Panel Abstract:
In response to this year’s conference theme of “Reinvention and Responsibility,” we bring forward three projects that have founded their work in recognition of a responsibility to welcome and support editing and recovery practitioners in the broadest conception of that community. To this end, these projects—eLaboratories, COVE Editions, and the journal Scholarly Editing —actively cultivate a community of users or contributors, and embrace the process of co-creation as it concerns the identification and development of new content for their respective platforms. The learning community eLaboratories, for instance, has cultivated a 24-person advisory board of community archivists, digital ethnic studies scholars, digital humanists, artists, literary scholars, and documentary editors with whom they collaborate on the identification and development of new educational resources; the COVE Editions and COVE Studio platforms facilitate interaction between instructors, students, institutions, and scholars throughout the development of anthologies, editions, and other multimedia projects through processes like social annotation; and Scholarly Editing ’s peer review and micro-edition publication processes focus on enriching contributors’ professional growth through developmental editing, technological assistance, and mentoring. Further, and as its new statement of purpose and statement on diversity and anti-racism suggest, the journal has reinvented itself with responsibility as a goal, introducing content that represents an expanded geographical range, a platform that intends to amplify and celebrate underrepresented communities, and public-facing sections that seek to attract communities of recovery practitioners beyond the academy. These projects also rely on tools or infrastructures that facilitate practitioner’s access and engagement: eLaboratories’ courses within the Fundamentals Series make use of a site-wide glossary that describe common disciplinary terms, and they include numerous practical applications and documentation tools that guide users through project planning; COVE's user interface takes advantage of common platform experiences, like WYSIWYG editors, and promotes a feeling of familiarity in the user experience across all site tools (despite those tools being built on different software); and the editorial infrastructure of Scholarly Editing includes a technical and micro-edition editor who regularly mentors and supports micro-edition creators, effectively reducing the learning curve of TEI (upon which the journal’s micro-editions section is built). Moreover, each project is committed to open-access or open-assembly publication, ensuring that source materials, educational resources, critical texts, disciplinary discussion, and more are freely available to practitioners for reference and remixing.
In this panel, affiliates of each project will introduce the principles and processes that guide their work. They accordingly will describe their commitment to supporting all practitioners, including those whose work does not always fit within the traditional bounds of documentary editing as a result of operating outside of the academy, working with non-textual records, or otherwise challenging the apparatus of the edition. Each project will then describe their recent publications in the form of case studies that demonstrate their technological and social approaches in cultivating and engaging a community of editing and recovery practitioners.
Paper #1 Abstract:
Introducing eLaboratories: A Learning Community for Practitioners Engaged in Editing and Recovery
Between 1972 and 2019, the Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents (IEHD) offered workshops that introduced documentary editors to the work of planning, producing, and publishing an edition. Despite its success, the effort was limited by its in-person format, which could not accommodate large numbers, nor a broad spectrum of practitioners. In 2018, in an effort to address this, program coordinators began reimagining the content, delivery, and audience of the IEHD.
What has grown out of that reimagining is eLaboratories —or eLabs. A community space that offers free courses, forums, events, and informational resources for practitioners engaged in editing, recovery, or other research activities related to making source materials accessible and discoverable.
With funding from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), we launched our first series of courses in July 2023 with the publication of 14 free, asynchronous courses that were developed collaboratively by five course instructors. Each course in that series introduces one of the fundamental activities related to the practice of editing (such as digitization). The courses were written in a way that enables practitioners to choose any combination or sequence of courses that aligns with their project goals. Now, with the receipt of additional funding from the NHPRC, we are working with a group of 24 advisory board members to develop new content on other topics they identify as essential for this interdisciplinary community space.
Our presentation will describe the development of eLabs and our first series of courses—specifically how we re-imagined our community of users, and how we prepared our content and learning platform with this expansive community in mind. We will also explore the challenges involved in cultivating community when transitioning to a virtual space, and our ongoing initiatives to recreate that spirit of community.
Paper #2 Abstract:
COVE Editions: From Recovery to Re-Assembly
COVE Editions, likewise, was founded to serve the wide community of editing and recovery practitioners. COVE is a scholar-driven, open-access platform that publishes both peer-reviewed material and active-learning or “flipped classroom” student projects built with our web-based online tools.[1] COVE operates as a two-fold platform: Studio, where instructors can create anthologies of primary works that can then be made available for student multimedia annotation, and Editions, which hosts published and private editions, galleries, maps, and timelines, and facilitates peer review. No coding knowledge is necessary for either. Moreover, both are designed to facilitate what COVE founder Dino Franco Felluga and colleagues call "open assembly": the free, transformative remixing of texts, items, and archives.
In this presentation, we will explain how individuals and teams of scholars have built highly interactive critical editions and published them in peer-reviewed, open-access form at COVE Editions, focusing on Sandra Leonard’s and her team's edition of Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Mr. W.H. and revealing its use of open-assembly methods.[2] Then we will consider some COVE Editions projects produced by graduate or undergraduate students collaborating with their instructors. Through our examples, we’ll show how COVE, built on the principle of ‘open assembly’ more than open access [3], fosters inclusive, interactive spaces for collaboration between populations ranging from seasoned scholars to introductory students. COVE offers these populations new ways to present and share the projects arising from their collaborations, projects that not only serve the editing community, but widen it, welcoming further new generations of editors.
Paper #3 Abstract:
Advancing Knowledge Beyond the Academy: Scholarly Editing and Its Diverse Communities
Scholarly Editing is the digital, open-access, peer-reviewed annual of the Association of Documentary Editing (ADE). Responsibility is at the heart of our new statement of purpose, statement on diversity and anti-racism, and content. We intend to amplify the cultural heritage of diverse communities and to serve as a publication platform for all those interested in recovery.
The editorial team invites micro-editions, interviews, reviews, and essays on textual theory and praxis and on pedagogy—from emerging and established projects, individuals at any stage of their career, archivists and librarians, students and teachers. We likewise invite those who engage in public history or otherwise seek to advance knowledge beyond the academy, including but not limited to ommunity groups, collectors, local genealogists, and families seeking ancestors. The reimagined journal aims to be public facing and to celebrate the discoveries of all custodians of knowledge.
The publication began as the ADE’s print newsletter in 1979; in 1984 it became a quarterly entitled Documentary Editing , presenting the writings of American statesmen and reformers; and from 2012-2017 it evolved into Scholarly Editing , a born-digital, open-access annual highlighting American and Western European textual scholarship. In 2019 the new editorial board revived the journal innovatively, expanding its geographic reach, content, and audience and shifting its focus from textual scholarship to recovery, broadly conceived.
This presentation will outline the journal’s current reinvention, its innovations in workflow and infrastructure, the content of its new volumes, the diverse communities with which it seeks to engage, and its strategies to enrich the work of contributors through mentoring, assistance with technologies, and developmental editing.
Presenters:
Dr. Noelle A. Baker is the author, editor, or co-editor of Stanton in Her Own Time (University of Iowa Press, 2016), The Almanacks of Mary Moody Emerson: A Scholarly Digital Edition ( Women Writers Online , ongoing), Margaret Fuller: Collected Writings (Library of America, March 2025), and numerous periodical publications. She is Co-editor in Chief of Scholarly Editing .
Katie Blizzard is the Managing Director of eLaboratories, and a research editor at the University of Virginia’s Center for Digital Editing, where she contributes to such projects as The Washington Papers and Papers of Martin Van Buren.
Dr. Cathy Moran Hajo is the Editor and Director of the Jane Addams Papers at Ramapo College of New Jersey. She has been a scholarly editor for more than thirty years, previously working at the Margaret Sanger Papers. She teaches digital humanities and digital editing for eLabs, the DHSI, and at Ramapo College.
Dr. Rebecca Nesvet (Professor of English and Humanities, University of Wisconsin, Green Bay) is Technical Director at COVE Editions and a Pedagogy Consultant at COVE Studio. Published in journals including Scholarly Editing and Victorian Studies , she was a 2022-3 Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Starting her use of COVE in Fall 2018, Penn State Altoona Associate Professor of English Laura Rotunno has worked with undergraduate students to annotate British literature and to create gallery collections, timelines, and maps. Rotunno began as a non-DH savvy professor but is now a diehard user—and a COVE Pedagogy Consultant and Advisory Board Member—who hopes to expand her research into digital editions. She is a Victorianist by specialty and is revising a book manuscript that explores fictional representations of the first generation of Oxbridge-educated women.