Exploring Textual Editions: Transcribing and Presenting Historical Documents to Enhance Reading Experience

1. What is a textual edition? • A transcription and presentation of the text of some documents (e.g., letters, diaries, meeting minutes), presented with explanatory footnotes, an introduction, and a bibliography • The goal: to represent the documents to people who haven’t seen them, and in some measure to recreate the experience of reading them

2. How much to edit? • Rough goal: to have a 20-30 page paper including introduction, text (with footnotes) and bibliography • Introduction: 4-10 pages, depending on how much background is necessary (some documents tell their own story more than others) • Very roughly, 8 or 10 1-2 page letters or the equivalent.

3. Introduction • Set the scene, introduce the main characters and their historical/literary milieu • Tell a story of which the documents will form a part • If you like, think of the documents as illustrations to the story you’re telling • Feel free to quote (briefly) from the documents you’re editing, or from other related ones you’re not editing • Use secondary sources, and quote and cite them as appropriate • Feel free to talk about how you got interested in the topic, satisfactions/challenges, and what the experience was like for you

4. Textual Note • Between the introduction and the text • Describe the nature, quantity, and condition of the documents • Manuscript/typescript • Have you tried to reproduce the appearance? (see ‘types of edition’ below) • Editorial conventions (see next slide): give list and explain any special problems or difficulties

5. Editorial Conventions[See Mary-Jo Kline, A Guide to Documentary Editing, pp. 134-138] Devise your own, but here are some examples: [...] an illegible, damaged, or unrecoverable passage [hardly] or [hardly?] editor’s conjecture <maybe> editor’s insertion; e.g., Hannah <Smith’s daughter> (round brackets) saved for brackets in the original text • A sample list, from an edition of a medieval psalter(the section “Editorial Conventions”)

6. Types of Annotation • Textual - explain the presentation or alteration of something in the text, if not covered in the list of conventions (e.g., “the word ‘also’ has been written above the line”) • Contextual - give some historical context for the fact or statement at that point in the text - many of these will explain references to people, places or things in the document, and you'll get that information from sources like books, articles, biographical notes, and others (occasionally maybe even some other archival materials) - they should be as long as they need to be, but don’t let them dominate the text

7. Types of edition • Diplomatic edition • Plain text edition • Compromise edition (including facsimile in column format)

8. Standardizing/Emending Standardizing: physical format • e.g., in letters, may arbitrarily place all datelines at the beginning; standardize paragraph indentations; etc. (or not) • Possible things to standardize: spelling, use of capitals, length of dashes and hyphens, word division, abbreviations • This will depend on how faithful you want to be to the text, and how disruptive the errors and idiosyncrasies might be • Explain your procedure in the textual note Emending • silent emendation: a change made without any indication in the text (explain your general principles in the textual note) • overt emendation: change indicated within the text (in brackets) - quiet emendation: change indicated only in footnotes or endnotes

9. One more example: • James Fenimore Cooper, The Deerslayer(accuracy makes a difference!)