Editorial Practices
1. Project Goals and Significance
Verses and Fragments: The James L.
Dusenbery Journal (1841–1842) is a joint project of
Documenting the American South (DocSouth)
[1] and Professor Erika Lindemann. It draws on DocSouth's
expertise in digitization, Web architecture and design, electronic publishing, and
long-term preservation of digital assets. In creating this digital scholarly edition, we
had four principal goals:
- To present an accurate, reliable text of the entire Dusenbery journal, with notes that explain whatever information would be
unfamiliar to modern readers.
- To provide users open access to a collection of documents, sound files, and images
for understanding the college experience and the literate practices of white southern
males attending an antebellum university.
- To gain a better understanding of what a scholarly edition can be in a digital
environment.
- To explore standards for creating and presenting a complex, multimedia scholarly
apparatus for such a scholarly edition.
James Lawrence Dusenbery was not "famous" in the
ways that our culture assigns such prominence. He also may not have been a "typical"
college student during the antebellum period. Nevertheless, like many students today he
enjoyed his senior year at the University of North Carolina
(UNC). He appreciated his friends; enjoyed sports, music, and dance; and
despite an active social life, completed his studies successfully, received his medical
degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and spent the rest of his life as a
physician in Lexington, North Carolina. His was an ordinary upper-class life. A digital
environment has the power to contextualize and fully document this ordinary life,
proving, as Nell Sigmon put it, "You don't have to be famous for your life to be
history."
[2] Though
Dusenbery's journal forms the heart of this site, it is enriched by
thoughtfully selected supporting materials that explain who his family was, explore his
taste in literature and music, describe antebellum student life at UNC, chart the
activities of the debating societies to which every student belonged, and detail how
mid-nineteenth-century physicians such as James and his brother
Fayette received their professional training. These
materials deepen our understanding of the ways in which the culture of the antebellum
South, including its educational institutions, shaped such young men.
Verses and Fragments extends work begun with the digital
publication of another DocSouth collection,
True and Candid
Compositions (
http://docsouth.unc.edu/true/), which makes available the work of
white males attending college in the antebellum South. The voices of students are almost
never heard in traditional histories of American higher education. As John Brereton
observes, "the lack of [student] papers in the histories is something of a scandal; . .
. it seems crucial to know what students were writing, what examples of student prose
nineteenth-century scholars and administrators were discussing, and how the writing
itself was represented to contemporary eyes" (
The Origins of
Composition Studies in the American College, 1875–1925, xv).
Dusenbery's journal represents an important primary source
for understanding the college experience from the perspective of a native North
Carolinian living in the antebellum period.
Dusenbery's life, as explicated through the
journal and its scholarly apparatus, also illuminates the role that UNC, the state's and
the nation's first public university, played during this important period. Enrolling its
first graduating class in 1795, the institution became the
fourth largest college in America on the eve of the Civil War. Most of its students were from North Carolina and represented
families of farmers, planters, politicians, educators, and religious leaders important
to the growth and development of the state.
Dusenbery himself was the son of a planter who owned 23 slaves. While he
returned to Lexington, North Carolina, after earning his medical degree, other students
mentioned in his journal participated in the great migration westward before and after
the Civil War. Still others, including
Dusenbery's brother
Fayette, lost their lives in that conflict.
Verses and Fragments also contributes to the study of private
and public literacy and to an understanding of how literary and musical canons are
formed. In addition to
Dusenbery's journal, the
site includes his academic papers and those of his brothers as well as Dialectic Society
library circulation records for these young men. As someone who appreciated poetry,
Dusenbery provided substantial evidence for the
reading habits of an antebellum young man, copying into the front half of his journal 27
poems and popular song lyrics as well as descriptions of major characters in Sir
Walter Scott's
Lady of the Lake. These pages give insights into
Dusenbery's literary and musical tastes and
testify to the transatlantic appeal of popular Romantic writers such as Felicia Hemans, Byron,
and Scott as well as writers less well known. For
Dusenbery these poems were contemporary works of
literature. He did not encounter them in college courses but rather through his reading
in the library amassed by the Dialectic Society.
Though many of the poets are familiar, the popular song lyrics preserved in the pages of
Dusenbery's journal are largely unknown to a
contemporary audience. One of the project's goals has been to highlight some of the
music of the period for which sheet music survives.
Dusenbery's journal, then, provides multiple
opportunities to extend his text by creating a multimedia scholarly apparatus that, when
combined with interpretive essays, illuminates the academic and social forces that
shaped his world. The journal is a valuable source of information for those interested
in antebellum culture and the day-to-day events that ordinarily fall through the cracks
of history. Edward L. Ayers, southern historian and one of the pioneers of digital
libraries, points out that new forms of digitization and spatial display enable scholars
and students alike to "see things that are invisible otherwise" (
The
Chronicle of Higher Education, 10 November 2006: 33). Visitors to this site can
both see and hear a slice of nineteenth-century American history. All of the materials
are accompanied by scholarly annotations, biographies, and essays that provide an
analytical framework for the site and forge connections between the disparate materials
(and disciplines) represented. As a fully realized, searchable, multimedia, scholarly
edition of
Dusenbery's journal,
Verses and Fragments presents manuscript materials, digital images, songs,
artifacts, maps, published documents, court and judicial records, and important related
resources drawn from a variety of repositories, especially the University Library's
special collections; the North Carolina State Archives; North Carolina public libraries;
and the private collection of a family descendant, Colonel William B. Hankins, Jr.
2. Selection Criteria
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In 2006, when this project was initiated, the University of
North Carolina's Southern Historical Collection housed 12 journals written
by antebellum students. They are all described in online
finding aids, publicly
accessible. Prior to this project,
none of the journals had been published in its entirety. In evaluating these journals
for possible inclusion in this project, five criteria were most significant.
- The journal had to be written by a student attending UNC during the antebellum
period. Student writing of this period had been the focus of the True and Candid Compositions site, but most of the documents selected for that
project were relatively short. An antebellum student's journal, we hoped, would
provide a more extensive view of college life for white males in a southern
university, a sparsely covered topic in historical discussions of intellectual life in
the region. Moreover, a journal would allow us to address the editorial and
technological challenges involved in preparing a longer, more complex document for
digital publication.
- The journal had to be an original document, not a photographic copy. We sought an
original autograph manuscript that could be transcribed accurately and
reliably.
- The journal had to be largely complete, the original document showing no
significant amounts of missing or damaged text. Though loose bindings, detached and
torn pages, fragile paper, and faded ink are typical conservation issues for these
documents, the journal selected for this project needed to be substantially complete,
readable, and able to be scanned and transcribed if handled carefully.
- The journal had to cover a sufficient period of time, ideally nine months or more,
to permit following students through a two-semester academic year, including
vacations. We sought a sustained account of college life, developed over a significant
period of time.
- The journal had to present specific details about the student's academic work and
social life. It was also desirable that the journal provide sufficient information
about what the student was reading to judge the writer's literary preferences. The
journal also needed to be engaging, giving evidence that the writer cared about the
experiences he was recording and came across as a student we might enjoy
meeting.
Three journals satisfied all five criteria.
Dusenbery's contemporary,
William S. Mullins (BA 1842), showed a keen
interest in sustaining the relationships he cultivated with fellow students, especially
members of his debating society.
Edmund D. Covington (BA 1844), on the other hand,
considered his journal a repository for comments on his reading and for drafts of his
own compositions.
Dusenbery's journal was selected
because it seemed to combine the virtues of the other two.
Dusenbery (BA 1842) clearly valued his relationships with classmates but
also provided, as no other student writer of the period did, a substantial insight into
his literary preferences by copying poems and song lyrics into the pages of his
journal.
The manuscript is further discussed in the
About the Dusenbery Journal section of the site.
Having chosen
Dusenbery's journal as the source
text, we then sought media and materials that might enhance a reader's understanding of
Dusenbery's work and his world. These materials
were selected with two questions in mind. The first question was, "What information was
known to
Dusenbery that visitors to the site might
not know now?" The majority of the images, documents, sound files, maps, and other
materials used to enrich the site respond to this question. Obviously,
Dusenbery knew well the members of his family, but we do
not. Investigating his family background uncovered a diversity of genealogical resources
(including a living descendant) that helped us build a "module" on the
Dusenbery family for the site.
Dusenbery also would have taken for granted the activities of the campus
debating societies and other routines of college life; the site presents two collections
of documents and other materials that explain what it was like to be a UNC student in
the 1840s; they can be found under the "His World" tab and are titled Student Life and
Debating Societies.
The second question we asked of the journal was, "What do we know now that Dusenbery
could not have known?" Answering this question can illuminate the outcome of certain
events, highlight the significance of the topics Dusenbery addressed, and place the
journal in broader contexts than Dusenbery could have understood at the time. For
example, Dusenbery could not have appreciated how devastating the Civil War would be for him and his classmates,
or how significantly the practice of medicine, his profession, would change during his
lifetime. He also could not have known that the contemporary (for him) authors he
admired would one day take their place in the canons of British and American literature.
To address such issues, the site includes several interpretive essays together with
images and sound files that explicate larger cultural movements in medicine, literature,
and music. These modules take us into Dusenbery's world even as they deepen our
understanding of how we got from "there" to "here."
In addition to 150 page images of the journal, then, Verses and
Fragments includes, under the tab "His World," six interpretive essays, together
with additional images and documents, focused on six topics: Family, Student Life,
Debating Societies, Literature, Music, and Medicine. A tab labeled "Documents" provides
37 additional primary sources in four categories: Family Papers (14), Student
Compositions (6), Debating Society Documents (7), Faculty Documents (2), and
Commencement Documents (18).
The possibilities for constructing a digital scholarly apparatus cover not only a broad
range of topics but also multiple media, including text, photographic and digital
images, sound files, graphics, and recorded presentations. Furthermore, users interact
with these media in increasingly complex ways, choosing not only which information to
access in what ways but also how to "read" one medium against another. Inventing,
organizing, and shaping text, audio, and images purposefully is a craft or art whose
principles are still being written. The goal for this edition, however, was to identify
and elaborate on opportunities that
Dusenbery's
journal and digital media present for deepening our understanding of the words of his
text. We are fortunate that
Dusenbery left many
"hooks" in his account of his senior year on which to hang a rich selection of
supplementary material.
3. Editorial Goals
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The primary purpose of this electronic edition of
James
Dusenbery's journal is to present a text that is easy to read,
intelligible, and as faithful as possible to the original. Because
Dusenbery's journal and its ancillary materials are based
primarily on documents written by students, they offer a model and a method for editing
such materials. Student writing, regardless of its subject matter, presents unique
problems for an editor. Unconventional spelling and punctuation and frequent revision
sometimes make determining an author's final intention troublesome. Devising the best
way to present such materials challenges even experienced editors. By explicitly
describing how these documents were prepared for electronic publication, we wish to
assure readers that the evidence of the edited texts is reliable and to share with
others procedures that might be useful in editing the unpublished writing of other
students.
Most of the documents presented here appear both as a digitized image and as an edited
text. The digitized images preserve most of the details of the documents and appear in
parallel with and just to the left of the edited text. For each page of the journal, a
600 dpi uncompressed TIFF file was created, and the TIFF images were then saved as JPEG
2000 images at 600 dpi for Web access. For ancillary documents, 400 dpi uncompressed
TIFF files were created and then saved as JPEG 2000 images at 400 dpi. The images serve
as a useful counterpart to the edited text but can be difficult to read, primarily
because the original manuscripts are written in different hands or have faded over
time.
Each document is presented in what is known as a diplomatic edition. A diplomatic
edition provides a readable text that is optimally reliable. A diplomatic edition
attempts to preserve not only the author's wording, but also the spelling, punctuation,
capitalization, page breaks, deletions, and insertions appearing in the original. Though
the transcription of the journal preserves line breaks, they are not preserved in
ancillary documents. Other details, such as drawings, flourishes accompanying
signatures, and alignment in some tables also are lost. However, readers can consult the
digitized page image for such features. The page images also can be enlarged to capture
other details of the document and corroborate the transcription. The edited texts
presented here, then, retain most of the characteristics of the originals without
requiring readers to become experts in nineteenth-century handwriting or in the
specialized editorial symbols used in scholarly editing.
4. Transcriptions
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All documents have been transcribed using a modification of the system of notation
developed for the
Mark Twain Letters [ed. Edgar Marquess Branch,
Michael B. Frank, and Kenneth M. Sanderson (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1987– )]. This system results in what the editors of Twain's letters call "plain text"
and depends as much as possible on "familiar conventions of both handwriting and
typography in order to transcribe what has tended to be problematic, or else simply
ignored, in more traditional kinds of transcription" (1:xxvi). Because the documents
included here are neither as numerous nor as complex as Twain's letters, it has been
unnecessary to use all of the features devised for the Twain project. Some elements of
the system were modified without compromising either the reliability or readability of
the edited documents. Moreover, because the
Dusenbery journal and some of the ancillary documents represent student
writing, some of it intended for oral presentation, the system appears ideally suited
for transcribing material that contains several kinds of errors, unusual ways of
presenting a text, and evidence of hasty composition.
A form of diplomatic transcription, plain text uses no angle brackets, arrows, or many
of the other conventional symbols of traditional editing. It also avoids using carets by
simply super- or subscripting insertions, whether or not the writer marked them with a
caret. Most traditional devices for transcribing a text can now be imitated in type,
making edited documents easier to read because the text appears as type-identical with a
handwritten counterpart. With plain text, readers are able to focus primarily on the
page before them. They do not need to keep in mind a complex translation table for
editorial symbols that says, "Arrows indicate material written above or below the base
line" or "Angle brackets represent words that have been deleted" (though they obviously
appear in the edited text). The edited text simply enacts that these conventions.
Typographical conventions that have more or less exact equivalents in manuscript are
large and small capital letters, a line through crossed-out material of one or more
characters, single and double underscoring (used whether the original underscoring is in
straight or wavy lines), and super- or subscripted characters for one or more characters
written above or below the line.
The transcribed journal preserves original lineation, but in documents included among
ancillary materials, line breaks are lost, though they can be confirmed by consulting
the digitized image. Also not preserved are false starts of less than one character,
catchwords, flourishes appearing with signatures, and most end-of-line hyphens. The
transcription of the journal preserves double hyphenation (a hyphen at the end of one
line and another at the beginning of the next), but hyphens occurring at the ends of
lines in other documents have been removed, and the trailing part of a word has been
joined to the preceding line. By convention, the solidus (/) indicates line breaks in
addresses, inscriptions, or endorsements discussed in endnotes.
Transcriptions preserve dittography, shorthand ("&c." for example), the repetition
of words or punctuation, and occasional apostrophes that appear on the line rather than
above it. Authorial revisions and self-corrections are transcribed where they occur in
the manuscript; however, words and characters superimposed on each other are transcribed
to reflect the writer's presumed final intention, with an endnote describing the
emendation. The paragraphing of prose and poetry is preserved but emended to appear
flush left, without indentation. Whenever a sentence ends at the right margin and the
next sentence begins flush with the left margin, the transcription continues without a
paragraph break, even though the sense of the material might have prompted the writer to
begin a new paragraph.
The writers of these documents punctuate the ends of declarative sentences in four
ways. Some use a conventional period, though the next sentence may begin with either a
capital or small letter. A few authors end grammatical sentences with commas. In both
cases, the transcription retains the writer's punctuation and capitalization, leaving
one space between the period or comma and the beginning of the next sentence. Other
writers end sentences with a period and a dash; the transcription preserves this
convention by rendering the original dash as an en dash, regardless of how long a dash
appears in the original manuscript, and leaving one space between the dash and the
beginning of the next sentence. A fourth kind of terminal punctuation for declarative
sentences omits the period altogether and uses a dash instead. Such dashes are
transcribed as em dashes, with no space between the dash and the beginning of the next
sentence.
To insure the reliability of all transcriptions, the word-processed typescript of each
document was visually collated twice with a photocopy of the original. Several months
later the typescript was visually collated a third time against the original document,
or when original documents were not available, against a photocopied or microfilmed
source. Subsequently, as part of the process of encoding the typescript for publication
on the Documenting the American South Web site, the project
coordinator and a research assistant, working independently, visually collated the
typescript and the digitized images of each original source. They then exchanged sets of
encoded documents and verified each other's work, visually collating the encoded
document and its digitized image. Finally, the project coordinator and a research
assistant, working indpendently, visually collated the online transcription and the page
image.
5. Emendations
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The documents have been emended as little as possible both to avoid introducing errors
or ambiguities that are not in the originals and to provide readers with an experience
reading the edited documents that is comparable to reading the original manuscripts. For
this reason, authorial errors are not emended when they can be transcribed. Some errors,
superimposed characters or words for example, are emended, but endnotes explain the
emendation. Occasionally it has been necessary to insert a word in brackets where the
writer has inadvertently omitted something. Such interpolations appear where they seem
absolutely necessary to make sense of the text and are used sparingly. Damaged texts
also are emended in brackets where it has been possible to reconstruct words from such
evidence as fragments of original characters, syntax and grammatical context, and the
writer's habits of spelling, punctuation, and word choice.
When damaged originals offer insufficient clues for restoring missing or illegible
words, the edited document shows [unrecovered]. The word [unrecovered] may signify
several kinds of difficulties in transcribing the original: a hole or tear in the
manuscript, a blob of ink or smear over a word, or an inability to decipher what has
been written. The word [unrecovered] denotes illegible characters or words that the
author has struck through. Though using [unrecovered] and [unrecovered] obscures how
much material may be missing or illegible, documents included in this collection show
only infrequent damage, and most readers will be able to gain the gist of a sentence
from the surrounding context or by consulting the digitized image.
The format of original documents has not been emended. The placement of titles,
salutations, headings, signatures, and datelines resembles as closely as possible their
position on the original page. The paragraphing of prose and poetry is preserved but
emended to appear flush left, without indentation.
Brackets appearing in the edited documents and headings always indicate editorial
intervention. They may indicate [unrecovered] material, reconstructed and interpolated
words, emendations in nonoriginal copy-texts, and material that the editor has excerpted
[. . .]. They also are used to identify briefly people and places that do not need to be
explained in an endnote. Though
Dusenbery
customarily dated each journal entry at the end, bracketed dates appear flush left at
the beginning of the entry so that readers can orient themselves to each new entry.
6. Annotations
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Consistent with TEI guidelines, each edited document is preceded by editorial and
publication information in a section called "About this e-edition." Clicking on this
header provides details about the author, editor, project funder, transcriber, and who
scanned, encoded, and published the document. The header also identifies the source of
the document; its title, author, and date; and how many pages and page images appear on
the site. Encoding information is also provided. A second header, "XML Source," presents
the source code for the document.
All documents are annotated by means of endnotes. For many documents, the first endnote
following the document also provides information about its source, but it may include
other information as well. It may include a physical description of the document,
particularly if it appears in a bound volume or is damaged or otherwise unusual; it may
describe endorsements (such as "Senior speech") that appear on the document; if
necessary, the note discusses difficulties in dating or transcribing the document.
Biographical information for a person whose name appears in an edited document can be
retrieved by clicking on the name. These pop-up biographies provide information for over
300 individuals mentioned on this site. Unless otherwise indicated by parenthetical
documentation in the biographical note, biographical information for University of North Carolina students and faculty members
is drawn from four published sources: Kemp Plummer Battle,
History of
the University of North Carolina, 2 vols., 1912 (Spartanburg, SC: The Reprint
Company, 1974); Daniel Lindsey Grant,
Alumni History of the
University of North Carolina, 2d ed. (Durham, NC: General Alumni Association of
the University of North Carolina, 1924); Weeks, Stephen B., ed.,
Register of Members of the Philanthropic Society, Instituted in the University of
North Carolina, August 1st, 1795 (Raleigh: Edwards, Broughton, 1887); and
A Catalogue of the Members of the Dialectic Society (Baltimore:
Isaac Friedenwald, 1890). Another significant source of biographical information is
William S. Powell, ed.,
Dictionary of North Carolina Biography,
6 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979–96). Biographical
information for members of the
Dusenbery family
derives primarily from census and estates records, tombstones, obituaries, marriage
bonds, and two published sources: Henry Dusenbery and Jean Porcaro,
The Dusenbery Story (Orem, UT: n.p., 1989) and William B. Hankins, Jr., "Samuel
B. Dusenberry and Some of His Descendants,"
The Heritage of Rowan
County, North Carolina, Vol. 1, ed. Katherine Sanford Petrucelli (Salisbury, NC:
Genealogical Soc. of Rowan County, 1991): 309–310. These and other biographical sources
are listed in the site's bibliography, located under the "About" tab.
In addition to source notes and biographical notes, other notes provide readers with
reasonable help in understanding the material without overwhelming them with excessive
detail. The annotations are of two types, depending on their relationship to the edited
document: editorial notes and informational notes. Editorial notes describe features of
the original document that cannot be transcribed conveniently. For example, if
characters or words have been superimposed, a note will indicate that fact. Editorial
endnotes also may describe drawings that are part of original documents, writing in a
second hand, the location of endorsements, and damage to original documents.
Informational notes identify terms, people, places, and events known to the writer of
the original document but perhaps obscure to a modern reader. Not annotated, however,
are terms, people, places, and events that can be found in a standard desk dictionary or
a desk encyclopedia such as The New Columbia Encyclopedia.
Informational notes provide translations for foreign phrases and college slang and give
sources for quotations when it was possible to locate them. (Students of this period
generally did not cite their sources, nor did faculty members appear to expect them to.)
Informational notes also furnish publication information for books mentioned in the
documents; such notes cite the year in which the book first was published. Brief
informational notes—a first name, a single word, or a short phrase—appear in
brackets in the edited text.
Notes
^1. Documenting the American
South is an open-access, digital publishing program developed in 1996. Initiated and maintained by the University Libraries,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
DocSouth is part of the Digital Publishing Group of the Carolina Digital Library and
Archives.
^2. Jacqueline Dowd Hall, interview with Nell Putnam Sigmon, 13 December 1979 (H-143),
Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill.
