Staff Matters: Inside the Center for Digital Editing

These days there’s more to the Corner than shopping and dining; it’s home to the College’s state-of-the-art array of initiatives and resources in the digital humanities. Two doors down from the corner of University and Elliewood Avenue, just above Raising Cane’s, the seven-member staff of the Center for Digital Editing, under the leadership of director Jennifer Stertzer, is advancing the art of documentary editing, weaving together historical documents, images and data in digital environments that make historical research easier and more accessible for everyone.

The Center hosts over twenty projects in the digital humanities from the Woodson Institute’s Papers of Julian Bond to the North American Climate History Project, the Chinese American WWII Digital Resource and the Archive and the Naval Documents of the American Revolution, supporting scholars on Grounds and off and communities that benefit from access to information that was once out of reach for many.

“We take primary sources and make them available to researchers, anything from letters to ledger books,” explained Erica Cavanaugh, the Center’s web and project developer who manages the technological aspects of the Center’s projects.

Cavanaugh builds and maintains the Center’s sites and other digital resources and troubleshoots technical problems, including managing performance and security for the sites as well as their sustainability and accessibility.

“Every single project that we have, I touch in some capacity,” said Cavanaugh, a UVA graduate with degrees in history and art history, Cavanaugh, who is also an assistant rugby coach for the UVA women’s team, a micro-farmer and mother of a four-year old.

The Center also hosts the eLaboratories project which provides a digital forum for scholars, editors and others involved in the work of editing, recovering and researching source materials. 

According to Katie Blizzard, research editor and managing director for eLabs, “It’s the newest evolution of the Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents. We create resources so that anyone who wants to get into this field has a space to learn more about the fundamentals and best practices and connect with others who do this kind of work.”

A graduate of UVA with degrees in anthropology and history, Blizzard also works with the Center’s Papers of Martin Van Buren project and applies the best practices developed by eLabs to her work with that project. The work gives her the opportunity to see the past from new perspectives and help scholars uncover historical details that can be critical to their work. She also enjoys the occasional unusual challenge like an inquiry she once received from a researcher looking for historical clues to the whereabouts of the Holy Grail.

In addition to working with historical documents and building websites, the CDE staff play an active role in helping scholars and research communities plan and manage even the most complex documentary editing projects. Christopher Minty, research editor/managing editor for the Naval Documents of the American Revolution, an exhaustive project that covers historical resources from five countries over four continents and housing 22,000 documents with more to come, works with scholars and other stakeholders to make massive projects manageable and achievable.

“I meet with historians and archivists and digital humanists to understand what they want to see and what type of materials would be relevant to them,” said Minty, a marathon runner with a Ph.D. in American history. “Then we work to make those resources accessible, to bring them all together so that wherever you are you can access them.”

The key to the work, according to Minty, is bringing people together to find solutions.

“Our work is really collaborative, and that’s what I enjoy most about it,” Minty said.

He added, “We’re always looking for others at the University [including student interns] who want to be part of that collaboration.”