Last month I attended the Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents in Lincoln, Nebraska.  The Institute or “camp edit” was a five day workshop funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission and administered by the Association for Documentary Editing.   At the camp, I had the opportunity to meet librarians, archivists, professors, and historians who are also annotating and transcribing historical documents and working on digital history projects.

Camp Edit

At the institute, I learned about the best practices for writing transcriptions and annotations and received further training in TEI (text encoding initiative), the markup language we are using to encode the political cartoons for the Historic Images, New Technologies (HINT) project.   I also got to attend a special session on using social media to promote digital projects and exhibits.

My favorite part of camp edit was learning about the digital projects that my colleagues are working on.  At camp edit we took turns giving ten minute “project spotlight presentations” where we outlined the basic goals of our projects, as well as, discussed the tools, resources, and technologies that we are using to build them.  Most importantly, we talked about the challenges we are facing and together came up with possible solutions.

At the conclusion of the camp edit we participated in a graduation ceremony and received a wonderful diploma.

Camp edit graduation diploma

At the end of the five day workshop, I decided to remain in Lincoln a few more days in order to attend the Association for Documentary Editing and Society for Textual Scholarship (ADE/STS) 2015 Joint Conference.  At the conference, I presented a poster about the HINT project.  Attendees at the poster session were quite interested in learning more about HSP’s new open source image viewer and how we used TEI to markup images. 

In conclusion, the Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents and the ADE/STS 2015 Joint Conference were truly valuable professional experiences for me.  I encourage anyone new to the practice of editing historical documents to apply to next year’s camp edit! And remember to check out our digital exhibit, Politics in Graphic Detail, when it becomes available later this year.