Digital editing and publishing in the twenty-first century as a cooperative for small-scale editions
- Juniper Johnson (author)
- Serenity Sutherland(author)
- Neal Millikan (author)
- Ondine Le Blanc (author)
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| Title | Digital editing and publishing in the twenty-first century as a cooperative for small-scale editions |
|---|---|
| Contributor | Juniper Johnson (author) |
| Serenity Sutherland(author) | |
| Neal Millikan (author) | |
| Ondine Le Blanc (author) | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.62637/sup.GHST9020.10 |
| Landing page | https://books.sup.ac.uk/sup/catalog/book/sup-9781917341073/chapter/11 |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ |
| Copyright | Juniper Johnson, Serenity Sutherland, Neal Millikan and Ondine Le Blanc |
| Publisher | Scottish Universities Press |
| Published on | 2025-04-29 |
| Long abstract | How might small-scale digital editions succeed in the future, and how is that future tied to the field of scholarly editing? The inclusion of more small digital editions has the potential to add numerous voices and perspectives to already existing digital and print editions that tend to center on figures of national recognition. While these larger projects offer glimpses into social issues and individual stories beyond the recognizable names they focus on, they have historically been projects of white, English-speaking men. Larger projects have also been expensive to maintain and operate. Recognizing these twin realities and histories of publishing scholarly editions, the authors of this chapter have been working to transform the potential of editions through the approach of cooperative digital publishing. With support from the NHPRC and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, four digital editions, the John Quincy Adams (JQA) Digital Diary, the Ellen Swallow Richards Papers, the Catharine Maria Sedgwick Online Letters (CMSOL), and the Papers of Roger Brooke Taney along with the institutional support of the Massachusetts Historical Society and Northeastern University, have been in the process of building and creating a digital publishing cooperative. This essay will describe what cooperative publishing is and how it is transformational to the making of an edition. The essay will argue that the power of cooperative publishing is three-fold: 1) the sharing of resources, both financial and structural; 2) the collaboration of content expertise across a wide range of functions and topics; and 3) the support of a community striving for the same goal. The goal of the Primary Source Cooperative is to provide a platform, designed by consensus, to assist small editions led by scholars who might not otherwise have a portal for online publishing that is affordable and supportive. For each individual project, the Cooperative is a platform from which to receive input and guidance from other editors when questions of process or encoding arise, acting in lieu of staff who serve as internal sounding boards at larger projects. Uniting these four editions under one digital publishing platform will allow for federated searching by users that would never be possible if these projects were siloed on individual websites. When data from these four projects are combined, the resulting digital edition cooperative will provide free cross-searchable and chronologically-navigable access for its target user community, which moves beyond the traditional academic audience toward inclusion of students and educators at the middle school, high school, and undergraduate level. The interdisciplinary nature of the Cooperative—with editors from the fields of communication studies, history, literature, political science, and women’s and gender studies—translates to a wide scholarly audience, the needs of which are met by the adherence of the cluster to accepted best practices of documentary editing. Beyond the scholarly community, however, the Cooperative is committed to engaging a broader public in reading and using primary historical sources. Thus, the editions produced by the cluster would be precise enough (regarding standard editorial apparatus) for use by scholars but also accessible (via search features) for the K-12 community and the general public. |
| Language | English (Original) |
Juniper Johnson
(author)Juniper Johnson is a PhD candidate in the English Department at Northeastern University with graduate certificates in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Digital Humanities. Their dissertation project, ‘Organizing Bodies of Knowledge: Classification and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Medical and Literary Discourse’, explores the history of non-normative bodies and sexualities in archival materials by combining computational text analysis and critical genealogy. They also specialise in digital pedagogy and research, having worked with the Digital Integration Teaching Initiative at the NULab for Texts, Maps and Networks, the Primary Source Cooperative with the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Early Carribean Digital Archive, the Early Black Boston Digital Almanac and the Homosaurus (an international LGBTQ+ linked data vocabulary).
Serenity Sutherland
(author)Serenity Sutherland is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at SUNY Oswego. She has a PhD in History and a graduate certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of Rochester. Her research interests include the history of women in science and technology, the digital humanities, scholarly editing and media studies. Currently, she is working on publishing a biography of chemist Ellen Swallow Richards (1842–1911). She is the current editor of the Ellen Swallow Richards papers, which is a member of the Primary Source Cooperative at the Massachusetts Historical Society, funded by the NHPRC and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She is also the co-author of the digital project Visualizing Women in Science and Technology at the American Philosophical Society, a network portrayal of women’s work in science. A select list of venues where her publications can be found includes Scholarly Editing, the Debates in the Digital Humanities series and Interdisciplinary Digital Engagement in Arts & Humanities.
Neal Millikan
(author)Neal Millikan is the Series Editor for Digital Editions for the Adams Papers editorial project at the Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS). She was project manager on the John Quincy Adams Digital Diary, part of the Mellon-sponsored Primary Source Cooperative at the MHS. Millikan holds a PhD in history and a master’s degree in Library and Information Science from the University of South Carolina and is also a graduate of North Carolina State University, where she earned master’s degrees in History and Public History.
Ondine Le Blanc
(author)Ondine Le Blanc is Ford Editor of Publications at the Massachusetts Historical Society. She holds a BA from Mount Holyoke College and a PhD from the University of Michigan. At the MHS since 1997, Le Blanc has helped to publish a variety of documentary editions, including letters, diaries and journals, notebooks and memoirs, as well as other kinds of publications. She was project manager for the creation of the Adams Papers Digital Edition, overseeing the conversion of 35 printed volumes into a consolidated TEI-compliant online edition. Le Blanc served on the faculty of the Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents, hosted by the Association for Documentary Editing, from 2014 to 2017. She now serves as principal investigator for the Mellon-NHPRC grant funding the implementation of the Primary Source Cooperative.