 Well, I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you, David. Thank you, Sarah, for inviting me to be a part of this amazing endeavor. I'm really excited to be here and to meet all of you and have a seminar with you tomorrow and project design sessions tomorrow afternoon. So this is the beginning of a conversation. And I guess I wanted to start, besides expressing my gratitude to all of you for being here, to say what this is not. This talk is not going to teach you in thorough detail how to do scholarly editing. It's not going to teach you how to do TEI. It's not going to teach you how to do oxygen, to make XML-encoded texts. So those are things that we couldn't possibly do in an hour. But my hope is that I'll give you a set of resources that you can use to pursue any of those goals, should that be of interest to you. Also, I want to acknowledge that after reading your quick bios, maybe only a few of you are interested, possibly, in encoding texts. Could I see a show of hands encoding texts or making digital editions? A couple of you? OK, great, great. Oh, good. More than I thought. Fabulous. But at the same time, despite that interest, which I'm delighted to see, some of you, I'm prepared for your eyes to glaze over a little bit. And yet, I want to argue that even if you might find yourself in that category, I think that these tools and these theories that we're going to be talking about actually will affect all of you who teach or do research in creating digital performances or talking about or writing about them. So I hope you'll listen to this in terms of a basic boot camp in what scholarly editors do, and documentary editors in particular, and how we, theater historians, theater historiographers, et cetera, theater teachers, can be guided by the decades of work that scholarly editors have done, both in print and digitally. So I was trying to think, what would I like you to be able to do by the end of this talk or by the end of our two days together? And these are the five things that I hope you'll have, you'll be able to approach doing. So the first one is, I'd love it if you would be able to describe some of the practices, the best practices in documentary editing, which is a field in itself and a community in itself. So knowing some of those best practices, I think helps us understand and design, understand projects that we encounter and also design our own. I also hope you'll be able to articulate how these processes that have been around for a very long time are different to and similar in digital documentary editing, because there are some crucial and interesting differences, but also crucial and interesting similarities. Thirdly, I hope you'll be able to identify potential sources of funding for digital documentary editing, because there's plenty of it out there. Fourth, I hope you'll know where to seek additional info and training, like I was saying before. We can't do that these next two days, but if you wanna learn more, I'm gonna offer you some resources for that. And then finally, because I imagine most of you teach in some way or another, in some context or another, how I'd like you to be able to have some ideas about how to integrate these concepts into your teaching. Okay, so this is the itinerary. Toward those ends, I'm going to first talk about our project, the Harry Wackenstiery Project, and give you a basic kind of foundation using this as a case study. Then I'll talk about these best practices in traditional documentary editing I was talking about, and then talk about how these translate into digital editing, so sort of like, I'll show you a slide with the best practices in traditional editing and then digital editing, same concepts. And then I'll talk more specifically about how we applied these practices to our digital edition project. Then we'll talk about funding and pedagogy at the end. So if we find that we're running short on time, we may say pedagogy for tomorrow, I was thinking, because Emily actually has a lot of experience and ideas about using digital scholarship in our teaching, so we could just pick up that thread tomorrow if we want. Okay, so the project is called A Player and A Gentleman, because that's what Harry Wackenst was. The Diary of Harry Wackenst, a 19th century US American actor, and this has been a collaborative project from the beginning between Naomi and me, as well as our technology director, Scott Dexter, and they're excited that we're talking about this today, but I miss them desperately, because of course they can answer some questions that I can't, and know that they are your resources as well as me going forward should you be interested in learning more. I apologize profusely, but our website is down right now. It's migrating, we're migrating servers, they said it would take three to 10 days, it's not taken that long. So instead, very briefly, I offer you two alternatives. This is the, oh, maybe I can't, okay, I can't, but you can do it on your own machines. Harry has a Twitter feed. So if you'd like to go to Twitter, please follow him. It's at Wackenst Diary, at Wackenst Diary, and each day he tweets, basically we give a tweet from the diary what he wrote 117 years ago. So I hope you'll follow us, and it gives you just quick snippets of what the diary is like and what he was like, and it's a lot of fun. We even get people sort of responding or commenting occasionally on these tweets. And so that's sort of our website at the moment, but hopefully by the time the institute's over, you could check us out. And right now, you can look at the manuscript itself at the Harvard Hollis catalog. As part of this project, we paid for a facsimile of the manuscript, which is 1,200 pages, 13 volumes, and about 400,000 words. So our first step was to scan the entire manuscript, and you can see that online at Harvard. So that URL is for you there. So this is Harry Watkins. And he was, his career span more than 40 years. He was an actor, manager, and playwright. His career was, I like to call him, he was barely above average. Barely above average. And this is important because so many documentary editing projects focus on the rich, famous, and important, right? And so when I found his diary, well, first of all, a few shots of him as an actor, he focused on low comedy. Eventually, he began as a juvenile, playing juvenile role, leads, and leading men and tragic roles, but eventually he figured out that he was most popular as a low comedian. So these are some of my favorite pictures of him and character. I found out about him because of this book, published in 1938. And this is basically a biography of Watkins featuring extensive excerpts from the manuscripts by Maude and Otis Skinner. And I noticed that in all of the 19th century theater history I was reading, everyone was citing this book. Pretty much everyone in my field, my little subfield. And I thought, well, where's the diary? Did it survive? Is it somewhere in the world? And long story short, after a sort of brainstorm about where it could have landed the sort of the genealogy of possible provenance and discovered that the Skinner family had donated their papers to Harvard Theater Collection. And even though there was no finding aid, I asked a very, the lovely librarian, Betty Falsy, who has helped many of us to search for this manuscript that I really hope was there and she found it, sort of lodged in an old box that had no label. So it was a very exciting moment. That was 10 years ago. 10 years ago. So I put it aside because this is not a pre-tenure project. Focused on my first book. And when I got that under control, I asked Naomi, who has a master's degree in lives and letters, to work with me on this project because most documentary editing projects are collaborative. Just as Catherine Hales in the reading that was assigned for yesterday says that most digital projects are collaborative. So our documentary editing project is similarly collaborative. So this is what it looks like. And you can go and look at it. And I hope you will if this at all interests you. And after we started talking about it, we started with what would our objective for such a project of bringing this document to a larger audience in a couple of forms, we hoped, what would its major objective be? And this was what we came up with to make it accessible to a wide range of readers, both in print and online. So it's always been envisioned as a hybrid project. But also it's a born digital project because we began the transcription process in XML using TEI, a TEI schema. And we envisioned that we could use that encoded text to generate what would eventually become the print edition, which is coming out in October. So the print edition is roughly 40% of the diary, corrected and edited for enhanced readability. This goes to that purpose of reaching a wide range of readers. Harry Watkins prose is pretty engaging. He's got a good sense of humor. It's a good read, I think. And there are moments when people like students who've worked with us have been transcribing, I'll talk about that later. And they will laugh out loud because he's just funny. And we wanted to be able to create a text that could be readable and enjoyable and give a glimpse in this nice, engaging way of the 19th century theater through his words and his diary. It also has an introduction written by Naomi and me, annotations to help again with that accessibility to all readers, maps that depict his travels each theater season because the diary spans 15 years and it's broken up by season. And indices, because of course, this is one of the most important ways we can make this text helpful to people who are looking up specific subjects or wanna learn more about, say, George Washington Watkins, Harry's brother. They can go to the index, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Just like in any book you've read, but the feedback we were getting from people, we shared samples with said we really wanna see all the people, all the plays in one index. So that's been one of the more gargantuan components, and we're working on those right now. The digital edition will be the entire diary, but it will not be corrected, it will be raw. All his bad spelling, all his bad punctuation that makes it difficult, all of his errors. So, and they won't have that support that the print edition has in terms of annotation. It will be hosted and maintained, however, by Michigan Library's Digital Collections. This was one of the decisions, one of the decision-making factors on which press to go with was influenced, as you can imagine, by how we could have both editions have a life and a common home. And, luckily, Michigan has this very robust digital collections arena or ARM and a very mission-driven sense of making text accessible free to a wide range of readers. So this is a reason why we're working with them, and we're so happy that they see the merit in this project. It will be free. There will be extra resources that a book can't necessarily hold because of word count and so forth budget. And it will include the introduction that appears in the print edition because you would find that on Google Books as well. That's our logic, but it won't have the annotations. It won't be a corrected text. It'll have, however, a bibliography of secondary sources and any additional archival material that we think might supplement readers' experience. Luckily, the Harvard Theater Collection, particularly Matthew Whitman, the curator, is very enthusiastic about this project, getting the manuscript out there, and has basically said, after many years of conversation, we'll give you whatever you need in terms of the archival resources. Isn't that amazing? So the lesson in that is, talk to the people who have your documents because they will often be just so excited about what you're doing and help you make it feasible. And then the most important thing is it will be searchable by keywords. So because it's so long and dense, and it's handwriting, which very few people these days, especially students can read, it's almost unusable unless you had, like I did a whole summer to read it in two months. So we realized that making this text, transcribing it, making it searchable was going to make it useful in a way it is not in its current form. But also through using XML, we're tagging text so that hopefully, and this is what Michigan Libraries will do for us, people can not only search for pamlet by keyword, but also designate whether they're interested in the play or the role, for example. So we'll have contextual searching or more fine-tuned searching in this digital edition, therefore making it more useful to a wide range of readers who have different goals. Maybe they're genealogy people looking for particular information about their families, maybe they're theater scholars, maybe they're students working on a project. We don't know, but the more useful and flexible we can make this, we figure the better. So that was what has guided our encoding as I'll talk about later. And then it will also link to the digital facsimile of the manuscript, as I showed you earlier. This is what it looks like at Harvard. You can scroll through, but it's hard to find what you're looking for because it's just by page number and not date. And he didn't date, his entry is very helpfully either. Only the beginning, the first of each month that's he lists the month, for example, the year only appears on January 1st, so thanks, Harry. That's what we're here for. So on to the next, that's our overview of the project. The next thing I wanted to talk about is what is traditional documentary editing because from the beginning I knew that I had no idea what documentary editors did. I've used so many documentary editions, they hugely helped me as a scholar, but I didn't know the first thing about how these are put together, what the best practices are, et cetera. So luckily, I found out very early on from a scholar, K.Y.'s Whitehead, that the association for documentary editing exists. And its purpose is to create and establish conversation, best practices, and support among documentary editors in all disciplines. So that's the first and foremost helpful resource I wanted to offer you. The MLA also has a committee on scholarly editions and then finally, TEI. Most of you have heard about TEI by now, maybe not, it's okay if you haven't, but the text and coding initiative is huge and crucial for those of us who are digitizing texts or making digital editions of anything that is based on text. So a little bit more about the TEI. Its mission is, or what it is, is a consortium which collectively develops and maintains a standard for the representation of texts in digital form. Now, of course, as we know and you've been discussing, I'm sure, technologies are changing all the time. So the reason why the TEI convened and continues to do its work is because XML is a relatively stable markup system and you can use other kinds of technology as they emerge to take that raw text and transform it into something usable. So the consortium talks about what are these best practices in textual markup that we can use to translate into an interface at the whim or will of the designers later in the future, et cetera. And it's now, the guidelines are now in their fifth edition. So it's not a constant concrete thing, but it is a community of folks who are trying to do this well and consistently and there's training available in TEI and it's been a huge education for me and I encourage all of you to learn more about it. So as you transcribe a text, you tag with using the, you tag different words or different components or sections of the text using tags. Like div, for example, is division. So you might have div type equals page or div type equals entry in our diary, for example. So there's, they're nested too. So you might have div, but there are all kinds of types you could put in. And you can even, if you decide in your schema, create custom types depending on your needs or then your manuscript's essence or structures. In a manuscript, we often have additions and deletions. So you can tag those as ads or deletes, open tag, close tag, open, you know, add and then slash and add, right? Same with deletion. Names, and you can again have an infinite, almost number of types of names. So people, places, et cetera. So you can tag text that way. Titles, we've tagged every play title and there are many, many, many in the manuscript with the title tag. And this is just a sample of some of the tags that we use in accordance with these guidelines. And our project is based on sort of TEI basic schema, although it has some tweaks and customizations. But the beauty of TEI is it's standards so that you can ensure sustainability of your encoding, but also it has some flexibility built in so you can, cause every manuscript is different. Every text is different. So for a couple of links for you to the guidelines are there and they always list training events if you want to attend a workshop, whether stand alone or at a conference, they're happening all the time and other online opportunities to learn to TEI can also be found there. So what is traditional documentary editing? Why am I spitting this together? I couldn't remember where I got these words. They're so ingrained. And I realized that they're actually from the NEH scholarly editions grant program guidelines. They asked us when we applied for an NEH grant to talk about all of these things in our edition. Now this vocabulary is also used by the Association for Documentary Editing and in all kinds of publications around scholarly editing but I thought it might be helpful to stick with this because again, it's what the funder is interested in our talking about and the best practices in their eyes can be very interesting and shape our projects in helpful, crucial ways. So that's why I'm offering these to you. The first one is document control which sounds sort of like a scary phrase but it basically means organizing documents, keeping track of them, making sure that they remain safe. So in traditional print oriented editing that has been paper files, file folders with photocopies of documents that you are transcribing and eventually publishing, databases where you have an item for every document or every thing that you're transcribing. So that seems familiar, that's familiar, right? Transcription is obviously a stage where there's a lot of best practices if you are interested in learning more. They eventually translate into what we call editorial policies. So Harry Watkins for example, he uses a lot of dashes. When we were deciding early on how are we gonna ask our transcribers to interpret different kinds of punctuation, we decided we don't want them to interpret any punctuation, we just want them to write what they see, transcribe what they see. So there were tons and tons of dashes. Unfortunately in XML, a dash is this funky four letter character because it's XML and they had to do that every single time but we wanted to have our transcription, our policy was going to be to represent the text as closely as possible as it appears on the page and then we would deal with any changes later and indeed when we created the manuscript for the print edition, a lot of those dashes became periods and commas for readability, right? But we still have in our transcription all of that original punctuation. So this is just one of many examples of endless debates. Some of them heeded Naomi and I had about how we would transcribe the handwriting of Harry Watkins and how we would tag them too. So these are things that you wanna start and do as early as possible so that you aren't going back and changing things once you've discovered actually I made a mistake in this policy or this approach or this choice towards transcription. The more planning you do, the more thought you put in in the beginning, the less work later, and the less fixing later. So the next stage is verification which is verifying that you've accurately rendered the text and the best practice generally for this is tandem proof reading which means one person reading the manuscript or the printed page, the source and one person checking and marking the transcription. So we decided we would do this and in fact we would do it twice because we're two editors and we work in teams of two with a student so each page went through a tandem proof reading first with me or Naomi and then with the other editor. And edits along the way. Selection means what things if you're not, especially if you're not going to publish the entire corpus or document what are you going to select and why because part of one of the best practices of documentary editing is transparency. You wanna state very explicitly for your reader what you've changed, what changes you've made on the sentence level of text like dashes and periods and commas but also why you've included certain things and what you've left out so that the reader, you're creating that trust with the reader and they can also know that there's more to seek out that is omitted should they desire. So selection criteria is another one of these concepts that's crucial to editing. Presentation is another how will the addition look ultimately on the page, on the screen, et cetera and for many years or one example of a debate over presentation is the notion of barbed wire so this is an example of barbed wire. This is an attempt to render as closely as possible in print what is on a manuscript page and you can see the strike throughs the superscript, the brackets and yet this is very, oh, these arrows that indicate an addition. So yes, you're getting a lot of information if you as a reader know what that arrow means but it's difficult to read, isn't it? It's like barbed wire so there was a moment when and you'll read about this tomorrow in the excerpts that I've provided for the seminar in the morning. The debate over barbed wire is a heated one in documentary editing which is why clear text additions is another approach which is what we would say the print addition of Harry Watkins Diary is. It's a clear text addition in that you do not see a lot of that raw, the errors, the additions, the deletions in the print addition, it's meant to be readable it's meant to be engaging, it's meant to be accurate but also updated in a way that's user friendly. And then the final thing that you can have to consider is annotation. This is a big, of course it means annotations as in footnotes but also anything we do as editors on top of the text or in addition is a form of annotation. So will you have an introduction? Will you have images, illustrations like we did with maps? That's a form of annotation. Appendices, indices, these are things that you too need to think about in advance given whatever your goals are for your addition. So how does this translate into digital documentary editing? It's similar, document control is of course vital in digital projects. We have to make sure they remain safe, they can disappear like that if you do not protect them, if we do not secure them in some way, back them up. Cloud services though are not just valuable for backup but also collaboration so that we can have a project team like ours on three campuses really far away from each other it being New York City and still be touching base constantly and not have duplicate documents. So the digital environment offers that opportunity with document control, that's great. Also there's many projects use document, well content management systems that are more elaborate than say your access database which is what traditional documentary editing might have used as a go-to resource. In our case we use Drupal. So you may need a tool that's a bit more robust to manage your documents and there are opportunities for that. And there's something here that is less, that's more important in digital editing perhaps or arguably than print editing that sustainability that I consider part of document control in particular but it certainly applies to everything including presentation, the ultimate publication of your document or your edition. In the beginning you have to be thinking this is a digital edition, how can I make it sustainable because it's not gonna be a book in a library. And so this is one reason we decided to use TEI was so that we could make our text sustainable regardless of whatever fashions existed at the moment of its publication around technology. Also hosting, we decided to partner with a library rather than say our department, one of our departments or IT division at Brooklyn College which is notoriously terrible. I'm sure you have experiences like that too. But with the library that's committed to sustainability as well and access in perpetuity of its resources and it's committed a lot of investment to that. So even when this was just an idea we were starting to have conversations with different people we imagined hosting the edition and brainstorming about ways we could do it early on at this stage of document control. Transcription is different in the digital environment as I've been saying, you might use XML, you might use a different form of markup, you might go and learn about TEI standards and create a schema. Verification has the added benefit, the digital environment has the added benefit of being changeable in a way that print editions are not arguably because, and we're hoping to do this with Michigan, we will find errors that we want to fix or we will learn things that we'd like to change in the XML. So having a way to do that is important to us and we hope to partner with them to make that happen. So that's another consideration as you're planning, as you're developing your project to keep in mind in this category of verification. Selection, so often in the digital environment we assume that we have infinite space but that's not always helpful to the user, right? So selection is still important to think about in the digital environment, I argue. At the same time we can't have all the playbills that Harry Watkins collected in six volumes as they exist at Oakland University in Michigan. We cannot do that in the book. We could theoretically do that in the digital environment. Would we? I'm not sure yet, they exist only on Flipr right now for us. If you're curious I'm happy to give you a glimpse but there's something about when you're an editor you are edging, right? You are curating, so still you have to think about selection I think even in the digital environment. Though it does present great opportunities but print does not. Presentation, I think in digital editing access is the most important thing to be thinking about. One of the great powers we have as digital humanists is the opportunity to make information more widely available than print ever did. And yet for a very long time digital editions especially of the more important documentary editing projects were behind paywalls. And that continues to be the case. So if you believe in the principle of free access find a creative solution to get that access to your people but still maybe meet the other goals of your project. So for just as an example we knew we wanted there to be a print edition of this diary because for many people a print edition is a go-to resource for a manuscript like this. It's also in great need. It's a great need for 19th century scholars. Like I said before so many of my colleagues have cited this very bad 1938 book that has it's badly transcribed. There's outright errors, there are outright lies about what the manuscript says. And so I felt like a great service I could do for my profession and for my colleagues and for my students was to create a book that could be acquired by a library or a scholar and have that resource available. But a publisher also wants to know that the book that they're publishing will maybe make its money, make the investment back, right? So one of the considerations we had early on was how can we make digital edition free but different enough that the book would still have an audience and a purpose. And that's why there's so little editorial convention in the digital edition. It's sort of right there for you. You can search it, you can do things with it on your own. But if you want the research that we've done about Harry Watkins, if you want the corrected version so that you understand, oh, that's not Henry, Miss Henry the dancer with a Y but with an I so you can find more about her. That's where you, that's the accurate text. And this is what we worked out with Michigan and they were totally on board with that and hooray, it's happening. But again, in the planning phases that we were discussing that very early on, how do we make these two projects distinct so we can have one that's free and very usable but also something that's going to be useful in a different way and help support the press's valuable work as an academic press. And then finally, annotation also applies in the digital environment because you can offer those supplementary materials, you can curate those supplementary materials for your users but at the same time there are copyright considerations that you need to keep in mind. Just this past week, we had an hour long conversation with the digital collections of people at Michigan about copyright. So the tagging you've done, is that a different text? Is that a copyrightable text? And we had literally an hour, we were going back and forth because we had never actually had this conversation. Is there something to copyright in the digital edition? And after that conversation we decided that no, it isn't copyrightable because what we've done is try to represent the document through code, through an encoded XML transcription. We aren't embedding annotations that we've researched or written ourselves. The introduction is already copyrighted because it's appearing in the book, so we'll do that. But these are things that will come up and we can talk more about them if you've got questions and that applies to anything that's part of your digital edition, not just the transcription. So these are things to remember as well. So a few more details about how our project dealt with some of these considerations. So as I mentioned, we used Google Drive and Dropbox to collaborate on documents like our editorial policies document, which was constantly evolving, unfortunately. It is no longer evolving because we're almost done but it was something that had to be constantly maintained and changed and edited and updated. So we used these basic document sharing services for that. We transcribed from JPEGs of the manuscript that we had acquired from the first grant I got to work on this project. However, of course, images, facsimiles are not the same as looking at the page. So we also had to make several visits to look at pages that the facsimile could not, or something confusing, or we couldn't identify. So nothing can fully replace the manuscript, but thank goodness we had a facsimile, otherwise we could not have done this work. We also, as I mentioned, use Drupal as our content management system, which is a really great customizable open source system. You can make websites with it, which we did, but in our case, Scott created and customized it so that each page would have a transcription. And in the handout that I've created for you all that's on the course site, Jason kindly gave, put that up there as well as this PowerPoint presentation because there's URLs and things. I thought it would be useful to you. But anyway, you'll see the stages of transcription and verification and review that we went through. And each, the Drupal workbench module was basically our workflow system that allowed us to have a page move through each stage of transcription, review, revision, review again, and finally editorial sort of rubber stamp or more changes, and then finalization. So Drupal was very helpful for that document control aspect of the project. And there's some sustainability issues that remain. For example, harrywalkinsiree.org, which sadly, as I said, is down because we, it's our website. We hope it will be indefinitely available but that's what we maintain. We pay for it, we update it, sometimes it breaks and it's our responsibility to fix it. It doesn't feel 100% sustainable to me because I don't know if I will want to be doing this 10 years, 20, 30 from now, and I will die too. We all die. So there are some issues that we haven't fully resolved but we're mindful of them and we're trying our best to make aspects of our project sustainable. And as I said, the decision to partner with you, Michigan, was one of those sustainability issues that we're happy to have resolved to the best of our ability for the digital and print editions. So transcription, as I said, we created written transcription policies to help our transcribers transcribe the text consistently and accurately. We created a pretty basic but somewhat customized TEI schema for the project to assist with that. We used Oxygen, which is XML editing software to actually do the transcribing to help make it more efficient and easier and more accurate because it will tell you when there's an error in the code and that's crucial. So Oxygen was really helpful to use and as I said, the workbench module and Drupal became our document control system and the place where we collected those transcriptions. During the verification process, we did the tandem proofreading twice and one great thing about Drupal that helps us with verification is every version is saved. So if something made it all the way through the eight stages and is still wrong or if I'm looking, and if I'm looking at it, I'm thinking, I swear I corrected that. We can go back and look at the history similar to Wikipedia or any Wiki and see every version, which I think is really important for verification. It's something you would get with paper files, right? In traditional documentary editing, you'd have a marked up copy of an earlier version. You would put in a file and you could refer to it. In the electronic environment, you need that too and Drupal lets you do that. So that's a crucial part of verification as well. How we'll be verifying or making changes to the text after it's on the Michigan Libraries website? I don't know, as I said before, I'm not sure, but it's something that we want to do and to be able to do, so it's something that we will work on. This is a screenshot of the workbench in Drupal. I'm sorry that it's hard to read, but you do have the PowerPoint on the course site if you want to zoom in. So this is a user profile and you can see, or this is Danielle, one of our editorial assistants who was working with us. And you can see each page has a number and it matches the number at Harvard as they supplied them, so don't change things. You know, that was one thing we decided early on, why rename the pages for our convenience because it still lives at Harvard forever. We hope, we expect, and let's be consistent. It will make things easier later. So even though it's a bit hard to know where you are, that's why we kept it that way. You can see when she last reviewed or revised the file, or remember, these are each a page. This is an image and then each image has a transcription in XML. And you can also see all content. So for example, in this dashboard for Danielle, she can also see from the beginning, the first page in the collection, one, one, one, Shane was the last person to edit that. Shane Breaux, by the way, some of you know Shane Breaux. He's been with this project from the beginning. He did all of the maps in the print edition. They're beautiful and amazing and we could not have done this project without Shane. And so you can see other people's work as well. And the moderation state shows what stage it's in. So these are all pages because they're early on in the file that have been through every stage of transcription revision and verification and now needs final approval. And this is, again, sorry about the size that you can look at it on your own. When you are looking at a page, this is the page view in the Drupal Workbench. So you can see the image of the page. This is the transcription in XML. So you could copy and paste this, put it into a text, an XML reader and have it rendered in whatever way you want. It's like using XSLT or what have you. But we also had a place to add comments for every page so that if an editorial assistant had a question, they could write it down. If they had done some research about a name, we didn't wanna lose that time or that information so we could add a comment on the page itself. And again, have that saved and preserved for future work endeavors, et cetera. The selection process for us was for the print edition based on word count. We had a contract with the press and so that dictated how much of the diary you could put in. It was really hard to decide what to leave out, what to omit and it ended up being about 40%. And we decided that for our main readership, the information, the stories, the narratives he had about his life as a theater professional was probably the most relevant and interesting. And then what he had to say about the very interesting fraught politics and social concerns percolating between 1845 and 1860, which as you know, in the US, very intense time, many issues being discussed. And we left all of that in because we thought that would be appealing to wide range of readers, not just theater scholars and students. And then, and that meant, oh, and we also kept in entries that showed where he was traveling because he traveled all over the place and he would get lost if you didn't know that on day one he was gonna take the car to Albany at which point he was gonna get a steamship, at which point he was then gonna get a mule, which he did once, to go to his next destination. So even though some of those entries are not very interesting, we felt like for the narrative experience of the reader, we needed to leave that in so they'd have a sense of the story. But some of the best things he wrote are in there. It's so hard, but because we made the criteria, we knew we couldn't keep the story about how someone took his umbrella by mistake at a restaurant, I think, and he has this whole funny narrative about it, writing a letter to said gentlemen and transcribing the letter and so forth. And we were just like, you know, we really wish this could stay, but it doesn't meet our criteria. And every time we had that kind of conversation, we'd say, well, anyone who really cares can search umbrella in the digital edition, or we could ask them to. So these are some of the ways that selection affected us. And then in the digital edition, as I said, we get the great privilege of sharing the entire diary with you and making it available to everyone for free. In terms of the print edition for presentation, as I said, we wanted the text to be accessible and readable, our goal really is for undergraduates even to be able to pick up one season and get a good story and be able to not stumble so much through it that they become disengaged. And I think we've succeeded with that. We'll see, but our students, as I said, have responded so enthusiastically to some of his stories that we hope we'll accomplish that in the print edition. But not only for scholarly purposes, but also for differentiation, for reasons of differentiation with the print edition, we've not corrected the digital version or the digitized text, and it's as close to what he wrote as possible. And yet we can offer you the ability to search it. Annotation, as I mentioned, these are the ways we've annotated the print. In the digital, we have some forms of annotation, but these are mostly things that we couldn't fit for reasons of space and volume, or because it'd be too complicated or be easier to actually access or see them. Playbill does not render very well on a page, but online, you can really zoom in and get a lot of information from it. So it will have that kind of annotation. Now, moving on to funding. Oh, okay, funding. You are going to hear from a program director on Thursday from the NEH, right? So I won't talk a lot about this. And in fact, maybe please know that this is not an exhaustive list and it may not even be fully accurate. If you've got questions about any of these programs, I hope you'll ask her. Victoria, I think? Victoria. Victoria. But very briefly, these are the things that we looked at as theater scholars creating a digital edition of a theater document. First and foremost, the scholarly editions and translations program caught our eye. Alas, we did not get this grant. We tried several times. I'm glad we did, even though we did not get it, because it really shaped our project in incredibly productive ways. So that's one thing I want to leave, I hope you will remember is that, and I know you probably know this, but the exercise of writing a grant actually teaches you so much about your project. It strengthens it in important and calculable ways. And that was certainly the case with us. Indeed, I don't think this project would have ever happened had I not read the guidelines for the scholarly editions and translations program and realized I could not apply for that grant without a partner, without a collaborator. And that was the moment in my career where I was looking at this manuscript and had this love-hate relationship with Harry. And I thought, I can't, I can't not do this. I don't want to do this. But then, oh, maybe I could apply for this grant. And, oh right, I know Naomi Stubbs. And she's brilliant. And we compliment each other so well. And it would be fun to do this with her. So, in that very pivotal, basic way, the grant changed the project because it had to be collaborative. It's so much stronger as a result. So anyway, this program requires you, in the guidelines, it says tell us how your project conforms to best practices of the ADE or the MLA. So that's why I gave you all that information about best practices is because if you were to seek out funding from these sources, you would need to demonstrate that knowledge. It's a nice amount of money, 100,000 over three years, I think, maybe more. And it's a very nice funding ratio. That's what FR means. 22% of the applications get funded. In contrast, the awards for faculty, which is the one you're probably the program you're most familiar with, I think, only 8%. So, I think it's good to sort of like, you have limited resources of time and energy and I think that even though it's still only one in five, it's still a pretty good opportunity for us to get the resources we need to do this work. They also have digital humanities advancement grants. They have to be innovative in some way, whereas the scholarly editions grants are much, they have to exhibit, those projects have to exhibit what we would call traditional documentary editing practices and presentations or publications. The advancement grants seem to be more interested in a product that has something new to it, a new way for users to engage or a new interface or what have you. That was not something that we were doing with this project, so we never applied for it, but I just wanted to fit this on this list because it's such an important program for us as a community. And again, 15% funding ratio, which is still better than the individual grants. And then, this is also interesting, I've not applied for this but I noticed it researching this presentation today, that there's the NEH Mellon Fellowships for digital publication. They're only one year grants similar to the awards for faculty, same amount, 60K for a year, similar funding ratio, but it's interesting, I think that the publication or the product can be interpretive, so it can be scholarship, your take on the subject at the center of your project, not just presenting it in an assimilative way to use Hale's term. So, again, not an exhaustive list, but just a place for you to begin and maybe ask questions on Thursday of the program director. Some other major sources of funding for documentary editing include the NHPRC and the ACLS. So, here are some facts about them. Again, with the NHPRC, which has federal funding, you need to demonstrate that knowledge of best practices in documentary editing as described by the ADE and the MLA, or, sorry, not and, the MLA. You can get quite a bit of money to support your project. It's a highly competitive program, however, they don't even give you the funding ratio, but just know that, especially as funding for documentary editing has steadily declined, it's very difficult to get one of these grants from the NHPRC. We didn't try. We figured, with someone like Harry Watkins, whose significance is not immediately clear to everyone, and indeed, the feedback we got every round that we applied, there was one person who said, I don't see why an actor's diary is significant enough to fund. And we, every year, we sharpened our argument, sharpened it, sharpened it, sharpened it. It got better and better, and those scores went up, but every year, somebody said, this guy, I don't know him, I don't understand why his take is important, and so forth. So, we just figured, let's focus on the NEH. And indeed, ultimately, Naomi got an award for faculty to support the project, but only as an individual, because that panel understood, they were panel scholars, not documentary editors, and they saw the significance of the project, so, in a different way. Anyway, ACLF also has a digital program I wanted to be sure you knew about. 12 to 18 month grant period, up to 150,000. And they don't say anything about ADE or MLA standards, but my sense is, knowing some of the folks who work there, and being on grant panels myself, that you're instilling confidence in your peers when you can demonstrate you have a sense of best practices. So, I would certainly get some more information and help in mentoring in that before applying. So, how do you get that mentoring? How do you get that information? Well, I had to get it by going to school, basically. And most of us in theater studies who have done this, there's a handful, I'm really proud that, in addition to Naomi and me, Laura Milkey, who's English and KU has been to the Institute for the Editing Historical Documents, CAM Edit, as it's affectionately known, a week-long institute to help new documentary editors learn how to do these projects. It's a boot camp. And so, Laura has been to it, Mary Isbell at University of Connecticut. This week, it's happening in Washington and Kate Bredesen at Reed College is doing it. So, there's a nice, there's a collective of people who are working on documents who go to the institute and get trained, and it's an incredible opportunity. They basically pay you, you apply with your project and they pay you to come and learn. And so, that's, I highly recommend you do that. But also, a guide to documentary editing, which is in its third edition and you will read bits of the introduction in the first chapter for our conversation tomorrow. That's a great place to start in terms of learning more of this vocabulary and these practices. And then, of course, the TEI has its guidelines, its training, and I have not gone through this myself, but recently, a pair of digital editors created an online course based on TEI that is free. So, if you are at all curious, I encourage you to follow this link, check it out, skip around, view promiscuously, or attentively, and see if it strikes you, because I bet that's gonna be a very helpful resource for all of us interested in TEI. And then finally, I wanted to end on teaching. It's just a few minutes, because I think we'll pick this up more tomorrow. I think that, of course, I'm excited that we're bringing this resource to scholars who are particularly interested in the 19th century, but also to theater historians generally, and honestly, to people like you who are interested in digital technologies and how they can change our work. Whatever period we're looking at, or whatever resources that strike our interest. But, some of the most rewarding experiences have been as a teacher for me during this project. And that's because this work, as you can imagine, often benefits from students we work with, or other collaborators that we might find, volunteers too. And so, throughout our project, we've had work-study students work with us as editorial assistants. Naomi has been able to do that successfully. I'll share that I could not get a work-study student because there's a policy at Brooklyn College, apparently, that the work-study should not be used to support research projects by faculty. And I don't know why that is, but anyway, just beware that it may not be an automatic thing, but also know that it doesn't hurt to ask, because Naomi, for three years, I think, three or four years had a work-study student be her principal transcriber. And it's a great opportunity for a student on financial aid, is it not? And because the digital humanities work is so undersupported, it's a way for us to get some important assistance with our work that's also a fulfilling experience for the student. We can also integrate maybe micro-documentary editing projects, encoding projects, into our undergraduate teaching. This is what has often been called high-impact practice when we involve our undergraduates in research projects that actually will go somewhere instead of just having them write a paper that only their professor will read, maybe a peer reviewer in class. And the students that Naomi worked with in particular at LaGuardia Community College came up with amazing projects at the end of their experience. She did it for two semesters where they transcribed a volume of the diary and then had projects along the way inspired by the diary and shared them as part of their work in the class. And none of them had looked at a 19th century manuscript before. All of them had tremendous difficulty with handwriting. And then they learned how to read handwriting. And they learned TEI, what that is, what XML code is. I mean, just think of all the practical skills they got out of it, as well as the intellectual simulation about history, about manuscripts, and so forth. So, and then finally, in terms of graduate research, those of us who have the privilege of working with graduate students, obviously we're giving them important skills that they can apply to traditional academic career paths in terms of scholarship, but also alternative career tracks. Because there are so many libraries, so many, with digital humanities programs or collections, and there are of course many documentary editing projects that need people with these skills in digital editing and TEI. And so, as an alternative career path for PhD students, for example, it can be a really great opportunity for them to work with a faculty member or mentor working on digital editing. So, I think that anyone who mentors graduate students or teaches a research methods class could and should consider integrating some kind of unit around text encoding so that they can have that career path open to them. This is an example of a student product, by the way. The Bitly Link goes to a Flickr set, if you're curious, seeing photographs of sort of final presentation day. It's amazing, I think, to see the students and what they were doing. But one of the products that one student did was create, basically, a glossary of Harry Watkins handwriting because they had so much difficulty. And so they took images of what his Q looks, his capital Q, right? Very, very hard if you aren't familiar with 19th century handwriting or the P here, the lowercase P. And for future students, created this sort of key that they could refer to and use when transcribing. And it's something that Naomi and I would also use. So, and this is something that the student came up with. There was another student who decided to work on the Harry Watkins Wikipedia page and learn Wiki code and do some research to develop that. There were students that created, there was a student who made a song, wrote a song and performed at the last day of class about a particular story that Harry wrote about in the diary that struck him. And many other things. So, it was really rewarding to on the undergrad level have them see what they would do with his diary. They did a lot. So, we have a little more, we have a little time. We're thinking of stopping around four. So, I wanted to ask you in these last 15 or so minutes what we could work on tomorrow that you feel a little vague on or want more information about as of now. So, take a look at this list and let me know. Raise your hand if you, like is there something pressing, something that feels pressing or still confusing? Yeah, Mike. I don't know if this is a question but because I'm thinking about a project. My partner and I will be working on a variety of different source texts. Some of them are manuscripts with all kinds of interesting annotations and corrections, scripts that are really fascinating. And then we're also working with texts that have already been digitally encoded but are crap. And in fact, we can recognize where there was a failure to do best practices but we don't have access to original digital manuscripts. So, we have mixed kinds of things and we're also gonna be working with a variety of genres. Some that are straight up dramatic texts, others that are in fact musicals which we feel like we need to be doing some things there. So, not necessarily a question but just a kind of a mixed source digital encoding project that we're thinking about. Wow, well that sounds really great and important and hard. Just a few off the cuff thoughts I have are the TEI consortium has an amazing listserv where many organizations do, right? But there's a lot of dialogue about very specific problems like you're facing with say you already have this poorly drafted transcription or encoded text. What are some tools I could use to work with that? Or even more specifically, I'm dealing with a musical. Any best practices I should look at in terms of tagging because that comes up a lot. There are tags for dramatic texts. For example, there's a tag for cast of characters so you can mark where the cast of characters begins and where it ends. It might be a div, it might be a nested into div, I can't quite recall but there are, there have been some conversations luckily in the consortium and the folks that make it up around the kinds of texts that we deal with. At the same time, it can never be comprehensive and the TEI list and other seminars would be a place where you could ask these questions about what do I do with this text, this genre. In terms of the text that is funky or not very good, that I don't know. I mean, it makes me think though of the Otis and Mod Skinner book that got me down this rabbit hole to begin with and how it was crappy and that's why, that's the reason why I decided to go through this trouble. 10 years later, it's coming out. I can't believe it's, like I said, it's 10 years. But because I was in the archive and I saw how bad the book was when I was reading the manuscript, I knew something had to be done. So even though it's challenging, I hope you will do it and I think that people will have in the community good ideas to help spur you on. Yeah, and you're not limited in this. If you have other thoughts, please share them, but I just, I'm thinking about like making sure that I haven't met my goals for this talk. You know where to go, if you wanna learn more. Yes, what's your name? Jonah. Jonah. Yeah, so I'm thinking that some of the training would be really interesting. Just this is a fairly new area for me. So just having an idea, I'm thinking right now about sort of rolling around some different ideas for possible projects. And just knowing not only how to just where to go to get trained, the TEI and also the software. So any of those sorts of things, I mean the best practices are useful as well, but one thing I'm kind of looking at is like, for example, the Dawes' roles that have been really interpreted a lot artistically, but not a whole lot theatrically. And so how a lot of that has been digitized, but how do you then again using the best practices as well as implementing them so that you're digitally recognizing them and able to stock them on these sites and then able to work with them and maintain them, I guess that's- Yeah, I'm glad that you've said this because this is, I'm so glad that we took the time before we even started to just get trained. And that's sort of what I think many of you are doing even by being here in Atlanta, so good for you. I'm sorry, in Athens, not Atlanta. But I would share that I'm an unwilling digital humanist. I really am. I did this project and I learned these things because I had a purpose and a mission with this document that I had found that I believed needed to become more widely available. And it was the training, it was the experiences of mentorship and instruction that made me decide to actually take the plunge. And it's another reason I'm here is that I had these positive experiences and I wanna be a resource for all of you because you're my people. And in whatever way I can be useful, I wanna keep talking and sharing resources with you. But as I said, the annual Institute for Editing Historical Documents is tremendously helpful. And every year, the digital component becomes more intense in that Institute because it's just required. Now every grant program is asking, how are you going to make your documents accessible and available to a wide audience? One thing I don't know that they're doing that I hope they're doing it. If they're not, we need to pressure them is thinking about the other definition of accessible, which is accessible to a wide range of learning and modalities and ability, right? So this is something that Scott, thank goodness, is very attentive to and invested in professionally. I would encourage you and your collaborators to also make that part of your conversation and your planning. And in any training you seek, try and find out to what extent are we gonna be trained in making our products accessible to a wide range of users, not just in terms of education or interest, but also site, hearing, learning difference, right? So, yes, anyway, Institute for Annual Institute, the ADA sponsors and funded by the NHPRC. Again, you get paid to go, so there's no downside except that it's your time. You should also, I think check out that online course that I showed you. It looks really promising. It's also in different languages. I think it's in three languages. And it has captions. That's a nice thing that makes it accessible too. There's also the DHSI, the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, which is held in Victoria, Canada, every summer, British Columbia, every summer, which I've never been to, but I've always wanted to. It's an amazing, I think two week series of workshops that cover a wide range of projects, not just digital editing, although there's always a workshop on editing, which is what I'm looking at, obviously, I'm doing, but other kinds of digital humanities projects, really an outstanding opportunity there, and it's in the summer. And there are funding opportunities associated with it, so you can seek those. And then the TEI often will have events on that webpage that gave you the URL for regional events where you can go to university that has a Digital Humanities Center and get different kinds of training. And Naomi and Scott both attended TEI seminars or workshops at a regional sort of conference or symposium, and I never had to do it, so I actually am less well-versed in TEI than they are, but luckily they did it and they really, that experience helped us move the project forward. So those are just a few of the resources, but I think more and more instruction is becoming available online, so keeping your eye on these professional associations websites that I share with you, the ADE, the MLA Committee on Digital Editing, the TEI will be good resources for you. Other thoughts, questions? Yes, what's your name? Katherine, so you said other languages, so I have two questions. One is are languages that are not in a Romanized script part of this project, so Chinese, Japanese, various kinds of, it's quite different with Arabic, but is this also work or do they go that? Because it wouldn't work ABC, you know? Yeah, I do not know specifically anything about, but I think it's only because I haven't sought them out. I imagine that if you joined the TEI Lister, there are conversations about markup, and I think I have seen, for example, how do you interpret a medieval manuscript that has, yeah, and people are doing that with TEI guidelines or under TEI guidelines, so I know that work is being done, though I can't unfortunately right now point to specific projects. I never thought of that illuminating, because one of the things is I work mostly in Northeast Asia, and Japan isn't archived country. I mean, something happened in 1604, someone was making a note about it, but unfortunately it was written, and then when they went to printing, it changed what was written, and then they also have illustrations all through these, which means that there's always more than just text. So I was wondering about other types of visualizations that might be in a journal, yeah, a description, and that's really a question. I mean, 19, well, before we were so typewriting and stuff like the Buto Higikata has these things called Butofu, which are written, drawn, pasted, collaged works, and I'm wondering, well, how do you work with these layers of communication? Yeah, yeah, that's a great question, if people aren't doing that, you should do it, because one thing I do know in terms of manuscripts transcription, TEI does have standards in place guiding us how to note, for example, text on a page written in a different hand. So you can, and I've seen this, there's sort of young Harry and old Harry in his diary because he went back in the 1880s, we think, based on various bits of evidence in the manuscript and revised parts of it, made changes, added pages, removed pages. And even though we have not, for our purposes, we felt that was not important enough to encode, we considered using the hand tag in order to note that, in the end, we decided not to, because we felt like pretty confident that this was old Harry versus young Harry, but never enough to responsibly and unequivocally mark it as such, because that's an editorial intervention, right? That's a bit of analysis that I think when you're encoding text, you have to be careful and cautious of. So that's why we did, that's an example of something we didn't do, but we considered it because there are structures in TEI that allow you to really fine tune your analysis and your rendering of the manuscript. In the article, tomorrow morning, towards the theory of digital editions, there's a discussion of the Jane, oh, help me, there's a project discussed there where it's a woman novelist who's famous, and I just, yeah, I think that's exactly, and you can, because it's been rendered in, there's different versions, many different versions of many literary greats works, right? And TEI allows us to encode things in ways, and even manuscripts that have been edited over time, you can mark that up in your text, in your transcription, and there are tools to do that. I imagine, and the sort of work you're talking about too, you could do that, but you may have to create a custom schema that would reflect that data. And what, just connected to that, this idea of open access is not global. You know, we're working towards that, but for example, this particular group of people, it's a KO university, it's really hard to convince them that the work should be accessible. Do people work with that, or, you know, just that? You mean that, yes. It's wonderful, it should be accessible, but in a lot of places, owning something, or guarding something, and the preciousness of something, do you have to work with that, those ethical spaces? Well, I'm not sure, I'm answering your query specifically, but I can share that I, in the last summer, was contacted by descendants of Harry Watkins' brother, George. Okay, yeah. And I had a long interview with them, in which they told me what they know about the family. Now, most of us know that we probably, most of us have family stories that have been passed down to us, and we probably also know they're not 100% accurate. How could they be, right? Yeah. And the stories I was hearing from Ralph and Angela and Lori, I was like, wow, I've spent hours in the archive looking at city directories, and I know they're wrong. But I need them to help me, right? And so, we're navigating relationships all the time and our work is what I'm trying to say, and every project is different, and it's the relationships, however, that make the project happen or not. And it can be very difficult. So far, they still like me. They live here in Georgia, because George was in Georgia. I may meet them on Thursday, we'll see. But again, on a case-by-case basis, we probably have to deal with these ethics and the obstacles we confront around what kind of gets published, what's owned. I have a theater survey article coming out in October about Harry Watkins. It's obviously inspired by the diary, but it's like my own scholarship on Harry and a specific story he tells in the diary. And the photograph that appears as figure three is from the Thomson family, these folks I'm telling you about, and that picture, which they sent to me last summer, made my argument. I would not, it was amazing, I cried. I got, they emailed me the photograph of him, which is, he and his family in the parlor of their New York City home. And this article is about a sword that an audience gave him in 1853 as a sort of admiring token of respect. And I knew he treasured this, or I had this hunch, he never brings it up again in the diary, but all the other research I did around gift presentations in the 19th century theater and so on and so on, made me think this really mattered to him. And I zoomed in on the image and there it was, leaning against the wall right next to him, the sword. I had no idea what it looked like until that moment. I had worked so hard to figure out. And it was because of this family that contacted me through Facebook, because Harry's on Facebook, by the way, Twitter, Facebook, he's totally not worked. And it's because of Facebook that I met them and these relationships really can transform what we can do. So, yeah, thank God every day for Naomi and Scott and all the students who've worked with us, Shane, Christine, Danielle, et cetera, and the Thomasons too, who've come out of the woodwork. So it can't be just one person. Chase. Can you talk a little bit about how you cultivated the relationship with the archivist and sort of the library to get the permissions? I know you said they were very eager to let you do this, but sort of what that relationship was about. Great question, okay. So, do you mind if we keep going for a few more minutes? Okay, so, because this will hopefully be helpful. The manuscript lives at Harvard, obviously. Harvard has a press. A lot of times people have said, why are you going with Michigan? Because Harvard has a press. Well, as you may know, Harvard Theater Collection did not have a curator for years. So I was just working with the really brilliant staff there, but no one who could really state an opinion about whether or not they wanted the diary that belongs in their archive to be published by Harvard. And I had a relationship already with Michigan, because it's my first book, and we talked to several publishers, but in the end, went with Michigan, as I said, because they have this outstanding digital humanities program. And when Matt Whitman finally did come on board, he asked the same question like, I feel like we should be doing this. And I said, well, do you have the infrastructure to do the digital edition? Because that's just as important as the print. And he was like, no, Harvard isn't there yet. So in the end, we're really lucky that, I mean, obviously it's in the public domain. It's an unpublished manuscript. There's no copyright issues, but of course, out of courtesy, we want them to be happy as well, because we need them. But because we continued to talk with them and keep them posted and continue that dialogue, in the end, they totally understood why we made the decision that we did. And then Matt, out of his own budget, because he still cares very much about the project, and we've been talking every year forever, seems like. He said, I have this budget, I care so much about this. Why don't we just tell us what you need, we'll scan it, give you the rights to publish it, et cetera. And it's because he, luckily for us, sees that this is part of the collections mission, that we're advancing their mission through this publication, digitally and in print, and this is a way that they can support it. So we're really beside ourselves that they'll do this with us. But again, this goes back to the theme, I'm sure, has been a theme in just two days, which is collaboration, is how these projects work. And that began, this one began with Betty Falsey, believing me, when there was no evidence that the diary was there, you know? Like she, I just kept, I was like a grad student, please, could you just look maybe here? And, because I had the curatorial file, blah, blah, blah. But it started with her and then I just feel so, I'm so grateful that so many other people have cared and helped advance this project. And we've maintained those relationships, you know? Sarah is one of those relationships, frankly, like Sarah's on her advisory board. So, and that's the reason I'm sure I'm here. So it's like these, even this week, these two weeks, the people in this room, I think, could be those crucial people that make a project go forward. Is that a good note to end on? Good. Excellent. Let's end on that. Thank you. Amy has very graciously offered to have lunch with any of you that's interested in having lunch with her.