Students in Professor Ulman’s English 8982 in Autumn Semester 2012 will be working on a recent RBMS acquisition, the unpublished mid-nineteenth-century (1862) manuscript journal of Lucius Clark Smith, a farmer and schoolteacher who lived right here in central Ohio during the Civil War. In the course of editing Smith’s journal, students will learn to transcribe, encode, annotate, transform, and describe manuscript materials and reflect on the information gained and lost in the preparation of electronic representations of cultural artifacts. In addition to the hands-on editing project, students taking the graded version of the course will compare print and electronic textual editions of texts and prepare rationales for editing texts in their fields.

Please note that the course does not require any previous experience with textual editing, the technologies involved in electronic textual editing, or 19th-century American literature and culture.   The class will work with the Smith journal in part because its local provenance will enable students to consult local archives for relevant information, but the skills students will learn are applicable to any genre in any period or language.

Examples of other student-edited editions of RBMS materials, completed or in progress, can be viewed via the following links:

Selected Letters from the Ivan S. Gilbert Collection of Stephens Family Travel Letters and Ephemera
Louisa A. Doane’s Journal of Two Ocean Voyages (1852-1853)
Samuel Sullivan Cox’s “Journal of a Tour to Europe” (1851)
William B. Anderson Letters (1862–1864)

Students may contact the instructor directly for further information at ulman.1@osu.edu.

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