In their presentation “Editing Charles Chesnutt’s Correspondence in a Digital Environment,” Dr. Price and Dr. Browner will discuss work at The Charles W. Chesnutt Archive to transcribe and annotate all incoming as well as outgoing letters. Currently, there are no comprehensive letter collections of African Americans who came of age as Reconstruction flowered and failed, and the violence of Jim Crow took hold. Chesnutt’s letters span from 1883-1932, and include exchanges with Black activists, White allies, a wide range of editors working in the Black and White press, and friends and family members active in schools, politics, and civic affairs in the North and South. The remarkable range of tone and topic in the correspondence sheds light on Chesnutt as a writer, as a legal thinker, and as a rhetorician. They also reveal Chesnutt's little studied connections within the black intelligentsia and thus allow scholars to follow debates among African Americans in conversations about art, literature, history, and politics. There are two print volumes of selected letters, and these have been a cornerstone in the growth of Chesnutt scholarship, but they are no longer sufficient. We will also include drafts of outgoing letters, allowing scholars and the interested public to examine this inveterate reviser’s attention to style and tone, and his second thoughts about what to share. Both the process, which draws on the expertise and perspectives of a diverse group of faculty, students, as well as that of librarians and archivists across the country, and the complete digital collection will provide an opportunity to rethink how we understand Chesnutt and how we preserve and make accessible his work.

The Emma B. Andrews Diary Project began a decade ago, with the goal of publishing the journals kept by the companion of an early excavator in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. Dating between 1889 and 1913, these diaries offer important and unique insights into the disciplinary development of Egyptology, as well as providing a comprehensive record of society and travel in Egypt during the so-called ‘Golden Age’. Dr. Ketchley’s team transcribes and encodes in XML/TEI and provides the background context about people, places, antiquities, boats, etc. necessary to understand what’s going on. From the outset, the project team comprised an interdisciplinary group of faculty and students, with a range of experience and skill sets. Involving undergraduates in the publication process is unusual but reflects the collaborative opportunities presented by a project that aims to reconsider the historical roots of a discipline through digital editing. This presentation will discuss the collaborative process and workflows, along with the challenges and opportunities such work presents.

As the William Morris Archive homepage points out, “Several of Morris’s contemporaries—Tennyson, Hopkins, the Brownings, and the Rossettis, for example—have benefited from full critical editions, but much of Morris’s extensive lifework has remained unedited and even ungathered for a century.” As the founder and editor of the current William Morris Archive (morrisarchive.lib.uiowa.edu), Dr. Florence Boos has worked with multiple collaborators, navigated multiple platforms, and employed multiple strategies to use digital editing to uncover Morris’s breadth of impact. Dr. Boos will focus on the logistics of collaboration with a major electronic consortium (NINES), with other units of the university, and with scholars and editors from outside the host institution. The project’s 16-year lifespan has encompassed a period of rapid change in online platforms, search technology, and institutional support for digital projects. Dr. Boos will share strategies for navigating unexpected circumstances, accommodating the different expectations of collaborative partners, and conceptualizing scholarly editing in seemingly a technologically-driven project.

The impetus for this just-in-time proposal was the robust response to the call for proposals for the Committee on Scholarly Editing’s guaranteed session, “From Canons to Collectivities.” This session will complement and extend that session’s metatheoretical approach to editing with presentations considering how the affordances of digital scholarly editions can transform reception.