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Making Past Voices Public: The Boston-Area Institute for Publishing Archival Manuscript Text Online 

 

The Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS) in partnership with Northeastern University Library (NUL) is proud to host Making Past Voices Public, a collegial institute from July 27 to 31, 2020, designed to assist participants with preparing the content of manuscript sources for digital public presentation. If you have/are working with archival manuscripts—letters, journals, etc.—and are seeking information about best practices for reaching high standards of accuracy, consistency, and documentation for your transcriptions and contextual information, this opportunity is for you! If you want to use TEI markup (XML) as the basis of your electronic text, this opportunity is for you! This institute is administered by the Primary Source Cooperative at the MHS and is part of the Association for Documentary Editing’s education initiative, the Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents (IEHD).

 

Applications are welcome from archivists, library professionals, public historians, and faculty, students, and independent scholars from a wide range of disciplines. Small project teams are also encouraged to apply. Instructors will work with participants to establish their best process and practices in order to move from historical text to an authoritative online collection/edition. We will discuss how to establish well-documented policies for transcription and annotation, including how those policies translate to encoding guidelines for a TEI-based workflow. Similarly, we will explore options for moving from word-processed documents to XML and from XML files to online delivery. We will also consider reliable practices for document control and task management. For a portion of the schedule, participants will have the option to choose between a project management track and a TEI-intensive track.

 

All participants are expected to have a text or a group of related texts that they have already begun to work with and hope to make public, either on their own or through an affiliated organization. For application instructions and other information, visit http://primarysourcecoop.org/summer-institute/summer-institute-application/.

Application deadline: March 30, 2020

 

Visit http://primarysourcecoop.org for application information and for more details about the schedule, fees, and travel grants.

 

Institute faculty: Syd Bauman (XML Programmer-Analyst, Digital Scholarship Group [DSG], NUL), Sarah Connell (Assistant Director, Women Writers Project, DSG), Julia Flanders (Head of the DSG and Professor of the Practice of English), Nancy Heywood (Senior Archivist for Digital Initiatives, MHS), Ondine Le Blanc (Editor of Publications, MHS), and Sara Martin (Editor in Chief, Adams Papers, MHS).