The ADE E-Newsletter
The Association for Documentary Editing's E-News
Editor’s Letter
Aug 30th
Dear Colleagues,
I hope you all have had an enjoyable summer. The theme of this issue is advocacy, and features Charlene Bickford’s report on the House Subcommittee’s NHPRC reauthorization hearings and Sue Perdue’s testimony and comments from that hearing. We also have plenty of opportunities for members to expand their own advocacy efforts, with calls from liaison and membership committees. Amanda Gailey and Andrew Jewell weigh in with their exciting plans for DE.
See you in Philadelphia‐‐
Jenn Steenshorne
Annual Meeting Announced!
Aug 30th
The Association for Documentary Editing’s Annual Conference is just around the corner! This year we head to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, October 15‐17, 2010, at the Hilton Garden Inn.
The registration form and program can be found on the web site at: http://documentaryediting.org/meeting/index.html
ADE Membership Committee
Aug 30th
Calling all ADE members! The Membership Committee needs your help!
We are looking to expand the ADE’s membership, and broaden our reach. We need your suggestions for potential members. Maybe some of your colleagues have not joined, or you know an editor whose name is not on our current members list. You might have a local library or historical society that is mounting transcriptions or images of historical documents, who would benefit from joining the ADE. You don’t need to get in touch with them (though you can, if you like!). Just send me their names and e‐mail addresses, and let me know if we can use your name in our recruitment request. Building a stronger and more varied ADE is an essential part of our long‐term goals.
Please help the Membership Committee build for the future. Thanks,
Cathy Moran Hajo, Ph.D.
Associate Editor/Assistant Director
The Margaret Sanger Papers Project
Department of History, New York University
53 Washington Square South
New York, NY 10012
(212) 998‐8666
(212) 995‐4017 (fax)
cathy.hajo@nyu.edu
ADE Liaison Committee
Aug 30th
Are you a member of another professional association? Do you know members of these groups who might be interested in learning more about documentary editing? Is there information about your other
organization that would be of interest to ADE members? If so, we need your help! You can provide vital professional service as an ADE Liaison. Last year the ADE conducted a survey of its members and found that our members are affiliated or connected to over 158 other professional societies!
Please consider serving as an ADE liaison to one of the other organizations to which you belong. The work is relatively simple but the mutual rewards in expanding the reach and the value of documentary editing are enormous.
An ADE Liaison can:
- Take membership brochures to professional meetings
- Identify potential prospects for ADE membership and pass along information to Membership Chair
- Gather and provide information about meetings, conferences, awards, research that might be of interest to other ADE members
- Pursue formal ADE affiliation with other organization as merited upon approval of ADE Council
- Provide members with information about ADE annual meeting, awards, committee work, and initiatives as pertinent to members of other professional organizations
We can’t do it without you! Volunteer today by contacting Martha King, Liaison Coordinator, for more
details mjking@princeton.edu or 609‐258‐5091.
Thanks for helping the ADE grow its membership and be more widely known in the scholarly community.
Changes Coming to Documentary Editing
Aug 30th
by Amanda Gailey and Andrew Jewell
This spring the ADE Council, working with the Publications Committee, accepted our proposal to edit Documentary Editing beginning with the 2012 issue. Our plan is to continue the fine traditions of the journal—essays about the theory and practice of editing, reviews of editions, news pertinent to the ADE, etc.—while simultaneously taking it in an exciting new direction. Thanks to a partnership with the University of Nebraska‐Lincoln’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, the journal will soon be an open‐access, digital publication, and it will begin to publish peer‐reviewed short editions themselves.
The ADE Council has also approved the title change to Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing. Below is our Call for Editions, which we hope many readers of this newsletter will have already seen. We hope many of you will consider submitting a proposal to us or will encourage your colleagues with appropriate projects to do so. We are, of course, happy to talk over ideas with editors informally before a full proposal is submitted.
We look forward to working with many of you as we take Scholarly Editing in this bold new direction.
A temporary website, with the call for submissions, may be found here:
http://www.scholarlyediting.org/
Background
Since 1979, Documentary Editing has been a premier journal in the field of documentary and textual editing. Beginning with the 2012 issue, the renamed Scholarly Editing will move online and become an open access, digital publication. While retaining the familiar content of the print journal, including peer reviewed
essays about editorial theory and practice, in the 2012 issue Scholarly Editing will become the first academic journal to publish peer‐reviewed editions.
Even as interest in digital editing grows, potential editors have not found many opportunities to publish editions that fall outside the scope of a large scholarly edition or that do not require creating a sophisticated technical infrastructure. We believe that many scholars have discovered fascinating texts that deserve to be edited and published, and we offer a venue to turn these discoveries into sustainable, peer reviewed publications that will enrich the digital record of our cultural heritage.
If you are interested in editing a small‐scale digital edition of a single document or a collection of documents, we want to hear from you.
Call for Editions (note: the deadline has passed for the next issue of SE but submissions will be considered
for future issues)
We invite proposals for rigorously edited digital small‐scale editions. Proposals should be approximately 1000 words long and should include the following information:
- A description of content, scope, and approach. Please describe the materials you will edit and how you will approach editing and commenting on them. We anticipate that a well‐researched apparatus (an introduction, annotations, etc.) will be key to most successful proposals.
- A statement of significance. Please briefly explain how this edition will contribute to your field.
- Approximate length.
- Indication of technical proficiency. With only rare exceptions, any edition published by Scholarly Editing must be in XML (Extensible Markup Language) that complies with TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) Guidelines, which have been widely accepted as the de facto standard for digital textual editing. Please indicate
your facility with TEI. - A brief description of how you imagine the materials should be visually represented. Scholarly Editing will provide support to display images and text in an attractive house style. If you wish to create a highly customized display, please describe it and indicate what technologies you plan to use to build it.
All contributors to Scholarly Editing are strongly encouraged to be members of the Association for Documentary
Editing, an organization dedicated to the theory and practice of documentary and textual editing.
To become a member, go to www.documentaryediting.org. Please send proposals as Rich Text Format (RTF), MS Word, or PDF to the co‐editors via email no later than August 1, 2010 for consideration for the 2012 issue (published in late 2011). Feel free to contact us if you have questions.
Call for Articles
Scholarly Editing welcomes submissions of articles discussing any aspect of the theory or practice of editing, print or digital. Please send submissions via email to the editors agailey2@unlnotes.unl.edu, ajewell@unlnotes.unl.edu) and include the following information in the body of your email:
- Names, contact information, and institutional affiliations of all authors
- Title of the article
- Filename of article
Please omit all identifying information from the article itself. Send proposals as Rich Text Format (RTF), MS Word, or PDF; If you wish to include image files or other addenda, please send all as a single zip archive. Submissions must be received by February 1, 2011 for consideration for the 2012 issue. Please, no
simultaneous submissions.
Thank you,
Amanda Gailey, agailey2@unlnotes.unl.edu, Department of English, and Andrew Jewell, ajewell@unlnotes.unl.edu, University Libraries and the Center for Digital Research in the University of Nebraska‐Lincoln University of Nebraska‐Lincoln
Grant Papers presents award to Frances N. Coleman
Aug 30th
The U.S. Grant Papers presented the first annual Ulysses S. Grant Association‐John Y. Simon Award of Merit to MSU Dean of Libraries Frances N. Coleman for her work in support of the Grant Presidential Papers at MSU, and to Rhode Island Chief Justice (ret.) Frank J. Williams for his 25 years of service on the USGA Board of Directors and his fifteen years of leadership as president. The project also hosted the 2009 and 2010 annual meetings of the Ulysses S. Grant Association. The 2011 meeting will take place in Galena, Illinois, the 2012 meeting at MSU, and the 2013 meeting at Georgetown, Ohio.
Papers of Abraham Lincoln reunite Lincoln copybook pages
Aug 30th
Researchers with the Papers of Abraham Lincoln, have identified and electronically matched two pieces of a page from Lincoln’s arithmetic copybook, one piece at the University of Chicago and the other at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. “The Papers of Abraham Lincoln is delighted to have been able to reunite these two fragments from a page of Lincoln’s homework as a teenager,” said Daniel W. Stowell, Editor of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln. “Although the two original fragments are in repositories nearly 1,000 miles apart, the Papers of Abraham Lincoln has reunited them digitally into a single page.”
The oldest existing manuscripts in Abraham Lincoln’s own hand are pages from an arithmetic copybook that Lincoln created in the mid‐1820s while living in Indiana. Lincoln’s stepmother Sarah Lincoln gave the copybook to his third law partner, William H. Herndon, after Lincoln’s death in 1865. Herndon subsequently distributed the pages among friends and acquaintances. Ten pages or partial pages from the copybook are known to have survived and were published in facsimile form in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln in 1953. When Stowell and Research Associate Kelley Clausing scanned Lincoln‐related documents at the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library in November 2009, they began the process that led to the reunion of two parts of a page from the copybook. Among the items they scanned was a fragment of approximately seven inches wide by seven and one half inches tall with math problems on one side and a series of questions and answers on the reverse. While processing the images at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library later, Stowell discovered that the fragment fit neatly with a smaller fragment that the project had scanned at the John Hay Library at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island in 2003. Although the fragment from Brown University had been published in the Collected Works, the other portion of the page at the University of Chicago had not. Using the digital images, Stowell compared the fragments and digitally reunited them into a single image for the front and another for the back of the page.
“This new discovery revives a part of what was lost to scholars when William Herndon dissected Lincoln’s ‘sum book’ and portioned it out in pieces to libraries and collectors as a memento of Lincoln. We are grateful to the Papers of Abraham Lincoln for their detective work, which restores the context of Brown University’s own fragment of this earliest known written work by Abraham Lincoln. It is our hope that this effort will underscore the benefits of the growing body of digital scholarship on Lincoln,” said Brown University North American History Librarian Holly Snyder.
Further research revealed that the questions and answers were from The Schoolmaster’s Assistant, Being a Compendium of Arithmetic, Both Practical and Theoretical in Five Parts by Thomas Dilworth. The math problems on the back of the sheet were from the “Examples” section of the same publication. Both the questions and the problems related to the “Single Rule of Three,” a mathematical method for solving proportions. Dilworth’s volume was first published in London in the 1740s. An American edition appeared in 1769, and additional American editions appeared regularly for the next sixty years. Which edition Lincoln may have used to create his copybook remains unknown.
The reunited images, as well as other images of Lincoln documents, may be seen at http://www.papersofabrahamlincoln.org/New_Documents.htm.
Theodore J. Crackel Retires from the Papers of George Washington
Aug 30th
by Jennifer Stertzer
During his six years as Editor in Chief of the project, Ted published ten letterpress volumes ‐ Presidential Series, volumes 13, 14, 15, and 16; Revolutionary War Series, volumes 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, and 20. A digital team was also created during his tenure to work in conjunction with Rotunda on the production of the Papers of George Washington Digital Edition, which currently contains fifty‐nine volumes and a cumulative index. Ted also laid the groundwork for numerous projects, some of which include: the George Washington Bibliography project, in conjunction with the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University; the Financial Papers project, including a conference of premier scholars at Mount Vernon; and the institution of new Travel and Learn Continuing Education courses that will start in 2011 with a tour of the sites of the 1775‐1776 siege of Boston, followed by Trenton‐Princeton, and then the 1777 campaign.
The list of accomplishments could go on, as Ted was extremely dedicated the Project and staff. Instead, I thought it best to include comments from a few of the editors.
Assistant Editor Carol Ebel notes that “Ted enthusiastically launched several new editorial and outreach efforts. I worked with him closely on ‘The Civility Project: Where George Washington Meets the Twenty‐first Century’ which focused on the 110 rules of behavior Washington prized to highly. Ted used the Civility Project to encourage debate about social attitudes during the eighteenth century and our own time, a topic which continues to engage the interest of both academic and public history circles. Most importantly, the ‘Civility Project’ served as an avenue through which university students nationwide engaged in a dialogue about Washington’s character and pondered civil behavior as it applied to their role as the upcoming generation of citizens and leaders.”
Tom Dulan, the Project’s copy editor, comments “Ted’s tenure at the helm of PGW has intrinsically reshaped the project, and his legacy will be evident even in the project’s final act as our repository is moved to Mount Vernon. Everything from expanded fundraising efforts to broader access through digitization bears his fingerprints, right down to the fundamental tools we now use in producing our print editions. The print editions themselves have seen changes that include the addition of endpaper maps and volume introductions. The joint effort between print and digital to produce a cumulative index, the launch of the financial papers project, the Travel & Learn initiative, and the Civility Project all are part of his legacy as well. On a personal note (and a personnel note), I have to express my deep appreciation that he hired me in the first place and has been consistently fair‐handed and supportive as my supervisor. I always will look fondly upon these four‐plus years, and I wish Ted the very best in his retirement and any future endeavors.”
Ed Lengel, Professor and Senior Editor, notes that “after six years as Editor in Chief, Ted Crackel leaves the project running at a greater level of efficiency and collegiality than I have ever seen it before. The numerous initiatives that he has promoted in scholarship and outreach have enabled our editors to engage productively not only with the scholarly community but with the American public at large‐‐thus fulfilling one of our core missions, to promote knowledge and appreciation of our nation’s most important historical figure. Ted’s legacy, embodied in exciting new projects such as the George Washington Bibliography project and the Financial Papers project, will be long lasting.”
Associate Editor Bill Ferraro states that “I am most appreciative of Ted Crackel’s support for activities broadly related to the main task of editing documents. For instance, he facilitated my examination of the collections at the Library of Congress and Georgetown University on John C. Fitzpatrick, editor of the Writings of Washington, which are now being supplanted by the Papers of George Washington. Learning how Fitzpatrick approached his editorial work allows me to make the best possible use of that earlier effort as I address my own editing, and that knowledge has given me the capacity to develop publishable pieces on documentary editing’s past, such as “The AHA and the George Washington Bicentennial in 1932,” Perspectives on History: Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association, 47 (Oct. 2009), 55‐
56.”
I too feel fortunate to have worked with Ted these past six years. His enthusiasm for the digital edition made it the wonderful resource it is today and set the standard for future work. Ted never settled for anything less than perfection, but always encouraged creative thinking and experimentation. The resulting digital edition and forthcoming financial papers are things I am extremely proud of, and know it couldn’t have happened without his involvement. We all wish Ted the best in his retirement!
Edward Lengel becomes new Editor in Chief of the Papers of George Washington
Aug 30th
Longtime editor Ed Lengel was appointed Editor in Chief following Ted Crackel’s retirement. Ed has been with the Washington Papers since 1996, when he began as a research assistant. Ed has written extensivelyon Washington, including the books A Companion to George Washington (Blackwell Publishing, forthcoming 2011), Inventing George Washington: America’s Founder in Myth and Memory (New York: HarperCollins, January 2011), This Glorious Struggle: George Washington’s Revolutionary War Letters (New York: Harper Collins, February 2008), and General George Washington: A Military Life (New York: Random House, June 2005) as well as given numerous talks, presentations, and interviews. He has also
edited seven volumes of the Washington Papers. Everyone at the Washington Papers is thrilled to have Ed at the helm of the Project!
Franklin Papers add two
Aug 30th
The Franklin papers have two new staff members: Robert Frankel, formerly of the Supreme Court Papers and the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, and Allegra DiBonaventura, a recent Yale Ph.D.