More about the Means: How Might it Work?
First, we've formed a working group consisting of students, staff and faculty, called the SourceLab Working Group. It will be meeting throughout the 2014-2015 Academic Year, to work out the organizational, curricular, and technological structures, that together would constitute our 'lab'. This would not be a physical space, but a set of courses and practices designed to make it possible for students to produce critical editions of previously digitized material.
Here is a sketch of how it might work:
Many history departments have undergraduate history journals. We're imagining SourceLab editions as a running series. We'd establish an Editorial Board–faculty supervised, run by students–that would supervise the release of new publications each year. Each semester, the Editorial Board will release a Call for Proposals, soliciting ideas for new editions. One obvious possibility would be a faculty member submitting an online source they would like rigorously prepared for classroom use. But the goal is not only to meet classroom or faculty needs: students, researchers, and members of the public would be able to submit ideas as well.
Proposals in hand, the Editorial Board would vet them for interest and suitability, before recruiting teams of students (as needed) to produce the editions. Our aim would be to produce informative and easy-to-use online 'books'–using publicly available web authoring tools, such as Scalar (the tool in which this brochure was made)–to present the artifacts in question. We would:
- Identify and provide full bibliographical information about the artifact in question, helping users understand its origins, current location, publication history, and how to cite it.
- Provide an editorial edition or text, for study and use, when appropriate, while of course at the same time providing hyper-linked reference to the digital original.
- Provide this edition in multiple formats (both online and for download), so that it can be read, viewed, or printed as readers prefer (i.e. on a laptop or tablet, on a Kindle or other e-reader, on paper, etc.)
- Collaborate with media, language and literature departments in the both the study of and the translation of documents.
- Take advantage of the online presentation of sources to add elements traditional paper publishing cannot, such as audio-text recording of sources, when such presentation may benefit their study. (For example, a poem might be read in its original language, to accompany its translation; or a story might be read aloud, simply to help students and other readers appreciate its narrative flow).
- Provide student-written introductory essays and critical commentary, both describing the source and explaining the choices we have made in publishing it.
Our aim is to develop this editorial and technological template in advance, so that students may focus on the basic elements of good source study: bibliographical and historical research, documentary editing, and critical and bibliographical commentary.