In terms of the specifics, Dr. Ryan Cordell (“Analyzing C19 Editorship at Scale”) considers the revelations and limitations of analyzing editorial practices at scale by drawing on recent work form the Viral Texts Project (https://viraltexts.org). More specifically, he focuses on experiments that seek to model “information cascades,” showing how reprinting in the nineteenth-century newspaper “exchange system” can, when considered in aggregate, map national or regional geographies of print culture circulation and influence. Ultimately, he shows how an aggregated view of editorial labor provided by computational methods reveal some facets of editorship while rendering others less visible—perhaps invisible—in particular, by flattening local and peculiar editorial practices into composite frameworks. Dr. Milan Terlunen (“Making Editorial Labor Visible: Undergraduates as Scholarly Editors”) echoes this interest in nineteenth-century print media from an editorial standpoint, yet he shifts the conversation into a pedagogical realm. As such, his talk describes a capstone assignment that asks undergraduate students to produce a digital edition of an out-of-print story, which they uncover in an archive of nineteenth-century periodicals. Dr. Terlunen details how students attend closely to the editorial labor involved in the assigned readings (nineteenth-century European and US-American works and lesser-known stories from Latin America, Africa and Asia) and reflect on how each editor's choices impact the reading experience. He concludes by alerting students to inequalities in the global literary system which mean some texts are frequently republished while most texts never are, thus becoming unavailable to read. Dr. Maura Ives (“Jean Ingelow’s Letters and the Ethic of Editorial Invisibility”) draws on many of these same issues in her talk, which centers on the creation of a scholarly edition of the letters of Jean Ingelow (1820–1897). In particular, she focuses on issues specific to editions of unpublished correspondence and, in the process, explores hidden factors—copyright, institutional support, economic feasibility, and technological sustainability—and the constraints they place upon editorial transparency. Dr. Ives concludes by considering whether an edition of Ingelow’s letters is feasible, what form that edition would take, and why visibility of and access to the texts might, in some scenarios, come into conflict with the ethic of visibility and access to editorial process. In the final paper, Ms. Pollak (“Posthumous Editing: A Strategic Intervention”) turns our attention to unfinished works that are edited for posthumous publication. More specifically, she considers posthumously published works by Lorraine Hansberry, Willa Cather, and Joanna Russ to argue that question of editorial visibility—whether the editor announces herself and her intentions, and whether (and to what extent) she flags and foreground her editorial hand throughout—is, for twentieth-century women writers, not only a question of ethics but a question of strategy. Authors must, she argues, reach a certain stature, secure a certain toehold, before the visibility of the editorial process—of editorial seams—can advance, rather than detract from, the conversation around their work. When placed in conversation, the papers on this panel expose the complex factors—both visible and invisible—at play in editorial work across time, space, and media.
This panel incorporates a wide range of perspectives, from graduate students to tenured professors, and from public institutions in the South and in the Midwest to private institutions in the Northeast. With regard to the mechanics of the session, the presider will briefly introduce the panelists, who will have 12–15 minutes to present their papers. Following the panelists presentations, the presider will open the floor for audience discussion (15 minutes).