Pedagogies of Scholarly Editing and Digital History in the Seward Family Digital Archive

Abstract

Those of us who transform primary materials into digital editions and archives understand that our work products communicate and contribute to a wider scholarly ecosystem; moreover, the act of producing published archival artifacts serves as its own form of internal knowledge production and incremental guide for future work. When digital initiatives are deeply informed by the minds and labor of undergraduate students, however, the dialogic interchange between pedagogy, methodology, and discourse is both intensely rewarding and occasionally daunting. Such is the case for the Seward Family Digital Archive. Indeed, its example promotes a unique model for several elds, including scholarly editing, public history, pedagogy, and digital humanities. Overview and HistoryThe Seward Family Digital Archive consists of letters, journals, and paper ephemera of the William Henry and Frances Seward family; it can be accessed publicly at sewardproject.org. 1 Since the project's inception in 2013, the work of documentary editing has bene ted from the robust collaborative support of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, archivists, and librarians. Likewise, the Seward Family Digital Archive's principal investigator, Dr. Thomas Slaughter, is also the professor of a series of courses that integrate transcription, annotation, editing, and markup in XML using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) as part of the course's assigned material. 2 Through grant funding, the project managers are able to pay about a dozen undergraduate and graduate students to work ten months of the year on all facets of documentary editing. Students on the Seward Project are essential members of the team and take part in drafting project documentation, performing transcription, annotation, and editing, and advising on the future directions of the project. Consequently, student agency and direct involvement through pedagogical coursework and employment in the project have gured centrally in the Seward Family Digital Archive since its commencement. 3 Importantly, in this work, students both gain exposure to the intersecting elds of scholarly editing and digital history, and give back to the scholarly and methodological discourses that support this archival achievement.The University of Rochester's Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation Department (RBSCP) houses the physical papers featured in the digital archive, and the work of digitizing, collating, and handling the manuscripts is undertaken in close collaboration with archivists and librarians. The manuscript material spans major events in American history from about 1817 to 1920, in which Seward and his family were at the forefront. They include land purchases in western New York, the abolition movement in upstate New York, the 1860 presidential election, the Civil War, the assassination of President Lincoln and attempted assassination of Seward himself, and Reconstruction. Vital social concerns, such as woman's su rage, prison reform, medicine and health, family life, childrearing practices...