Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal archived by the U.S. Library of Congress and distributed by the University of Virginia Press. Committed to the advancement of all aspects of textual scholarship and recovery, the journal is interdisciplinary, multilingual, and public facing. Global in scope, Scholarly Editing features small-scale digital editions, interviews, essays, and teaching resources, along with reviews of written, oral, and visual media that sustain, recover, and reimagine texts, information, and meaning.
Sustaining, Recovering, Reimagining
Texts, Information, andMeaning
Illustration from "The Dancer Prepares: New Approaches to Principles of Movement as Applied to Ballet Pedagogy," by Lydia Joel and Jo Anna Kneeland, in Dance Magazine, April 1966, 58.
Volume 43
In Volume 43 readers will discover digital humanities and bibliographic insights, pioneering methods to foster student professionalization, analyses of performance art, and wide-ranging conversations about the contested nature of the archives, the arts, AI, community, and Afrofuturism. They will encounter meeting minutes as social activism, the recovery of foundling hospital archives, and the remediation of legal data to amplify suppressed and misrepresented histories. Volume 43 also launches the journal's newly designed website, conceived as an extension of our commitment to public accessibility, open-source knowledge creation, and vision of textual scholarship and recovery as meaning makers.
Recent Features
Beyond the Bounding Box: Entity Extraction and the Remediation of Newspaper Directories
This article argues that advances in computer vision models and digitization within the past few years have changed the landscape of cultural heritage data. Tasks that previously required manual annotation, fine-tuning, and substantial computational resources can now be executed with significantly greater expediency using machine learning. Moreover, tasks that were previously thought to be impossible are now increasingly feasible.
A Model for the Digital Edition of Inventories of Enslaved Persons
This micro-edition explores a model for creating digital editions of the inventories of enslaved persons that appear in censuses, wills and other colonial-era and nineteenth-century documents from throughout the Americas. We seek to address two central problems in the transmission of these texts: how to edit the censuses as both textual artifacts and relational data, and how to handle them in a way that acknowledges and does not amplify their dehumanizing effects.
Reparative Editing: Working with Ukrainian Authors in Wartime
In fall 2022 I became chair of the editorial board at the British online journal Museum and Society, published by the University of Leicester School of Museum Studies.[^1] I was full of ideals and visions for continuing the journal’s commitment to diversity. I would seek new editors, reviewers, and authors from a variety of populations. I would reexamine our editorial practices to ensure that they
From the Archive
A selection of pieces from the journal’s archive (Volumes 33–38, 2012–2017).
The Selected Letters of Hannah Whitman Heyde
Volume 37 (2016)
Aside from his mother, Louisa Van Velsor Whitman, and his brothers George and Jeff, Walt Whitman's most frequent family correspondent was his youngest sister, Hannah Louisa Whitman Heyde (November 28, 1823–July 18, 1908). [...] Hannah, Whitman's favorite sister, was an ongoing source of concern for the Whitman family in the decades after her marriage to Heyde in 1852. Hannah's letters provide a compelling account of domestic violence from the standpoint of the abused woman.
Alex Haley's "The Malcolm X I Knew" and Notecards from The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Volume 35 (2014)
As a subject specialist in African American literature and a digital humanist, I am dismayed by the dearth of scholarly edited, digitized contemporary African American literary texts. Even extremely visible figures are not well represented by digital scholarly materials, a fact not fully excused by the difficulties of digitizing post-1923 authors due to copyright restrictions.
A Poem's Flight: Reprints of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "Sunset Wings" in the American Newspaper Press
Volume 34 (2013)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti is beyond doubt one of the best known and most studied British poets of the nineteenth century. By virtue of the recently completed Rossetti Archive, digital images of "every surviving documentary state of [his] works"—manuscripts, sketches, editions, paintings—are now easily accessible online, accompanied by extensive editorial comments, notes, and transcriptions. This edition of Rossetti's brief lyric poem "Sunset Wings" deals with a type of text that falls outside the scope of the Rossetti Archive: the transatlantic reprint.