Center for Digital Research in the Humanities

Following a presentation at the National Archives, Ken Winkle, co-lead on the Civil War Washington project, will be a guest of the Kojo Nnamdi show. His appearance is in conjunction with both the relaunch of the CWW site and Emancipation Day in Washington, DC.

Civil War Washington relaunches its site (civilwardc.org). New content includes emancipation petitions, medical cases, database, & maps.

The Whitman Archive has been awarded a $275,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create item-level finding guides to the nearly seventy individual repositories holding Whitman’s prose manuscripts. The finding guides will attach to each description high-quality digital images for all the prose manuscripts. When coupled with the Whitman Archive’s similarly organized and award-winning guides to Whitman’s poetry manuscripts, this project will provide unprecedented documentation of and access to the literary manuscripts of a major literary figure. For more information, visit http://whitmanarchive.org/

We are delighted to announce the debut of Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing, now online at scholarlyediting.org. Published for over 30 years as a print publication titled Documentary Editing, Scholarly Editing continues to publish articles about the theory and practice of editing and reviews of new editions. In addition to this material, Scholarly Editing offers new, innovative content: the journal is among the first—if not *the* first—to publish peer-reviewed editions of primary source materials of cultural significance. We are pleased not only to present editors with a rigorously peer-reviewed publication platform, but also to share fascinating documents from cultural history with the reading public. All of this material is available freely online and is completely open-access.

Sincerely,
Amanda Gailey and Andrew Jewell, editors

Contents for the 2012 issue:

Introduction:

• “Introduction to the First Issue of Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing” by Amanda Gailey (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) and Andrew Jewell (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)

Editions:

• “The Inscription of Walt Whitman’s ‘Live Oak, with Moss’ Sequence: A Restorative Edition” edited by Steven Olsen-Smith (Boise State University)
• “Selection from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: A Digital Critical Edition: ‘Topsy’” edited by Wesley Raabe (Kent State University) and Les Harrison (Virginia Commonwealth University)
• “‘The Firstling/Erstling/He Complex’ by Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven” edited by Tanya Clement (University of Texas, Austin) and Gaby Divay (University of Manitoba)

Essays:

• “Musical Works, Musical Texts, and Musical Editions: A Brief Overview” by Ronald Broude (The Broude Trust)
• “A ‘Succession of Little Occurrences’: Scholarly Editing and the Organization of Time in John Tanner’s Narrative” by John Fierst (Central Michigan University)
• “The Common Pot: Editing Native American Materials” by Paul Grant-Costa (Yale University), Tobias Glaza (Yale University), and Michael Sletcher (Yale University)
• “Documentary Editing in the New Scholarly Ecosystem” (Presidential Address, Association for Documentary Editing Annual Meeting, Salt Lake City, Utah, 2011) by Susan H. Perdue (University of Virginia)

Reviews:

• The Having of Negroes Is Become a Burden: The Quaker Struggle to Free Slaves in Revolutionary North Carolina By Michael J. Crawford. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010. Reviewed by Donna E. Kelly (North Carolina Office of Archives and History)
• Reminiscences & Traditions of Boston. By Hannah Mather Crocker. Edited by Eileen Hunt Botting and Sarah L. Houser. New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2011. Reviewed by Beverly Wilson Palmer (Pomona College)
• Recent Editions. Compiled by W. Bland Whitley, Reviews Editor (Princeton University)

William G. Thomas’s “The Iron Way: Railroads, the Civil War, and the Making of Modern America” (Yale) was selected as a finalist for the 2012 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. The book, an outgrowth of the “Railroads and the Making of Modern America” digital archive project, “illuminates the critical impact of railroad construction, railroad management and the boost railroads provided to regional development during and after the Civil War era.” Read more here.

Will Thomas, John and Catherine Angle Professor in the Humanities and Chair of History at UNL, wrote an article on slavery and the railroads for the New York Times. You can read the full article here.

On Feb. 1, 2012 Dr. Robert Cargill, Assistant Professor of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Iowa, will present a digital model of the archaeological site of Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. Cargill will guide the audience through the site using digital “fly through” technology, enabling the audience to get “up close and personal” with Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Full information can be found at the Classics and Religious Studies site.

CDRH Faculty Fellow Doug Seefeldt will share some of the findings from “Mapping Buffalo Bill’s Great Plains,” a digital history research project that examines and displays multiple perspectives on Great Plains history via the lens of the early life and times of William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody. This event will be at 3:30pm on Jan. 18, 2012 in the Center for Great Plains Studies, 1155 Q St., Lincoln, NE. For complete details visit here.

Linguists and others interested in more in-depth information about the Omaha language may view the working database behind the Omaha Ponca Digital Dictionary.

Brian Pytlik Zillig and Stephen Ramsay of the CDRH recently received an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant to further their work on textual analysis through a program called Abbot. You can read the full announcement from UNL communications here.