the Web. As the rest of the world adopted HTML, there I was with a database that might as well have been a cuneiform tablet for all the good it was. With my back to the wall, I was compelled to learn some programming, and after various misadventures had a MySQL database that was belatedly published in 2006.
Legacy problems persist. All that text, and not a single tag! I had once flirted with SGML but went the database route, resulting in a technical albatross whose future remains in doubt. It was long past time to learn something about digital editing, and in 2006 I made the transition to XML/TEI, and have since edited, among other things, The Civil War Letters of Joseph Perrin Burrage <http://burrage-letters.cath.vt.edu/>, an 1822 Lives of Scottish Poets <http://scotspoets.cath.vt.edu/>, and a variorum edition of Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel <http://scott-minstrel.cath.vt.edu/> I am now launched on an enterprise entitled Lord Byron and his Times that will involve editing, annotating, and cross-linking scores of books and hundreds, nay thousands, of poems and articles.
Editing for the screen is proving to be very different from editing for the page; where the object was once to reduce a cluster of witnesses to one ideal text, current practice, given unlimited space, is more likely to involve presenting one document in several variants. By means of pop ups and hidden text it is possible to append quantities of information without rendering a document visually incoherent (there is now generally more available information to append). The tendency toward digital expansiveness is reflected in my own editorial interest in using the voices of historical readers to gloss a text, yet another way of multiplying “witnesses.”
That earlier study of literary evolution demonstrated, to my satisfaction anyway, that there is no such thing as equilibrium in literary history, only processes of continuous change quite beyond the control of critics, theorists, and makers of curricula and anthologies. Such was also my experience of a digital revolution better described as an evolution, albeit a hasty and non-linear one. Its sequences of events make a degree of sense retrospectively, yet no one could have predicted, much less willed, the outcome. Certainly I could not have predicted the course my career has run. And yet I find myself, if hardly in the Bowers tradition of textual editing, very much in the Bowers tradition of putting bibliography at the center of literary enquiry.
As Jerome McGann and others have argued, it has fallen to our lot to begin the unspeakably ambitious task of digitally editing and annotating the legacy of three thousand years of written documents. If the way forward is somewhat clearer than it was a decade ago, there is much that remains challenging methodologically, technically, and economically. We may be confident that the challenges will be met if only because we have three thousand years of experience with bringing editorial skills to bear in historical circumstances that never have stood still. Matters will not unfold as planned–the future fossil record will be replete with obsolete projects, failed innovations, and neglected merit–but the work will be done.
_________________________
After taking an undergraduate degree in architecture, David Radcliffe pursued literary studies at the University of Chicago and the University of Virginia. He now teaches at Virginia Tech, where he is the director of the Center for Applied Technologies in the Humanities (CATH). He has published Forms of Reflection (Johns Hopkins UP, 1993) and Edmund Spenser: a Reception History (Camden House, 1996).
Digital Conversions: The George Antheil Digital Edition
Nov 12th
by Sabra Statham, Fellow, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities
When I completed my Ph.D. in Music from CUNY Graduate Center in February of 2009 I felt energized. I immediately embarked on my next project, one I had decided upon even before I finished my dissertation. I had produced a documentary study of letters exchanged between composers and publishers who had worked for the music publishing firm Universal Edition A.G. before WWII, most of whom had emigrated to the United States by 1938. I was interested in exploring how market forces and the interests of the publishing companies had shaped the music of these composers between 1938 and 1965. This was essentially a question of canon development as Universal Edition published almost every important composer of the twentieth century. In the end I produced an annotated edition of letters by composers Béla Bartók, Arnold Schoenberg, George Antheil, Kurt Weill and Ernst Krenek and publishers Hans Heinsheimer, Hugo Winter, Felix Greissle and Ralph Hawkes.
Although I had begun with the goal of writing a history, I instead ended up editing and annotating a collection of letters because nothing spoke as well as the documents themselves to the issues I had raised. And while they were all interesting, none were as compelling as those by George Antheil, an American-born composer whose career took off in 1920s Paris and Berlin. There he was acclaimed for his “Bad Boy” image and avante garde mechanistic music. In 1933, with the rise of fascism and the collapse of the European economy, he returned to the United States. He moved to Los Angeles, transforming himself into a Hollywood composer who made his living by writing film scores –- and began composing in a more neoclassic style. Antheil was charming and well-spoken and traveled among the rich, famous, and talented. His letters were long, culturally rich, full of emotion, and detailed. Everyone who read my dissertation talked about Antheil’s letters.
So I decided to make my first project a book that would be the selected correspondence of George Antheil. No one had done it, the letters were fantastic, and Antheil was enjoying a rediscovery. I began making plans and started examining grants. I soon ended up with a copy of an NEH Fellowship application in hand. The date for applications had passed but it was something to think about — especially the part that said all things being equal they favored projects that had a digital component.
That got me thinking. I had dealt extensively with online resources doing my research and had worked with the Arnold Schoenberg archive online (it was actually coming online as I did my work). I thought that maybe I could do the same thing, build an online database of Antheils’ letters, after the book was finished. That would be great, but it had to work better than the Schoenberg archive. I had used it and while I didn’t know how it was done, I knew what I liked and what I didn’t like. I wanted search functions, and I wanted the paragraphs and sections of the letters to look like the originals when I printed them , and I wanted to be able to read marginalia, and perhaps more.
I had no idea, of course, how to do this. There were few models in musicology and no training for it at my graduate school. One day while web surfing I happened upon a site by a group named Documents Compass. I sent an email. In my experience, these sorts of queries ordinarily go unanswered, but Holly Shulman responded, and it wasn’t long before we met. She liked the project, and began to put some of her own energy into it. Looking back, I think the topic had personal relevance for her. Moreover, I found Documents Compass wonderful: they have energy and imagination combined with technical knowledge and a deep professionalism. Work began.
This past summer I became a fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. I come from Charlottesville, so it was easy for me to spend time there this past summer, familiarizing myself with digital editing tools, researching grants, and meeting people at a lot of lunches. By the end of the summer the project was well defined enough that I could apply for grants from NEH, ACLS, and NHPRC with some level of knowledge about how the technology would work. The project I had only begun to imagine four months previously was now “launched” and I had confidence that it would, at least eventually, be produced and published. Moreover, I could see that this was only the beginning of my entry into the digital world.
As I think about my future, I believe that my work with the Antheil Edition has opened up a whole new side to my scholarly work. I have found that working with the digital medium has stimulated my creative sense. My ideas are no longer limited to pages of typeset essays and footnotes, with an occasional photograph or facsimile — a sparkle of freedom from the confines of black and white Times New Roman 12 pt. With the electronic medium I have to think about aesthetics, functionality, and interest of my electronic edition. It also opens up new doors to collaborative work, which for me has always been an interest. The technology naturally invites projects that involve multiple people, in various locations, working with diverse materials and the potential to bring ideas and objects together in an online work site. I have begun exploring different tools that I have recently located including TextGrid, Pliny, Eclipse, and PubMan. After sending a query via the American Musicological Society (AMS) Listserv I have become part of a little study group whose goal is to do some sketch studies on Antheil using TextGrid.
Other issues have now begun to surface as well. The most imperative within the musicological community is their lack of engagement with digital technology. There are some exceptions, a few fantastic digital projects are going on and some online editions. But we lag far behind other branches of the humanities in our digital output. The main focus for the musicological community has been digitizing manuscripts for study. I believe it is significant that out of 1500 musicologists on the AMS list, only two responded that they had knowledge of TextGrid and one of those was a German (the home of TextGrid) scholar. There may well be others who did not respond for a host of reasons, but still I was surprised. There is no AMS study group on digital issues and to my knowledge there will be only one paper at the 2009 national conference that deals with scholarship in the digital world. Moreover, we not only lag far behind other fields in the humanities but also far behind our European counterparts who seem to be more actively engaged in digital technology than Americans.
The other major issue my project has raised is dissemination. How will my electronic work be “published”? Fortunately I have already had some good conversations with a few university presses. But publication by a university press won’t satisfy the expectation that online scholarship should be free of charge. Nor do my potential answers help smaller projects find solutions.
I can see that there is a circular pattern here. The medium shapes the project and the project shapes the medium. That is how it has played out in my case. The NEH “mandate” that I publish digitally shaped my project. Without the suggestion that I go digital, I would not have approached the full correspondence nor extended the Antheil project to include other composers so it can blossom into a networked project. If scholars do not have any incentive to produce digitally they probably won’t take up the challenge. And if musicologists do not have an online venue through which to publish their work, then they won’t develop projects that take advantage of the technology. And that would be a loss to scholarship. We must develop more ways to publish material and encourage collaborative work environments. And these must extend beyond e-books, or bringing journals online, but include venues that invite diverse ways of thinking about presenting material and different ways of doing work together or alone in a digital world.
As I said, I am just at the beginning of my career and at the threshold of my entry into the digital world. But I believe that the internet, the world wide web, and the technology it brings is powerful. It will shape my scholarly work and my scholarly career.
Editors’ note: We have included a brief description of the George Antheil Digital Edition.
The George Antheil Digital Edition (GADE) will be the first complete edition of all the known correspondence of the twentieth-century American composer George Antheil. The edition will be published electronically and will feature a user-friendly interface which will allow scholars to search the database by name, date, term, topic, work and place. In addition, the edition will feature biographical and thematic essays, editorial notes, and scholarly bibliographies. Annotations will be accessed via pop up windows and hyperlinks. Unlike paper editions that can only accommodate text, the electronic edition will allow for the addition of sound, image, and notation to the annotation panes that accompany the letters.
The GADE will be prepared using a unique FileMaker Pro database that allows for accessioning, editing, and tagging of the documents all in the same software system. All correspondence will be output as fully tagged XML documents that will be exported to the publisher for publication. The same FileMaker Pro database records all of the steps in the editing process. It generates an individual record for each document, an original ID number for each annotation tag, aligns facsimile images with the corresponding transcriptions, and records the date and time of all editorial activity. There will also be a letter press edition of the Selected Letters of George Antheil.
While publishing options are being considered for the GADE, options for free and open access will continue to be explored.
It is hoped that the final phase of this project will be an extended set of related editions that will be cross referenced and interoperable and published in a series alongside the correspondence of George Antheil. Located in one virtual space, scholars would be able to search multiple archives all at one time while enabling the gleaning of data to study name authority, social networks, and chronologies. This last phase of the project is tentatively called Mahagonny, after the opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny by Kurt Weill and Bertholt Brecht.
Sabra Statham holds the Ph.D. in Music from the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York as well as the M.Mus. in Violin Performance and the M.A. in Music Theory and History from Pennsylvania State University. Her dissertation is forthcoming by Georg Olms Verlag as part of the series Studien und Materialien zur Musikwissenschaft.
Special Featured Article: Hidden Archives
Nov 12th
Susan Severtson
Director, Communications
Documents Compass
The Litchfield Historical Society was founded in 1856. Since that time, the Society has been dedicated to preserving the rich history of the town. Its Helga J. Ingraham Memorial Research Library collections contain documentation of events with local, regional, and national significance. Litchfield’s rise to prominence began in 1751 when it was named the County Seat. During the Revolutionary war it housed a supply depot as well as a notorious prison which held New Jersey governor William Franklin, the son of patriot Benjamin Franklin. Oliver Wolcott, signer of the Declaration of Independence, made his home on South Street. It was in his orchard that a statue of King George, brought to Litchfield via ox cart, was melted into bullets for the use of the continental army. Despite its inland location in the northwest Connecticut hills, Litchfield became a regional heart of culture, education, and Federalist politics. In the aftermath of independence, the community embraced the strife of party politics and the bustle of the market economy. In American education, Litchfield was in the vanguard. Local lawyer Tapping Reeve developed the first curriculum for teaching common law and opened the first law school in the United States and educated such prominent men as Aaron Burr and John C. Calhoun. 
Women also discovered unusual educational opportunities in the town. In 1792 Sarah Pierce founded a pioneering institution of female education. Her innovative curriculum that combined academic, practical, and ornamental courses expanded the world of more than 3,000 girls who attended the school over its 41-year history.
The collections of the Society also document the Beecher family including Lyman and his daughters Catharine and Harriet; Benjamin Tallmadge who served as George Washington’s spy master during the Revolutionary War; Colonel John Brace, Revolutionary War Paymaster; Senator Uriah Tracy; the Wolcott family including Connecticut governors Oliver Wolcott Sr. and Oliver Wolcott Jr.; Elihu Harrison, a Litchfield merchant who did business in New York and around the world. Until recently, these collections were only made available via an in-house card catalog. With a grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources and the use of open source software, the staff is making progress toward creating online finding aids for these materials. See what is there at http://www.litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org/archon/ and check back often for new descriptions.
Interedition
Nov 12th
“Interedition’s aim is to promote the interoperability of the tools and methodology we use in the field of digital scholarly editing and research. Toward this aim Interedition organizes meetings for experts in both digital and non-digital scholarly editing to further the ideas and concepts for interoperability of digital tools. As a result Interedition will produce a road map for the realization of a supranational digital infrastructure for scholarly editions and research, accompanied by a number of proof-of-concept web services to demonstrate the viability of the ideas and concepts put forward by Interedition as a networked research platform.”
National Archives Helps Founding Fathers Go Online
Nov 12th
WASHINGTON, DC. The National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), the grant making arm of the National Archives, in partnership with Documents Compass at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, is pleased to announce 5,000 previously unpublished documents from our nation’s founders are now online through Rotunda, the digital imprint of The University of Virginia Press.
For full article, go to:
http://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/2010/nr10-14.html
Textual Debates and Editorial Practice: A Spring Semester Seminar directed by Margaret Jane Kidnie
Nov 12th
Editorial studies achieved an unexpected celebrity in the late 1980s and 1990s, while occasioning sometimes heated polemical debate. While the scholarly quarrels have recently become more nuanced, there remains uncertainty about the principles of editorial practice. How are editors adapting their methodologies in face of the so-called theory wars, and how might they continue to evolve? How, if at all, are editions designed for use in the classroom, study, and theatre changing?
This seminar is designed to engage practitioners new to the field as well as experienced editors who would like to explore current issues at more length. Participants will draw on their own works-in-progress among other examples to investigate the process of preparing an edition for publication, from interpreting manuscripts to establishing substantive editions to making decisions about emendation, lineation, and commentary.
Using this practical aspect as a foundation for discussion, participants will explore new possibilities for editorial practice and the larger conceptual issues they raise. Topics will include authors and authority; print evidence of lost manuscript sources; changing canonical boundaries; editing conventions and modern publishing constraints; and editing and theatre as related forms of modern (and always adaptive?) production.
Director: Margaret Jane Kidnie, Professor of English at the University of Western Ontario, is the author of Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (2009). She has edited Philip Stubbes: The Anatomie of Abuses (2002) and Ben Jonson: The Devil is an Ass and Other Plays (2000); her edition of The Humorous Magistrate, an early seventeenth-century manuscript drama, is forthcoming with the Malone Society. She is the co-editor of Textual Performances: The Modern Reproduction of Shakespeare’s Drama (2004), and has written widely on editorial practice, particularly in relation to issues of performance. She is currently working on an edition of A Woman Killed with Kindness.
Schedule: Thursdays, 1 – 4:30 p.m., 28 January through 15 April 2010, except 25 February and 1 April.
Apply: 4 January 2010 for admission only.
Application information may be found on the Folger Institute’s website:
Queries: institute@folger.edu
Papers of Abraham Lincoln, Editors
Nov 12th
University of Illinois Springfield, Center for State Policy and Leadership is seeking two (2) historical documentary editors to provide historical research in locating documents, document image acquisition and editing, transcription and proofing of historical texts, and contextual research and drafting of document annotations for the Papers of Abraham Lincoln project. The historical documentary editors will work initially with the project at the National Archives in Washington, DC.
Requirements: 1) Master of Arts degree in History, with a concentration in American history; 2) minimum of five years of applicable experience in documentary editing or scholarly research on Lincoln; 3) demonstrated skill in historical research and writing; 4) demonstrated ability to communicate effectively orally and in writing; and 5) working knowledge of computers, including word processing, database, graphics, and e-mail programs. Preference will be given to applicants with a Doctor of Philosophy degree in History; demonstrated ability to work effectively on group tasks; demonstrated attention to detail and precision in research, reading, and writing; demonstrated ability to speak to public groups on historical topics; and experience in utilizing electronic databases and the Internet for historical research. Salary and benefits appropriate to skills.
Applicants should send a resume documenting all job requirements; college transcripts; and names, addresses, and phone numbers of at least three references. Screening of applications will begin November 20, 2009, but applications will be considered until the positions are filled. Positions ideally will begin on January 4, 2010.
The University of Illinois Springfield is one of three campuses of the University of Illinois and provides an intellectually rich, collaborative, and intimate learning environment for students, faculty, and staff, while serving local, regional, state, national, and international communities. UIS is an affirmative action/equal opportunity employer with a strong institutional commitment to recruitment and retention of a diverse and inclusive campus community. Women, minorities, veterans, and persons with disabilities are encouraged to apply.
Contact:
Dr. Daniel W. Stowell
Papers of Abraham Lincoln
112 N. Sixth Street
Springfield, IL 62701-1310
Freedman and Southern Society Project
Nov 12th
Applications are invited from scholars specializing in Southern or African American history of the Reconstruction era. Successful applicant will collaborate in editing Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867, beginning with a volume on law and justice during the early years of Reconstruction. Appointment begins September 2010. Although the position is not tenure-track, it carries faculty standing, faculty benefits, and the prospect of long-term employment, including promotion to associate editor and coeditor.
Qualifications: Ph.D. in hand or nearing completion, strong analytical and writing skills, facility in reading handwritten historical documents, and familiarity with the relevant scholarly literatures; preference for applicants with research experience in the records at the National Archives on which Freedom is based, especially those of the Freedmen’s Bureau.
Send application letter, c.v., précis of dissertation, and three letters of reference to Leslie S. Rowland, Director, Freedmen and Southern Society Project, Department of History, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742. Application deadline is January 15, 2010.
Contact:
Leslie S. Rowland, Director
Freedmen and Southern Society Project
Department of History, University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742