Description: I am requesting a UPREP student for Spring 2021 to help me edit Seventeenth-Century News. Working on this project would help the student gain valuable practical experience as a magazine or journal editor, while helping me substantially with my research.

Student Involvement: Seventeenth-Century News is a book review journal sponsored by the Milton Society of America, though it seeks to keep its international readership abreast of the best new scholarship in all fields of seventeenth-century studies—art, history, literature, including continental and American, music, and philosophy. Reviews run usually about one thousand words. Seventeenth-Century News is now published digitally. My editorial assistant would help edit reviews to make them conform to our house style as well as conduct regular correspondence with contributors. The student would also assist me in laying out the issue with InDesign and then uploading the issue to the Texas Digital Libraries site. He or she would gain invaluable practical experience.

As time allows, the student would also help me work on the Oxford edition of the Prose Letters of John Donne. A student assistant who would like to learn something about scholarly editing could (1) help me establish the copy-text and verify it against the first printed editions, and (2) help track down material in the library for notes and annotations.

Required Skills & Interest: Basic computer skills are required, such as familiarity with Microsoft Word. Knowledge of InDesign would be helpful. This is an opportunity for a student to learn—through hands-on experience—about editing.

Benefits to Student & Faculty: The student would learn about copy-editing, laying out the issue with InDesign, and uploading to the Texas Digital Libraries site. He or she would gain invaluable practical experience. The student would also learn something about scholarly editing.

In the past seven years, all of my former UPREPs have found employment as editors or technical writers in part through the experience gained with me.

Description: The editing of and TEI/XML markup application to Jean Toomer's Cane is the centerpiece of the third chapter, "Marking Race in Jean Toomer’s Cane: TEI and the structures of Textual Knowledge," of my current book project, "Can a Computer Be Racist?: Digital Humanities and the Infrastructures of Race in African-American Literature." 

One of the cornerstones of digital textual preservation in the digital humanities has been the creation of TEI/XML, the preferred metadata structure of literary and historical texts. Metadata application to literary texts, by now a technique with a long history in digital editing and literary study, is primarily structural, with the ability to follow patterns through a text in ways that are not easily seen by the reader. This chapter examines the structures produced and reproduced by the application of TEI/XML to Jean Toomer’s Cane, a significant text for scholars of African-American literature. Our understanding of Toomer’s representation of race is vexed by critical disagreement ranging from scholars who celebrate Toomer’s rich portrayals of early 20th-century Southern African-American life to scholars, such as Henry Louis Gates and Rudolph P. Byrd, who argue that Cane demonstrates that Toomer “was a Negro who decided to pass for white.” At the same time the book, one of our finest examples of a modernist text, is often pigeonholed into African-American literature and erased from scholarly discussions of the high modern (white) Americanists, writers such as T.S. Eliot and William Faulkner. 

Unique to this project, I will use metadata applied to representations of race that will allow scholars to see Toomer’s use of racial identities in all their complexity. For example, in the novel’s chapter “Fern,” Fern is described as multiple races, from having a nose that looks Jewish, to skin tones of whiteness, to underlying black features. Toomer’s refusal to settle on one racial description highlights his resistance to understanding blackness as a singular category. Critics have noted that none of the short vignettes included in Cane represent a stark division of black and white. Instead, Toomer weaves subtle markers of color throughout his descriptions, leaving the reader to understand that the lingering effects of the “one drop” rule of race, where one drop of black blood legally constructs the individual as black, plays out in far more complicated ways than often considered. By marking each instance of racial representation and “coloration” in the text, then using visualization software to show how various formations of race and color play out through the text, we will be able to better understand Toomer’s complex work and, by extension, reveal the way that such techniques will be of use to scholars studying the representation of race in literature.

While we have some digital texts of Cane, none are accurate. The UPREP will assist in the transcription and editing of the volume, which will then serve as a testbed for TEI/XML.

Student Involvement: The student will work with the faculty member to edit the text. The student will help to OCR the text (apply computer technology to transform the image to text). OCR is is not fully accurate and will need to be checked once the process is complete. The student will learn to edit the text and apply basic TEI/XML, a standard humanities markup language, to select chapters.

Required Skills & Interest: No prior skills are necessary.

Benefits to Student & Faculty: Students interested in editing and digital publication will learn useful skills including using technology to assist in copyediting. In addition, the student will learn the use of XML in editing and digital humanities projects. Working with a student will allow me to move the corresponding chapter of my book forward.