Volume 43 Introduction

Volume 43 amply represents the editorial board’s interest in resuscitating, sustaining, and investigating eclectic, understudied materials. Readers will discover digital humanities innovations, critical bibliography insights, pioneering methods to foster student professionalization, novel analyses of performance art, and wide-ranging conversations about the contested nature of the archives, collective memory, the arts, technology, community, and Afrofuturism. They will encounter meeting minutes produced as forms of aggregated social action, the re-constellation of foundling hospital archives through volunteer researchers’ affective engagement, and new technologies that extract and remediate understudied genres characterized by tabular data—including directories, census lists, inventories, and other other legal documents—to amplify suppressed and misrepresented histories. Finally, readers can enjoy the website’s freshly envisioned aesthetic appearance and technical stack—conceived as extensions of the journal’s ongoing commitment to public accessibility, open-source knowledge creation, and expansive view of textual scholarship and recovery as meaning-makers.

The volume opens with the Micro-editions section. Readers will first encounter A Model for the Digital Edition of Inventories of Enslaved Persons, edited by Clayton McCarl, Eduard Arriaga-Arango, Siobhan Meï, and Blossom Machado Fehrs. The editors of this micro-edition prototype a model for recovery practitioners seeking to establish digital editions based on multilingual inventories of enslaved people, wills, and other early American documents. Among their central concerns: “how to edit [such documents] as both textual artifacts and relational data, and how to handle them in a way that acknowledges and does not amplify their dehumanizing effects”—while also offering a flexible template that others can adapt for their own projects.

The second micro-edition is Voices: Micro-editions of Readings by McClure, Marlatt, Rukeyser, edited by Tanya E. Clement, Trent Wintermeier, Karls Shearer, Emily Christina Murphy, and Matthew Kilbane—a social-text edition of audio recordings of performed poetry by Daphne Marlatt, Michael McClure, and Muriel Rukeyser. The annotated recordings in this edition document “aspects of the literary record that print editions may never produce” and rely on the conversational or dialogic perspective of a performance that engages with a live (listening and responding/participatory) audience, the performative poet, and the prior, published literary object itself. This edition marks a distinct break from the power dynamic long held by print-based editions, and it produces multiple, new, and overlapping interpretations.

The last micro-edition is The Amazing Kneeland Methodology, edited by Myrna Layton. Ballet dancer, choreographer, and teacher Jo Anna Kneeland (1925–1999) developed a pioneering training method based in kinesiology. Widely incorporated by all dance methodologies today, Kneeland’s technique was forgotten and then lost, but her innovative theory and practice have significantly impacted classical ballet, with crossover to other dance styles, physical rehabilitation techniques, and the fields of gymnastics and mental health.

The Voices and Perspectives section is next, containing four multimodal interviews interrogating the contested nature of the archives, ascending technologies, Afrofuturism, creative arts, and community.

The first is Julian C. Chambliss’s “A Bridge Between Generations: An Interview with Bianca Swift.” An emerging scholar with an MA in creative writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Swift is an Assistant Editor of the Charles Chesnutt Archive, a performance poet, and an author. At UNL she has assumed an integral role in developing public-facing and community-based archival research at the Chesnutt Archive during a time of increasing technological challenges and racism at university and college campuses across the country.

The second interview, “Finding Your Voice in the Machine: An Interview with Lillian-Yvonne Bertram,” was also conducted by Chambliss. Bertram is an Associate Professor of English and Director of the MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Maryland. Bertram’s scholarship places experimental and verse writing in dialogue with computation and the archival imaginary while also exploring the ways in which technologies create new angles of vision and expression.

The third interview, “An Archive for the People: An Interview with Rasheedah Phillips,” finds Chambliss in conversation with the housing advocate, lawyer, writer, and interdisciplinary artist Rasheedah Phillips. Phillips is the co-founder of Black Quantum Futurism, the founder of The AfroFuturist Affair, a collaborator with the Community Futures Lab, and former Director of Housing Futures and Land Justice at PolicyLink. Her activism demonstrates the synergies that law, art, and organizing enact on archival collective memory, policy engagement, and community self-determination.

In this section’s final piece, “Stewardship and Legacy: An Interview with Clint Fluker,” Kyle Flanagan interviews Clint Fluker, an educator, artist, and curator with special interests in the restorative nature of communal memory, cultural heritage collections, and multidisciplinary art. As Senior Director of Culture, Community, and Partner Engagement at Emory University Libraries and the Michael C. Carlos Museum, Fluker cultivates collaborative community partnerships, exhibits, and public programming.

Volume 43 continues with a contribution to the section on Uncovering and Sustaining the Cultural Record. In “Linking ‘Voices Through Time’ at the London Foundling Hospital,” Corey Risinger highlights the affective volunteer theory and praxis that sustain “Voices Through Time: The Story of Care” (VTT), a four-year, internationally supported project to transcribe an eight-ton archive of maternal petitions held by the London Foundling Hospital, established in 1763. The hospital’s gate-keeping board and staff educated children—born out of wedlock—whose mothers were able to justify their newborns’ societal worth through these petitions. Risinger and her fellow volunteers “re-constellate” the archive’s disparate maternal petitions and other fragments collaboratively with empathetic, shared transcriptive and research practices. This “story of care” narrates a model of archival ethics in which people and methods can resuscitate discarded and truncated histories.

The journal’s Essays section includes two contributions. The first is Daniel Evans’s “Beyond the Bounding Box: Entity Extraction and the Remediation of Newspaper Directories.” Evans argues that by producing “structured datasets,” emerging computer vision models and digitization have radically transformed the potential extraction, remediation, and analysis of cultural heritage data held in tabular sources such as published nineteenth-century lists and business directories. Outcomes include large-scale analysis, pattern recognition, and cross-referencing that have previously been inaccessible to scholars conducting research manually. Further, these remediated datasets promise an expansive “speculative horizon” teeming with digitized “dynamic objects” that will enable researchers to “locate traces of what we do not know we do not know, especially in relation to marginalized or deliberately minimized archives.”

Alice Martin’s “Constructing and Maintaining Voluntary Associations in Women’s Meeting Minutes” follows. Like Evans, Martin examines genres that earlier scholars overlooked, neglecting to subject them to interpretation and analysis. In this case, Martin examines meeting minutes produced by nineteenth-century women for mixed-gender voluntary associations. Martin suggests that these minutes both highlight the increasing femininization of association note-taking and the significance of women’s labors—work that displays distinct rhetorical strategies that amount to sophisticated and activist editorial practices. Such women’s engagement ensured that “social relations work in a civil society at large.”

Both essays in the Teaching and Learning section of Volume 43 recount the exciting ways that students can gain professional and academic skills in the classroom by taking charge of cultural recovery, from editorial process through final production.

This section begins with an essay by Kevin McMullen, Sarah Danielson, and Michael Hodge. The authors present an account of a successful collaborative editing project guided by Professor McMullen in an upper-level undergraduate course at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. In producing an actionable model for other students and instructors, McMullen, Danielson, and Hodge recount their work in editing one of Susan Glaspell’s out-of-copyright texts in an annotated critical edition, published in fall 2025 with the trade imprint of an academic publisher. Importantly, in addition to McMullen, all students are listed as co-editors, and McMullen and his two students offer an account of their experiment, its outcomes, and projected futures for students’ intellectual and professional lives.

In this section’s second piece, “From Elements to Styles: Pedagogical Strategies for Digital Editing and Publication,” Sarah Connell offers three teaching case studies under the auspices of Northeastern University’s Women Writers Project and its Digital Integration Teaching Initiative. In these pedagogical settings, students learn TEI encoding and then handle all collective and individual decisions about editorial and publication practices. Despite the serious challenges involved with this intensive classroom prototype, Connell observes that students who are required to “make decisions about textual selection, transcription, regularization, annotation, and publication … gain insight into the layers of mediation that go into all edited texts” and gain valuable expertise in reading and analyzing edited texts and cultural artifacts.

The reviews in Volume 43 reflect the editorial board’s interest in analytical essays that survey developments, challenges, and questions in the field—rather than purely descriptive book reviews. They include:

Taught by Literature: Recentering Black Women Intellectuals. A digital project by Denise Burgher, Brigitte Fielder, and Jean M. Lutes. Review by Andrew W. Smith, University of Maryland College Park.

Colored Conventions Project: Bringing Nineteenth-Century Black Organizing to Digital Life. Codirected by P. Gabrielle Foreman and Jim Casey. Reviewed by Scot French, University of Central Florida.

A Miserable Revenge: A Story of Life in Virginia. By George A. Newman. Edited by Mollie Godfrey, Brooks E. Hofner, and Evan Sizemore. Reviewed by John Ernest, University of Delaware.

Futures of Digital Scholarly Editing. Edited by Matt Cohen, Kenneth M. Rice, and Caterina Bernardini. Reviewed by James Cummings, Newcastle University.

§Acknowledgments

I am indebted to the Scholarly Editing Advisory Board, the University of Virginia Press, the ADE Council, and Chris Minty (ADE Director of Publications) for their support of this publication. I am also grateful for the curatorial and editorial work of the Volume 43 Editorial Board: Megan Bushnell (Micro-editions Co-editor), Julian C. Chambliss (Voices and Perspectives Editor), Eagan Dean (Essays Editor), Kyle Flanagan (Voices and Perspectives Associate Editor), Silvia P. Glick (Reviews Editor), Melissa Jerome (Uncovering and Sustaining the Cultural Record Editor), Robert Riter (Managing Editor), Serenity Sutherland (Teaching and Learning Editor), and Raffaele Viglianti (Technical Editor and Micro-editions Co-editor).