October 8, 2020

Professor David Birnbaum, Co-Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh, spoke on “Theorizing and Implementing Digital Editions.” Professor Birnbaum has been involved in the study of electronic text technology since the mid-1980s, has delivered presentations at a variety of digital humanities conferences, and has served on the board of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the editorial board of Markup languages: theory and practice, and the Text Encoding Initiative Council.

October 15, 2020

Henry David Thoreau’s complex, multi-versioned manuscript of Walden is an encoder’s nightmare and a teacher’s dream. With funding from a SUNY Innovative Instruction Technology Grant, the Huntington Library has digitized the manuscript, and a small team of scholars has collaborated to produce a series of open-access modules that draw on the images to explore the aims and methods of digital scholarly editing. This session showed participants how the modules and the manuscript can be used to get students thinking about the relationship between the meaning of a text and its material history. It also provided opportunities to think broadly about the power of student collaboration, project-based learning, and open-access tools in humanities pedagogy.

October 22, 2020

This final session was an opportunity for participants to share what they’ve done with any aspect of encoding and editions in the undergraduate classroom. They shared assignments, projects, triumphs, and frustrations, or just showed up to listen and learn.