Organised by Research Area 5, "Building Digital Communities".

How can digital editing recover under-examined anti-slavery literary archives and introduce new paths for critical interpretation and historical scholarship? I am proposing to address this challenge by producing a digital scholarly edition of The Bow in the Cloud (hereafter BC), an 1834 anti-slavery anthology edited by Mary Anne Rawson, an activist from Sheffield, England. This project uses editorial and network analysis principles to make accessible the genesis and historical significance of this anthology and its neglected manuscript archive, and to investigate the social networks and underlying themes of transatlantic anti-slavery print culture and rhetoric between 1826 and 1834, when Rawson was preparing the anthology. Using the semantic web authoring tool Scalar, the project combines a TEI XML workflow, network analysis tools, and linked open data standards to attempt to model relationships between archival documents aswell as creative-critical potentials.

The project’s pioneering use of textual “paths” and network analysis tools leverage computational tools that facilitate critical analysis. This digital publication employs an integrative and interdependent approach by featuring new modes of presentation, enriching library catalogs and digital image collections with IIIF technology, and building an edition with network analysis tools. The edition lays the groundwork for a detailed, dynamic, and flexible engagement with the making of a significant anti-slavery publishing event.

The meeting will take place online on Webex: https://fu-berlin.webex.com/fu-berlin-en/j.php?MTID=mea5706c4ccffb5adef54d4b4cb3879ab