Managing a Short -Term Graduate Level Text Encoding Project

This poster presentation will demonstrate not only the development of a digital scholarly edition of a mid-nineteenth-century social reform pamphlet, but also the successful management of a short-term encoding project at the graduate studies level.
The period between 1830 and 1860 saw a dramatic
increase in the production of social reform texts in
Britain. The question of how to alleviate the suffering of the labouring classes was explored in novels, poetry, pamphlets, and letters. While excellent collections of
literary and non-literary social reform texts exist, what is lacking is a comprehensive research database of social
reform writing that will make lesser-known non-literary texts available to scholars. I am currently creating a
digital scholarly edition of one such text for my master’s thesis. This electronic textual editing project is the first
in a proposed series of editorial projects that will make non-literary social reform texts available in digital form.
My master’s thesis involves both editorial practice and literary analysis. The editorial project will culminate in the creation of a digital scholarly edition of “Slaves of the Needle,” a pamphlet written by Ralph Barnes Grindrod
in 1844. “Slaves of the Needle” is representative of
mid-nineteenth century British social reform rhetoric. Creation of the digital scholarly edition will involve
encoding the pamphlet’s structural features and using interpretive markup to identify the text’s rhetorical
patterns.
The second focus of my master’s thesis is an analysis of the depiction of seamstresses in nineteenth-century
British literature. The results of this analysis will be
included in the digital edition of “Slaves of the Needle.”
Once completed, the digital scholarly edition will
illustrate prevailing concerns about the labour conditions of female garment workers in mid-nineteenth century England. In the future, the digital edition of “Slaves of the Needle” will be part of a body of work concerning mid-nineteenth century social reform texts.
This project faces two challenges. The first challenge
is posed by the text itself. The pamphlet includes a
number of different types of text, such as letters, poetry, and eyewitness accounts, each with its own encoding difficulties. Before I begin creating the digital edition, I must research existing electronic textual editing projects and determine what methodology I will use. Because I will be using an interpretive markup scheme, I must
decide which features I will identify and how I will classify
rhetorical figures.
Creating a digital scholarly edition is an ambitious project. In this case, the project is made all the more challenging
by the temporal limitations of a master’s program.
Estimated time from the project’s inception to its completion
is nine months. As opportunities for graduate-level
digital humanities projects increase, students and
advisors will be faced with the task of managing this kind
of short-term encoding project. This poster presentation will show the digital scholarly edition in progress and discuss the project management process.