Documentary Editing

Catalog description

This course is one of three specialized offerings in public history collections management. The focus of this course is documentary editing, or the assembling of comprehensive document collections. Documentary editors must scrutinize, verify, and organize the resources upon which historical scholarship rests. This includes making the difficult, and potentially controversial, decisions about what is included and what is not. In this course, students engage in research, evaluation, transcription, annotation, and compilation of historical artifacts. The implications of documentary editorial decisions on future understandings of the past are assessed.