A Laboratory-Based Introduction to Digital Scholarly Editing

Abstract

This project will create modularized open online educational resources that leverage a classic work of American literature, Henry David Thoreau's "Walden," to introduce learners to digital scholarly editing as a branch of professional editing and publishing. Modules will teach basic practices and principles of digital editing, including manuscript transcription and XML encoding following the standards of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). They will incorporate the manuscript of "Walden" — to be digitized by the Huntington Library and made openly accessible under a Creative Commons license on an open-access platform — as a laboratory where learners can apply their developing skills by submitting their own transcriptions and encodings of manuscript pages. The project will promote student success by enabling instructors in a wide range of classes to incorporate coding as a high-impact activity; help meet the current resource challenge in digital humanities (DH) instruction by leveraging the expertise of project collaborators to create instructional content beyond the capacity of many instructors to produce on their own; sustain past innovation by building on the success of Digital Thoreau, an initiative previously funded by an IITG which has produced a TEI-encoded edition of "Walden" and built a platform for crowdsourcing commentary on Thoreau's works; support flexible learning by creating content suitable for stackable credentialing in DH or electronic publishing; reach beyond campus boundaries through cross-institutional collaboration to create the modules and through a partnership with the Huntington; and create opportunities for external funding by serving as a proof of concept for a laboratory approach to online DH instruction.