It’s that time of the week and it’s my turn to do the roundup, so let’s just get started with some links from the past week or so… Continue reading
Tag Archives: Archives
Historians and Documentary Editing
On this—the 223rd anniversary of the death of Benjamin Franklin—I thought I would use this space to say a few words about my experience over the last year working at the Papers of Benjamin Franklin here at Yale University from the perspective of a graduate student. Last June, I was fortunate enough to be given a regular (part-time) position at the Franklin Papers. Officially, I am a Research Assistant and have done a number of small research projects designed to provide the editors with reference materials on Pennsylvania in the 1780s as they finish up the volumes covering Franklin’s stay in Paris. I have also been given the opportunity to tackle more editor-type duties including fact-checking and drafting/re-drafting annotations and proofreading transcriptions. Through these experiences and my innumerable conversations with the chief Editor, Ellen Cohn, I have gotten an inside look at scholarly editing, which often goes either unnoticed or under-appreciated by academic historians. Continue reading
The Historian’s Lunch
Congratulations, readers: you’ve made it to spring break! This post is written for everyone about to embark on short archival research trips (but that doesn’t mean you have to skip over it if you’re stuck in one place). I’ve always found that while I’m researching, it’s nice to have an idea of what food places are nearby for those lunchtime moments when I emerge, ravenous, from manuscript rooms around the country. Continue reading
Forgotten Giant: Restoring Simms
“Washington Irving and His Literary Friends at Sunnyside.” Simms is seated at the left end of the table, shown in full profile.
(Christian Schussele, Oil on canvas, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1864)
Meet a Southern man of letters, William Gilmore Simms, through his life’s work of literature—much of it now available in the form of free, digital editions thanks to the Simms Intitiatives at the University of South Carolina. A well-known editor, critic, poet and historian of Southern life and culture in his day, Simms (1806-1870) occupies a unique position in early American literature, and (re)introducing him to modern readers has presented new challenges for scholars. The Junto asked the Initiatives’ Todd Hagstette, Simms Curator, to talk about creating a digital portrait of the author, and why Simms’s work belongs on the syllabus. Continue reading
Brave New World: Digital Early America
As settlers and explorers, early Americans navigated intricate webs of trade, created dynamic intellectual networks, and (often, thankfully) left us a paper trail of discoveries great and small. Presented with that past in the archive or on the screen, historians increasingly turn to digital resources for a new arc of insight. Thanks to digitized books and manuscripts, online reference tools like Google Books, amplified search methods, new digital libraries, and GIS mapping, there are plenty of opportunities for new research. We can follow foreign consuls, read a Southern man of letters, watch a Brooklyn family put down roots, or hear a podcast about Native American family life in Virginia. That’s just a small sample of the many digital projects transforming what we know of American history. The wave of new media has benefitted professional training, too. For digital scholars of all stages, there’s a welcoming set of training opportunities like THATCamps, summer institutes, and winter training sessions. Continue reading
About a Book
Ceci n’est pas une book.
She was encased in stolen books, buried in them as if in dirt. The thought of the countless hundreds of thousands of names that surrounded her, vainly scrawled in top right-hand corners – the weight of all that ignored ink, the endless proclamations that this is mine this is mine, every one of them snubbed simply and imperiously….The ease with which those little commands were broken.
She felt as if all around her, morose ghosts were milling, unable to accept that the volumes were no longer theirs.
China Miéville, The Scar
So, on the heels of Christopher’s eloquent framing of the questions of historical distance, a material-texts take on the joys of negotiating that distance by using dead people’s books: Continue reading
