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SourceLab (An Idea)

How does it work?

Well, to be honest, it doesn't, just yet. SourceLab began as an idea in the Fall of 2014, in the History Department at Illinois. In the Spring of 2015, a faculty and student Working Group met to discuss organizational and curricular questions related to the initiative, even as a separate student seminar prepared prototype editions of a few select sources, including the ones featured on the previous page. We hope to present these prototypes soon for public discussion.

Conceptually, however, here's how we're imagining the initiative.

Each semester, SourceLab (led by an editorial board composed of students, staff and faculty) will issue a call for proposals. Faculty, staff, students and indeed members of the general public will be encouraged to submit names of individual digital sources, already online, that they feel could be brought into teaching and research, if presented in a critical edition. The editorial board will evaluate these proposals for inclusion in the SourceLab series, focusing in particular on those projects for which a clear audience exists. Thus, for example, an instructor may anticipate wanting to use a web-based video for a course to be taught in the following semester or year, and SourceLab will try to create an edition to meet this need.

Once the projects are chosen, students will be recruited to complete them, either as part of a special, SourceLab working seminar, or as a supervised independent study project. In either case, students will be trained in the editorial practices and digital publishing technologies developed by SourceLab, and have their final work reviewed by both content specialists and SourceLab's own editorial board. We are developing a common look and template for the editions, which will all conform to the

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Red Cross Work on Mutilés (1918)
"Troika" (Lithograph, 1865) This lithograph was produced by I. Govrilov and published by P. N. Sherapov in 1865. It shows a Russian relay driver (or iamshchik) driving a troika across a broadly rural landscape, with a village arranged along a road whose signs point the direction to somewhere else. The text at the bottom is a mash-up of popular coachmen's songs. It begins with lyrics drawn from F. N. Glinka's famous "Troika" (itself an excerpt from a much longer poem, "A Russian's Dream Abroad," published in 1825). It continues with material from "Here on the Way There's a Big Village," by P. Bulakhov and N. Anordist (Radostin).