Digital Humanities Summer Institute

Conceptualising and Creating a Digital Edition

Jennifer Stertzer, Cathy Hajo and Nick Wasmoen
This course will explore all aspects of conceptualizing, planning for, and creating a digital edition. It provides a basic introduction to the various types of digital editions, the practice of editing in the digital age, and a survey of the many digital tools available to serve project goals. Approaching a digital edition means taking time to think about how end-users will want to work with a particular edition. Beginning with the research and analytical needs of end-users in mind, editors are better able to develop effective editorial strategies that will result in a dynamic, useful, and usable, digital edition. In this course, participants will engage in hands-on learning and group discussions related to project conceptualization, editorial policies and processes, and the selection and use of digital tools that can serve the needs of researchers and other end-users. Participants will bring a few sample materials they are working with. We will use these in a class project – creating a digital edition over the course of the week using skills learned in each session. Our goal is for participants to return to their home institutions ready and able to build upon, enhance, and transform these initial ideas into robust digital editions.

Rare Book School

Digital Approaches to Bibliography & Book History

Benjamin F. Pauley & Carl G. Stahmer
This course will explore the possibilities that digital tools and methods open for the pursuit of bibliographical and book-historical investigations, as well as the questions that those tools and methods bring with them.

The class will offer a (necessarily selective) survey of currently-available and emerging digital resources for book-historical research, and will also introduce students to digital tools for bibliographical and textual analysis, some available for use today and others still in development. We will consider tools specifically designed to facilitate the study of historical texts, as well as platforms and frameworks for codifying and disseminating this work. Finally, the course will examine how such tools have the potential to alter both scholarly practices and the workflows of the modern research library.

Beyond providing a practical introduction to digital bibliographical resources, the class will also invite critical reflection on the affordances (and the limitations) of such resources. This guided reflection will be both forward- and backward-looking, comparing digital tools with their non-digital, often mechanical, predecessors. A central concern of the course will be the consideration of the kinds of bibliographical and book historical problems that digital methods may be best positioned to address in the future.

This course is intended for humanities scholars as well as librarians and curators. It aims not simply to introduce resources for bibliographical and book historical research, but to provoke critical and creative thinking about the kinds of resources that are needed to address the next wave of questions in the field. As such, the class is addressed to researchers who wish to become intelligent users of digital tools and methods, at librarians who aim institutionally to support and manage digital workflows, and at archivists and developers who seek to create new kinds of resources.

Scholarly Editing: Principles & Practice

David Vander Meulen
This course is an introduction to the principles and practice of scholarly editing. The emphasis will be on the methodology of preparing an edition, either documentary or critical, and on the thinking that informs the decisions editors make about the issues they confront. In learning how to prepare new documents, the class will consider principles of textual criticism, that is, the study of the history of texts and the evaluation of their changes.

The course will concern itself with both literary and non-literary texts, of different genres and eras; with both published and unpublished materials; and with manuscript, printed, and electronic sources. As such, it will be of special benefit for anyone preparing an edition (the lot of most academics at some point in their careers), for scholars and other readers wishing to understand the nature and reliability of the texts they use, and for teachers choosing editions for the classroom. It will also help those who wish to understand the terminology and concepts of textual scholarship. Additionally, it will benefit academics who think about what happens to texts made up of words or other visual symbols, in fields as diverse as law, religion, literature, and music. Finally, it will aid librarians and booksellers, who superintend and make available the documents by which the texts of works are transmitted, in understanding better the uses of the objects with which they deal.

The week will be structured largely according to activities involved in preparing a critical edition: locating materials, comparing them with each other, determining their relationships, establishing a new text according to some specified standard, and developing a format for presenting the results. It will include practical exercises as well as an introduction to devices such as the Hinman Collator. The course will culminate with each student presenting a thorough critique of an edition, either one already published or one of the student’s own now in progress. Because the focus is historical, the course will not address directly questions such as how a publisher’s editor ought to adjust the text of an author. And because it centers on texts themselves, it also will not deal with how to annotate the contents of a book.