CFP: Association for Documentary Editing: Representation and Recovery

Well-funded digital archives have energized the field of documentary and scholarly editing, yet the recovery of content by women, Indigenous people, Black people, People of Color, and other underrepresented groups has suffered setbacks since the 1990s. For editing and other communities, the recovery of marginalized voices was long hampered by funding sources that focused interest on well-known and canonical historical figures. And even though the interests of funding organizations have shifted in the context of changing technologies and constituencies, the field has been slow to respond. Increasingly, however, new funding sources and technologies are enabling documentary editors, textual scholars, historians and other interdisciplinary scholars, educators, genealogists, family historians, students, librarians, archivists, church historians and other community groups to bring marginalized voices and artifacts to light.

The ADE Program Committee solicits presentations for panels and individual papers on recovery broadly, including efforts of small-scale projects; rare or marginal texts; texts and artifacts produced by women, Indigenous people, Black people, People of Color and other marginalized groups; texts that dislodge the single author model; the exploration of the ways in which scholarly editions, archives, and pedagogical recovery projects can avoid reproducing colonization/marginalization; the ways in which editors can offer context to historically famous figures to avoid placing them on a pedestal; and the role that new technologies, social media environments, editorial institutes, and community groups play in advancing these objectives. We welcome projects and individuals in all disciplines and at any stage of their career, as well as those who engage in public history and advancing knowledge beyond the academy.

Please submit inquiries and 300-word abstracts and brief bio(s) to Noelle Baker (noelle.baker@me.com) by 1 March 2021.

Potential topics include but are not limited to:

• Initiatives to support peer review of and recovery work by marginalized figures
• Editing and minimal computing in the Global South
• Community recovery work
• Teaching with recovered materials in K-12 classrooms
• Digital technologies, accessibility, and the broadening/democratizing of knowledge
• Recovering hidden voices and stories through their interactions with canonical figures
• Editors’ responsibility to engage with emerging scholarship adjacent to their figures
• Decolonializing archives, records, and editions (including but not restricted to metadata, bibliographies, and indexing) for the discoverability of marginalized and underrepresented groups
• Challenges and strategies in placing historic (and imperfect) figures in context in 2021
• Editorial institutes and expansive definition(s) of what constitutes digital recovery
• Editorial treatment of understudied documents for which encoding is scholarship
• Pedagogical experiments with micro editions and recovery
• Teaching an imperfect past in 2021
• Decolonialized approaches to recovery
• Social editions, new platforms, and more democratic models of recovery
• Creating discoverability for underrepresented individuals via county/state sheriffs’ records, professional licensing records, store ledgers, and other related records