More about the Means: How Might it Work?
First, we've formed a SourceLab Working Group consisting of students, staff and faculty. 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'. (If you'd like to hear more about these discussions, let us know.)
Our thought is that this 'lab' would not be a physical space in our or any other History Department, but rather a curriculum and set of practices–culminating in a running editorial series of source publications, under the SourceLab masthead, and supervised by an Editorial Board composed of students, staff and faculty. Though many History Departments have journals, our publications would each be stand-alone 'books,' independent critical editions that would import the digital object in question into a critical apparatus that would make it better for scholarly use.
Increasingly, web-based authoring tools such as Scalar–the platform on which this brochure was written–are making it easy for students without extensive web-training to build such 'editions' of materials already found online, by constructing the proper critical apparatus or frame around them. While we are not, at this point, committed to Scalar as our final platform, our aim is to find an easy-to-use, low-weight technology, that both lends itself to long-term archiving on a university-based server and is itself free and adaptable to such a use. (Have an idea? Let us know!)
What kinds of features should editions have? Well, to start, we'll obviously provide links to the original digital copies, as and where we found them. But we'll also seek to produce editorial versions–properly transcribed according to the best standards of documentary editing–where such versions would aid students in using the materials. We'll have online presentations of our editions: but also intend to offer them in multiple formats–downloadable versions for print, versions optimized for E-Readers or tablets, etc.–so that users can have them in a form that suits their purposes best, and can look at them where and when they want. Obviously, all this editing involves decisions that we'll explain, as good editors do, in a systematic commentary, describing the choices we've made and the thought behind them. We'll provide citation guides, and bibliographies for further reading: in short, everything people generally don't get from the sources they find on the Web. In the case of texts, we're also providing such services as audio-text versions (where hearing the source read might be useful) created in Librivox, and shortened, annotated excerpts, where an instructor might want to focus a class's attention on a specific part of a document.
Who can participate? History students and people interested in history, of course. But we're particularly excited about the interdisciplinary potential of SourceLab, and hope to draw on the expertise across the whole university in making our editions.
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.