This course will introduce you to the principles and practices of digital scholarly editing, an exciting area of activity that underpins humanities projects like The Willa Cather Archive and the Papers of Abraham Lincoln. The best way to learn about scholarly editing is to edit a text for publication; after an introduction to the techniques of scholarly editing, you will select a short text to edit for publication online. The text you choose to edit can be anything: a vintage comic book, family letters, an original composition like a short story or collection of poems, an archival document (The course will include an optional field trip to peruse the extensive collections at Yale’s Beinecke library), etc. Successful completion of this course will provide you with a digital edition and experience sufficient to demonstrate your editorial skills to potential employers.
Spring 2016 Sample Student Project (full syllabus here)
With “Three Princess Stories,” Anna Kroon offers a comparison of Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs, The Little Mermaid, and Rapunzel to their Disney film counterparts. Over multiple semesters of the Text Encoding Lab (a 1-credit follow-up to Digital Editing), she has expanded her use of the TEI and is building “Digital Editions of Valentine and Orson” for her senior thesis in the University Honors Program.
Spring 2018 Sample Student Projects (full syllabus here)
Cecelia Kimes compared the canonical Tony Stark/Iron Man comic characterization to the portrayal done by Robert Downey Jr. in the films in “A Tale of Two Redemptions: A Comparison of Iron Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Invincible Iron Man Comic Books.”
Caroline Frazier created “A Small Collection of Works by Sheridan LeFanu” to introduce LeFanu to readers already interested in gothic literature. The collection includes two poems and one short story, with notes and information added to aid readers in their understanding of the works.
Mackenzie Reh created “Post-Game Write Ups” to showcase the very different ways lacrosse games are covered by the athletics programs of opposing teams. She selected a game that has become part of the lore of the university’s lacrosse team, creating a project with a very specific audience: future team-members.
Walt Cunningham created “Duke Blue Devils: 2015 National Champions” to relive Duke’s 2015 title run through an edition of President Obama’s speech to the team. He created the annotations to make Obama’s speech more accessible to readers unfamiliar with the world of college basketball.
“A Slight Rebellion: How the Catcher in the Rye’s Short Story Predecessor Gives Insight into Your Least Favorite Novel” allowed Tom Almeida to convince his classmates and any other haters of Catcher in the Rye to look at the novel in a new way.
