Volume 43

2026-07-24

DOI: 10.55520/H86ERCEM

§ Micro-editions

A Model for the Digital Edition of Inventories of Enslaved Persons

Clayton McCarl, Eduard Arriaga-Arango, Siobhan Meï and Blossom Machado Fehrs

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.

Voices: Micro-editions of Readings by McClure, Marlatt, Rukeyser

Tanya Clement, Trent Wintermeier, Karis Shearer, Emily Christina Murphy and Matthew Kilbane

The audio recordings included in “Voices: Micro-editions of Readings by Daphne Marlatt, Michael McClure, and Muriel Rukeyser” represent select moments of performed poetry. In each case, we have chosen to include these recordings of these performances, because rendering what we find resonant for listeners highlights aspects of the literary record that print editions may never reproduce. Our micro-editions mark how and to what we listen in these particular performances just as editorial choices and marginalia mark how and what editors find significant in specific versions of manuscript and printed texts.

The Amazing Kneeland Methodology

Myrna Layton

This is an edition of the ballet teaching methodology of Jo Anna Kneeland, which demonstrates a form of textual recovery. Kneeland’s intention was to publish her manuscript, but she did not accomplish that objective before her death. Her work was neglected because it was unavailable. This edition replicates an unpublished manuscript written by Kneeland in the nineteen eighties and nineties, and sourced from her colleague Mary Price Boday. Frank Kneeland, Jo Anna’s son and heir, granted permission to publish his mother’s work.

§ Voices and Perspectives: Interviews and Conversations

A Bridge Between Generations: An Interview with Bianca Swift

Julian C. Chambliss

In Volume 43, the Voices and Perspectives Section features an interview with Bianca Swift from the Charles Chesnutt Archive. As a poet, teaching artist, and emerging scholar, Swift considers how archives connect to place, public memory, ethical labor, and the evolving challenges of technology in textual scholarship today.

Finding Your Voice in the Machine: An Interview with Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

Julian C. Chambliss

This interview examines Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s work at the intersection of computational writing, poetry, and archival imagination. Bertram’s creative and scholarly practice examines how language systems shape identity, race, memory, and cultural expression. In this interview, she examines her own journey with technology, considers its implications, and raises critical questions we must address at this moment.

An Archive for the People: An Interview with Rasheedah Phillips

Julian C. Chambliss

This interview features Rasheedah Phillips, an interdisciplinary artist, lawyer, and housing advocate who challenges colonial concepts of time and archives. In this interview, Phillips discusses her views on community, archives, and policy.

Stewardship and Legacy: An Interview with Clint Fluker

Kyle Joseph Patrick Flanagan

This interview explores archival work at the intersection of Afrofuturism, Black archival practice, and emerging technologies, through questions of accessibility, materiality, memory, and the future of cultural preservation.

§ Uncovering and Sustaining the Cultural Record

Reading in Pieces: Linking “Voices Through Time” at the London Foundling Hospital

Corey Risinger

In 1763, the Foundling Hospital — a London-based institution that oversaw the care and education of illegitimate children — radically altered its admissions policies. Where struggling mothers could once anonymously apply for the Hospital’s support, they were now required to prove their worthiness for charitable services. Accordingly, maternal applicants assembled petition billets that attempted to convey their upstanding character and their material inability to provide for their young children. Thanks to “Voices Through Time: The Story of Care” (VTT), a four-year volunteer-driven collaborative campaign to transcribe materials from the Hospital’s 8-ton archive, maternal petitions have found global audiences.

§ Essays

Beyond the Bounding Box: Entity Extraction and the Remediation of Newspaper Directories

Daniel Evans

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.

Constructing and Maintaining Voluntary Associations in Women’s Meeting Minutes

Alice Martin

In this essay, I take meeting minutes written by women in the nineteenth century for mixed gender voluntary associations as my primary objects of study. Meeting minutes are often ignored in scholarship in favor of annual reports, printed summaries of a voluntary associations’ activities for general, outside audiences. But what do we miss by looking only at how associations projected themselves to others, rather than at how notetakers depicted an organization’s labors to its own members? I argue that meeting minutes make visible the vital work women continuously undertook to maintain associations at a local scale, even as a growing awareness of mass audiences began to eclipse them.

§ Teaching and Learning

A Model for Creating and Publishing a Collaborative Critical Edition in the Classroom

Sarah Danielson, Michael Hodge and Kevin McMullen

This essay describes a collaborative editing project undertaken by an upper-level undergraduate English course at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. As a class, we edited an out-of-print and out-of-copyright literary text, writing a critical introduction and researching and writing historical and contextual annotations, for which we received a contract with the trade imprint of an academic publisher.

From Elements to Styles: Pedagogical Strategies for Digital Editing and Publication

Sarah Connell

The TEI markup language is a widely used method for introducing students to the practices of digital editing, and ample scholarship has shown the efficacy of TEI as a learning tool in the humanities. This paper contributes to current discussions on the pedagogies of TEI markup and digital editing by making the case for an approach to classroom encoding that has two distinctive features: students make encoding decisions for the full scope of the editorial and publication processes, and they make those decisions both individually and collectively.

§ Reviews