Digital Editing Workshops for Building Campus Public History Communities and Developing Student Leaders

This paper presents a model for conducting editing workshops at institutions of higher learning in connection with digital projects based on archival materials. These events are designed to engage campus communities in the practice of public history and create opportunities for students who are interested in archives and digital humanities to gain professional skills. We propose a flexible approach that can be used for both limited, short-term events and regularly occurring workshop series. The model draws on the experiences of students, faculty, and staff at the University of North Florida (UNF) in the context of Editing the Eartha M. M. White Collection, a pedagogically focused project that explores methods for publishing in a collaborative fashion selected personal papers and correspondence of local African American leader Eartha M. M. White (1876–1974).

This article first provides background on the Eartha M. M. White Collection and its importance for the North Florida region in general and for UNF specifically. It locates our discussion of editing workshops in a larger scholarly context, and details the evolution of our paradigm since 2016, identifying its basic components and proposing strategies for its successful deployment. We reflect on the implications of this model for engaging communities, on campus and potentially beyond, in the recovery of historical narratives and for providing formative experiences to the students who will chart the future course of digital public history.

This essay explores a model for project outreach and student engagement, not a specific implementation. Accordingly, although we focus on the particulars of Editing the Eartha M. M. White Collection by way of example, our primary objective is to outline a paradigm that others can adapt to serve the needs of their own projects, students, and institutions. Out of a concern with keeping this larger goal in focus, we relegate details on technical topics, to the extent possible, to the endnotes, pointing to specific resources that others can use as starting points.

This study connects to several established and emerging conversations in today’s academy. These include discussions about electronic textual editing as an area of scholarly inquiry, digital humanities pedagogy, experiential learning, and digital editing as a form of public history practice. It also relates to scholarship examining the relationships between archives and the digital humanities and the notion of digital community engagement. In addition, this study intersects with work examining recent efforts by institutions of higher learning to reckon with the past amid heightened social awareness of racial injustice.

Electronic textual editing has been an important area of scholarly activity for decades. Indeed, the field we today understand as digital humanities grew, in large part, from efforts to employ technology and computational methods in the storage, transmission, and analysis of written texts. Marking an important moment in this process, in 1987 the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) was established to create a standard for markup, thereby addressing problems of compatibility and sustainability that had developed in the preceding years.¹

Since that time, the interdisciplinary field of digital editing has grown exponentially. Researchers and institutions have undertaken countless projects that pursue diverse objectives, including preserving and providing access to cultural heritage materials, enabling new ways to interact with and understand archival texts, and bringing attention to overlooked writers and communities.² As this partial list suggests, digital editing is not only an area of praxis but also a space for analyzing critically our relationships with written material and the ways in which we create and transmit narratives in a world shaped by technology. An expanding body of scholarship reflects the dual nature of digital editing as both a theoretical and applied pursuit with broad implications for the humanities today.³

In recent years, scholars have grown increasingly interested in the pedagogical applications of digital humanities methods at the undergraduate and graduate levels.⁴ Scholars have considered broadly what to teach, how to teach it, in what context, and why we might do so.⁵ Within this body of work, some studies look specifically at the pedagogy of digital textual editing. Authors have examined the potential objectives or outcomes of engaging students in the practice of digital editing, proposing, among other possibilities, that such activities can be used to teach critical thinking and close reading skills.⁶

Though not always explicitly stated, scholarship on digital humanities pedagogy often connects with theories of experiential education that rose to prominence in the last quarter of the twentieth century and continue to represent a central component of learning in many academic fields today. The use of digital humanities methods in teaching often involves hands-on, project-based work, as well as critical analysis of the processes involved. Such an approach reflects ideas about learning that, since John Dewey first articulated them in the early twentieth century, emphasize lived experience and critical reflection on that experience.⁷

Scholars have also considered the role of libraries within digital humanities endeavors, examining topics including collaboration with academic faculty and the ongoing management of digital humanities projects.⁸ Within this context, some authors have reflected specifically on the place of special collections and archives in the digital humanities.⁹ Scholars have likewise studied the role that archives can play in teaching and building connections between institutions and the publics they serve.¹⁰

The concept of digital community engagement has emerged to describe processes by which scholars and non-academic constituencies collaborate in the production of digital scholarship.¹¹ Work on this topic has pointed to ways that such a model goes beyond merely involving communities in scholarly processes, instead creating equitable relationships in which academic and community partners share both in the design of the projects and the ownership of their outcomes. In examining such scholarship, authors have pointed to the ways that digital work creates broader and more engaging possibilities for these partnerships than does traditional academic production.¹²

Scholars have likewise reflected on the relationship between editing, archival work, and public history. Historical editors make available archival materials and the narratives they contain, and as such, their work has long been understood to be a way of conducting public history.¹³ As scholars have noted, however, editors, public historians, and archives professionals continue to occupy separate professional realms, despite the overlap that exists today between their work.¹⁴

In recent years, and particularly following the public outcry after the murder of George Floyd, various universities have found themselves compelled to reckon with or atone for aspects of their pasts that reflect racial violence and injustice. Often reluctantly, prodded on by the efforts of researchers and students, institutions have taken steps to acknowledge and make visible the contributions that enslaved persons and African American workers made to their founding, construction, and operation.¹⁵ Scholarship has highlighted the difficulty in recovering, in particular, the stories and perspectives of Black women, especially those who were enslaved.

This article connects to all of these conversations. We point to a paradigm through which archivists, teaching faculty, staff, and students can work together to transmit materials of value to local history. We examine a method for putting into practice ideas around digital editing as a pedagogical tool, and in doing so, seek to contribute to remedying the relative absence of scholarship in the humanities related to experiential learning and student leadership.¹⁶ We also present a way to connect archives and digital projects with communities on campus and potentially beyond, through hands–on engagement with textual material, in a process that—in the case of our project, at least—has implications for the way the institution understands the role of race in its past and present. In doing so, we seek to bring together several threads that have not always intersected. We hope also to contribute to the creation of new spaces for collaborative, innovative public history practice, and promote stronger connections between archive professionals, teaching faculty, students, and others.

Eartha M. M. White was a businesswoman, philanthropist, and civil rights activist in Jacksonville. Born in North Florida in 1876, she relocated to New York as an adolescent in response to the 1888 yellow fever outbreak in Jacksonville. As a teenager, she toured as an opera singer, returning to her hometown after the death of her fiancé in 1896. She studied at the Florida Baptist Academy and taught in Bayard, a transit point between Jacksonville and St. Augustine that was later annexed by the former, as well as at Stanton School. In 1904, White founded the Clara White Mission in the LaVilla neighborhood, just west of downtown Jacksonville, naming the institution after her adoptive mother. Over the following decades, White’s other charitable works included the establishment of an orphanage, a refuge for single mothers, and a home for elderly African Americans. She also managed several successful business ventures, the profits from which she directed toward the Clara White Mission and her other endeavors. White was a community organizer, campaigning against lynching and encouraging fellow African American women to exercise their franchise. She was also active in women’s organizations, including the National Association of Colored Women, and served in leadership roles in local and national civil rights organizations. Her legacy is most visible in the ongoing functioning of the Clara White Mission, a cornerstone of Jacksonville’s nonprofit sector for nearly 120 years, but the lasting impacts of her work continue to mark the city in many other less obvious ways.¹⁷

Through the efforts of Dr. Daniel Schafer, the first professor of history UNF hired when it opened in 1972, the university attained a portion of her estate in 1975.¹⁸ The Eartha M. M. White Collection was the founding acquisition of UNF’s Special Collections and remains today the most frequently consulted of its holdings.¹⁹ The collection gathers over one thousand letters, documents, event programs, notes, photographs, and other artifacts connected with White’s life and work.²⁰ These materials are critical sources for understanding the African American history of North Florida, in particular with regard to the vibrant social, economic, and religious life of the early twentieth century, a time when LaVilla was known as the “Harlem of the South” and when Zora Neale Hurston, J. Rosamond Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, A. Philip Randolph, and other figures of national stature lived and worked in Jacksonville’s historically Black neighborhoods.²¹

Those areas were later transformed by the forces that hollowed out inner cities across the United States. The advent of redlining, the construction of expressways, the demolition of neighborhoods under the rubric of “urban renewal,” and the exodus of white residents to increasingly sprawling suburbs all combined to undermine the viability of areas where African American communities were centered and that had been central to the city’s earlier development. The consolidation of Jacksonville and Duval County in 1968 dramatically increased the size of the city, making it the largest in the contiguous forty-eight states by area and diverting attention from the problems of a declining urban core.²²

The founding of UNF in southeast Jacksonville was itself a reflection of this movement away from the city’s historic center. Rather than downtown, the university was located in what was then forest, thirteen miles away. This outcome was the product of a complex and contentious process that pitted supporters of a downtown site against those who believed a rural location would be less expensive and allow for greater future growth.²³ According to Daniel Schafer, race was an undeniable factor in the decision. He cited City Council President John J. Lanahan’s explaination from an interview held in 1979 that asserted that support for a downtown campus had been limited primarily to those in the Black community, who, to his mind, did not need UNF. Lanahan believed that the “junior college system really suffices their needs for the immediate problem of the first two years of college where you sort of screen out the person, whether he is really third and fourth year college material.”²⁴ In other words, Lanahan believed that no reason existed to build the university in the urban core, as it was to be an upper-division institution only, and few downtown residents were likely to make it through two years of junior college and later enroll at UNF.

Due to such attitudes, according to Schafer, the strongest and most enduring criticisms of UNF’s ultimate location came from those who felt the decision was racially motivated. Writing in 1982, he explained that “Blacks in Jacksonville, some of them prominent public officials, have accused UNF of being a racist institution because of its location.” Schafer argued that UNF itself cannot be held responsible, as the city council, not the university, chose the site. He agreed, however, that race played an important role: “To argue that UNF itself had no say in its location is accurate, but to say that race was not a factor in the site selection is to disregard the evidence of the 1960s.”²⁵ Exacerbating the negative impact of this decision on the city’s African American communities was the fact that the campus was not only far from downtown, but entirely unreachable by many, as no bus lines connected the new campus to the city’s center.²⁶ Although half a century has passed, the sense of betrayal this caused has not been forgotten by some Black residents, including Jacksonville civil rights activist Rodney Hurst Sr., who has been active in the area for over six decades.²⁷

Administrators were aware that UNF was inaccessible to those who lived in the core, and in the late 1970s, the University attempted to address the situation by establishing the Downtown Center, situated on what was then Hemming Plaza, a location that since the nineteenth century has been central to the public life of Jacksonville.²⁸ The satellite campus offered undergraduate classes from 1978 through 1987. After its closure, UNF continued for a time to offer courses downtown in a few academic fields, using space in buildings not owned by the university, and maintaining an administrative office called the Downtown Service Center, which was subsequently closed in 1990.²⁹

UNF today remains a predominantly white institution. For the fall of 2021, the university reported that 60 percent of students and 74 percent of full-time faculty were white. At 10 percent and 5 percent respectively, the percentages of African American students and faculty members on campus remain significantly below that of Jacksonville itself, where, according to US Census Bureau data, 32.9 percent of the population was Black or African American in July 2021.³⁰

The university is aware of the need to diversify the campus and in recent years has taken steps in that direction. The institution mentions diversity as a key part of its vision and values, maintaining an Office of Diversity and Inclusion that is led by a vice president with the title of Chief Diversity Officer.³¹ Among the responsibilities of that position are to “lead and collaboratively assist in recruiting and retaining underrepresented students, faculty and staff; assess and improve the campus climate for diversity and inclusion; promote inclusive excellence in scholarly and creative activity; and engage the community to encourage discourse while countering bias and discrimination.”³² Efforts to increase diversity at UNF extend to curriculum, perhaps most visibly through efforts in recent years by the College of Arts and Sciences to strengthen and expand its Africana Studies Program.³³

The results of a Campus Climate Survey conducted in 2019 suggest that most students, faculty, and staff believe the university is making efforts toward diversity and inclusion, but that systematic differences persist. Among the report’s summary findings are that “[n]on-white students as compared with white students are more dissatisfied with how much the university values diversity, less satisfied with the diversity at all levels of university (including students, faculty, and staff), have lower beliefs about their safety on campus, feel less valued and included, experience a lower sense of community, are less satisfied with leadership’s response to discrimination, report being marginalized, are less satisfied with the interactions among diverse groups of students, and less satisfied with the atmosphere for difference at UNF.” Results for faculty and staff, the report indicates, “mirror the student data collected.”³⁴

In an opinion piece in May 2022, Joshua Smith, an editor of UNF’s student newspaper, considered how Black students on campus live this reality. Smith recounts his own experience during the COVID-19 pandemic:

Setting aside the question of underrepresentation, Smith proposes that a more important issue has to do with communication and respect: “Making up 10% of the University of North Florida (UNF)’s student demographics, it is highly unlikely that black students have a hard time being seen. However, they certainly have a harder time being heard.” Smith asserts that Black students often feel “unheard or just ignored” when interacting with professors and classmates.³⁵

Jacksonville’s African American population is now more geographically dispersed than in the past, and so the impact of UNF’s distance in physical terms from downtown is not the same as in the university’s earlier years. However, the areas where African American residents are most concentrated remain the neighborhoods in which White lived and worked, as well as others further out on what is known as Jacksonville’s “North Side.”³⁶ Although bus routes today connect UNF to those areas, relying on public transit in Jacksonville presents what most residents would consider to be significant inconveniences, with relatively infrequent departures and trips taking significantly longer than by private vehicle.³⁷

In recent years, UNF has begun to again have a presence downtown. Since 2009, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), located coincidentally in the same building that once housed the Downtown Center, has been a “cultural resource” of the university. While an important link between the university and the city’s center, MOCA is a specialized entity that does not extend access to its degree programs into the area. In 2019, the university opened a Downtown Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation, but while potentially the start of a larger reengagement with the urban core, that space serves primarily for business development and for offering a limited number of graduate-level business courses.³⁸

The Eartha M. M. White Collection, therefore, offers opportunities not only to researchers and the public at large but also to the university itself. It is not merely the jewel of the institution’s special collections, but also potentially a tool for confronting the racial injustices that continue to impact and divide Jacksonville and that are not disconnected from the institution’s own history. Projects that can engage the UNF community with the collection in compelling new ways can present opportunities not only to celebrate the life and work of White, one of the city’s most prominent residents, but also to rethink the university’s connections to the city’s core neighborhoods and rich African American history—a history that is inseparable from that of the city itself, despite the degree to which it has been forgotten or erased since the middle of the last century.

Editing the Eartha M. M. White Collection began in the context of an experimental course in the summer of 2016 taught collaboratively by Dr. Clayton McCarl and Dr. Aisha Johnson–Jones, then head of Special Collections and University Archives.³⁹ McCarl coordinated the project documentation and workflow and managed the technical aspects of the course. Johnson–Jones provided context regarding White’s biography and the African American history of Jacksonville, and facilitated the students’ access to materials in the Eartha M. M. White Collection. The students selected and transcribed items, encoded them in TEI–XML, and published them online through a preliminary web interface. The course concluded with a public presentation in the Library’s Special Collections Reading Room.⁴⁰

In the spring of 2018, McCarl and history major and project intern Susan Williams sought to continue the project outside a classroom context and extend its reach to new audiences. They designed a short–term workshop series, conducted in three sessions over a period of three weeks.⁴¹ The events were promoted through the campus newsletter, the email list of the Digital Humanities Institute, and posters located around campus, including in the library. Despite these efforts to publicize the events, most participants, as it turned out, were librarians, who were interested in learning more about the project and the White Collection itself.

The scope of these events was modest, with the first and second lasting two hours, and the final one hour. McCarl and Williams co-led the first two sessions, in which participants learned the basics of TEI–XML and transcribed and encoded short items from the collection. The third session was an informal presentation and conversation in the Special Collections Reading Room. This event proved particularly useful to the organizers, as the librarians were able to offer insights into the project and its processes that differed from those shared by students after the 2016 course.

In response to an invitation to submit a chapter for possible inclusion in the collection Archives and Special Collections as Sites of Contestation, edited by Mary Kandiuk, McCarl reflected on some of the problems surrounding the project. He considered specifically the way the editing of the documents took place far outside the context in which they were created, and without the participation of African American constituencies. He examined, in particular, the manner in which the digital edition created, intentionally or not, narratives about local Black history.⁴²

In the fall of 2019, McCarl initiated a new collaboration with history/Spanish major Lyn Hemmingway with two goals in mind. They sought to advance the project by expanding the 2018 series and to address the concerns examined in McCarl’s book chapter. In Spring 2020, Hemmingway became student leader of the project, and, as in the case of Williams previously, his experience was framed as a digital humanities internship undertaken for credit. He applied for and received a grant through the UNF Office of Undergraduate Research to support his work.

Hemmingway focused on three areas of activity. The first was to create and implement the expanded workshop series. He designed, publicized, and led a semester-long series of open workshop sessions, held twice weekly for a period of two to three hours on each occasion (figure 1). They were hosted in a computer lab operated by the Digital Humanities Institute. To promote participation in these events, Hemmingway improved the online presence of the project by constructing a new website using Omeka, created and managed social media accounts for the project, and spoke to classes and on-campus organizations.

Through these efforts, he was able to recruit a student population that we did not reach with the 2018 workshops. A community of regular participants emerged around the project, with several students attending the open sessions at least once a week. This group included students from various majors within the humanities, but also others in computer science, engineering, and other fields. When the COVID–19 pandemic interrupted the workshop series in mid–March, Hemingway continued his work remotely, completing and publishing on the new Omeka site all documents that had been edited up to that point.

Outside of the weekly workshops, his other primary focus centered on creating interpretive materials that would assist project participants and users of the website to gain a broader perspective on the collection. His idea was to provide context that would connect individual documents to each other in order to illustrate larger narratives about African American history and activism, especially as protagonized by Black women. With guidance from Dr. Felicia Bevel of the UNF Department of History, Hemmingway wrote and published on the project website the exhibition “Eartha White and the Creation of Black Historical Memory in Florida.” His essay features several edited documents from the collection and demonstrates how they reflect coherent efforts by White and her associates to recover and document the African American history of Florida.

Hemmingway also engaged in broader outreach, speaking about his work with the project at numerous public and professional events. At the invitation of Susan Swiatosz, who began as head of Special Collections in 2018, Hemmingway gave a talk as part of the Library’s Black History Month programming in February 2020 (figure 2, figure 3). Later that spring, he presented at SOARS, UNF’s annual undergraduate research symposium, and in the fall, at the National Humanities Conference, along with Bevel, McCarl, and Swiatosz.

In the spring of 2021, Hemmingway undertook a second internship, focused on developing an approach to conducting remote workshops, as well as continuing to create interpretive materials. He collaborated with UNF’s Center for Community–Based Learning to initiate a series of virtual sessions involving students at a local high school.⁴³ That experiment proved to be of limited success due to problems related to technology that were beyond the control of both Hemmingway and the school in question. More productive was a series of remote workshops for members of the UNF community that Hemmingway also organized, promoted, and led. Despite being virtual, these workshops attracted numerous participants, some of whom had attended the in-person workshops on campus the previous year.

By this point in the evolution of Editing the Eartha M. M. White Collection, the project was explicitly engaged in the practice of public history. Not only were workshop participants contributing to the publication of the documents, but they were also involved in thinking about how the documents should be understood. As Hemmingway and the other editors prepared the materials for online publication in 2021, they searched together for documents with thematic significance that could become the focus of online exhibits, collaborative critical work that is now part of the project’s process.

The group’s efforts that semester led to Hemmingway’s second exhibition, “‘Not for Ourselves, But for Others’: African American Women Organizing and Leading in Jacksonville, Florida, and the United States.” Participants had edited several pamphlets related to African American club women's organizing, and in response to their work and the conversations around it, Hemmingway developed and published his exhibition. In doing so, he connected specific items that contributors had edited to a broader story that runs through the Eartha M. M. White Collection regarding the role of White and her female associates as protagonists of civic life.⁴⁴

Hemmingway continued his outreach efforts, speaking about the project at numerous events. In May of 2021, he presented with McCarl and Swiatosz at the annual meeting of the Society of Southwest Archivists, and the following year, he appeared at the conferences of the Florida Digital Humanities Consortium and the Association for Documentary Editing, as well as an on-campus event hosted by the UNF Office of Research and Sponsored Programs as part of the university’s annual Research Week.

The model we propose has three main phases. In the first, session leaders provide the necessary contextual and technical information. For our project, this initial orientation focuses on two main topics. First, we discuss Eartha M. M. White and her role in the history of North Florida, as well as give an overview of her papers at UNF. We then walk students through the basics of TEI–XML, examining briefly how and why the standard was developed, demonstrating the fundamentals of XML structure and syntax, and reviewing the project documentation, in which we provide a reference of elements to use in specific situations. As part of this introduction, we show and discuss a selection of the items already completed.

In the second phase, the attendees transcribe and encode documents. They work in XML files we prepare in advance, using document images that we provide. We monitor their progress, answer questions, assist in addressing technical problems, and aid in using the project documentation.

In the final phase of our model, participants present the results of their efforts. We ask them to give an overview of the item’s content and comment on its importance to the larger project and our understanding of White’s life and work. We encourage them to identify any problems they encountered and explain the solutions they devised, as well as to reflect more generally on their experiences. That final event also serves as a forum in which to gather participants’ suggestions about the workshops going forward, feedback that can be complemented by information gathered through surveys or other means.⁴⁵

The nature and duration of these three components differ, depending on the format. In the spring of 2018, the three phases corresponded roughly to the three workshop sessions: the first session involved phase 1 and the start of phase 2, the second session continued phase 2, and the third session was comprised of the presentation in phase 3. In total, the process involved five to six hours. In the 2020 series, phase 1 occurred on an individualized basis, with Hemmingway orienting each participant as they joined the project (usually a 20–30 minute conversation), and phase 2 continued for most participants over various weeks, with the number of hours invested by any given individual varying, according to availability and interest. We intended to approach phase 3 as an end–of–semester presentation and discussion of 60–90 minutes in the Special Collections Reading Room, but this was not possible due to the COVID–19 pandemic. Hemmingway and several of the contributors were able to present, however, at UNF’s annual undergraduate research symposium, held in a virtual format in April of that year.

At some point prior to publishing the edited documents on the website, the student leader and faculty mentor must review the files produced. In situations in which time allows, a first round of review could be conducted by the student leader during phase 2, providing feedback to participants, who could make changes prior to a final review by the faculty mentor. When such an iterative process is not possible, review could take place following the workshop series.⁴⁶

As documents are published, they can be highlighted on the project’s social media accounts and website or by other means. Sharing these items on a periodic basis provides an opportunity to celebrate the contributions of participants and raise awareness about the project. Building a social network around the project through the process of posting such materials and tagging contributors is also a way to keep those individuals connected and potentially draw in future participants.⁴⁷

The key to making this workshop model function is the effort that takes place beforehand. Some of this, of course, is logistical. Dates, times, and locations for the sessions must be determined, a system for registration implemented, and publicity materials created or updated and distributed. Additionally, any remote participation must be coordinated, ensuring that participants have access to the technology and software needed.

The most important preliminary work pertains to the preparation of the project documentation and the materials to be edited. A statement of editorial approach and a reference list of TEI–XML elements and their use must be developed and maintained. Step–by–step instructions that guide contributors through the necessary tasks are also helpful. Particularly for remote workshops, short how-to videos can be beneficial, as participants can refer back to them as needed.⁴⁸

Most critically, a pool of materials to use must be pre-selected and prepared. Projects will have diverse criteria for identifying these items, but length, readability, and complexity in terms of layout should be primary considerations in most situations.⁴⁹ For workshop series with only a few meetings or a large number of participants, items that can be edited in a matter of hours are preferable. For workshops that take place in a compressed time frame, or as initial documents for those participating in longer series, brief, easy-to-read letters offer numerous advantages. For recurring workshops held over an extended period of time, regular contributors can handle longer items. Due to the brevity of our Spring 2018 and Spring 2021 workshops, participants generally edited short letters or fliers, but in the 2020 series, they worked across multiple sessions with more complex materials, such as programs from community events and letters of four or more pages.⁵⁰

Reproductions of the selected materials must be procured, and the resulting images must be named according to the project’s scheme for filenames.⁵¹ An XML file must also be created for each item. An effective approach can be to create an XML template with the TEI header pre-populated with the metadata that is common to all items, and then copy and rename that file for each. Contributors also benefit from having the first few lines already transcribed and encoded by way of example, as well as tips for getting started that are included as XML comments. Adding all of the necessary page break elements, configured to point to the corresponding image files, can also help to minimize potential problems.⁵²

The XML and image files must then be made available to the participants. This can be done via a shared online folder or other means. We currently use a customized version of TEI Boilerplate, so we place the files in the appropriate folders on the server where our installation resides.⁵³ We then add an entry for each new item to the project’s Omeka website, linking to the corresponding XML file and adding the name of the participant who will work with the document, if that person has been identified, as a contributor in the Dublin Core Metadata. We then confirm that the correct XML file loads for each item and that all the corresponding images appear properly on the resulting page. The contributors can then save the XML file locally from within their browser and either consult the images online or save them locally as well. This approach offers the advantage of allowing the contributor to see how the item will figure on the site once complete. Thorough testing is essential, however, as any errors in filenames or links can prevent participants from accessing materials—or cause them to access the wrong materials—during the workshops.

A plan needs to be made with respect to contributors’ access to an XML editor. At UNF we have had a site license for the Oxygen XML editor since 2016, which is installed on our Virtual Lab, allowing remote access.⁵⁴ Other options exist, including software available at no cost.⁵⁵ The main consideration is that whatever tool is chosen be easily accessed by contributors, and if software is to be installed locally on their personal devices, the time needed to address any related problems must be accounted for in the workshop schedule. For in-person events, software preloaded on machines that contributors can access may be the least problematic solution.

A system must also be in place to receive the completed files from contributors as well as to move them to the server or wherever they will reside. The best way to handle this will depend on the circumstances of a given project. In the past, we have asked contributors to place the files in a shared folder, from where we retrieve them and transfer them to our server using an FTP client. This manual process has worked well for our relatively small project, but an endeavor involving numerous contributors or facing other types of complexity may need a more sophisticated system for workflow and version control.

The three phases we outline can be conducted in person, online, or in a hybrid format. In-person sessions offer a potentially greater level of personal contact, as well as the possibility to have students physically visit the archive and view or handle the actual documents. Many participants, particularly those who face challenges in using technology, may prefer this format, which may also present advantages with respect to effectively teaching and discussing the historical context of the project. Conducting sessions in person, however, can mean a smaller number of potential participants, given the logistical difficulties of being present in a specific location at a particular time, realities that persist for many despite the general resumption of in-person activities on campuses in the wake of pandemic disruptions.

Online sessions can offer more than just greater accessibility and flexibility in terms of scheduling. The ability to share screens in video conferencing software, for instance, has proven to be an effective mechanism for demonstrating processes to participants and for working through problems that they encounter. Such hands-on guidance, in fact, can sometimes be delivered more effectively in this fashion than in person. Because conducting such sessions requires a greater degree of organization and clarity, this format can often compel a project to create more straightforward procedures and documentation, both of which can benefit contributors. Perhaps most importantly, online sessions offer different, and potentially greater, possibilities with respect to expanding workshops to communities beyond the campus itself.

The frequency of such events can vary. For some endeavors, once a year might be appropriate. In the case of Editing the Eartha M. M. White Collection, we offer a workshop series annually in the spring. For an ongoing, largely open-ended undertaking like ours, which is focused more on community and outreach than reaching a point of completion, this schedule can work well. Such an arrangement might not be optimal for projects with shorter timelines or specific objectives in terms of publication.

Although we did not set out to create a model for student leadership in digital public history projects, this has been perhaps the most rewarding outcome of our explorations with these workshop series. This discovery was a product more of necessity than pedagogical vision, as McCarl’s empowering of Hemmingway to take charge was motivated, in the beginning, mainly by limitations on his own time and ability to focus on the project. This decision, however, resulted in fundamental changes to the way the project operates and how we view its purpose.

Among the critical contributions made by Hemmingway was his design of the open workshop series and his approach to project outreach. Hemmingway saw the ongoing, informal session format as a more likely way to draw in a diverse population of students. Through his outreach to classes and student organizations, he demonstrated that students would engage with the project in different ways when interacting with peers instead of faculty leaders. He also showed that students were able to attract participants who might not otherwise have considered contributing to such a project or realized they were eligible to do so. In this way, Hemmingway was able to extend the reach of the project and expose a greater range of students to the open publication of historical documents and discussions of local history.

The most valuable aspect of Hemmingway’s outreach was, perhaps, his efforts to build relationships between the project and African American groups on campus. Through his interactions with the Black Student Union, several members of that organization became active participants who attended every week. The African American Faculty Staff Association also helped to promote the project, inviting Hemmingway to present at their Spring 2020 general body meeting. The support, contributions, and feedback from these groups were invaluable in furthering the project. Through his public appearances in roundtables and other events, Hemmingway also helped to connect Editing the Eartha M. M. White Collection to other efforts on campus focused on African American and Diaspora studies, including several that are led by or involve the collaboration of African American and Black scholars.

Hemmingway’s approach to creating the interpretive exhibits was also transformative. His work in this area responded to a question posed by McCarl in his 2020 book chapter about the narratives that the online archive may unintentionally present about White and Jacksonville’s African American communities. To give one example, many of the documents edited prior to 2020 were letters of appeal written to White by individuals who found themselves in dire circumstances. These documents interested project leaders and participants because they are generally short and compelling in their immediacy and intimacy. As a disproportionate share of the documents presented in the archive-in-process, however, they project an image of poverty and crisis that does not reflect the multi-faceted nature of Jacksonville’s culturally rich and economically thriving African American communities in the early twentieth century.⁵⁶ For this reason, themes such as Black historical memory in Florida and African American women’s leadership stood out to Hemmingway. These topics demonstrate the efforts of local Black leaders to preserve and make visible the state’s African American history and to combat the unjust and violent circumstances of Jim Crow segregation.

Although Hemmingway’s efforts to shape the narratives presented by the project took place in response to a question from McCarl, his work was entirely self-directed. He conducted independent research, took initiative in consulting with Bevel, and built on his own interests and prior experiences as a history major to formulate an approach to guiding users through the collection. These exhibits now serve as models for how the project will seek to analyze and interpret the documents and reflect critically upon its work in the future.

Hemmingway also played a key role in shaping how the project presents itself to the public. He determined that, after the interpretive exhibits, the most important public-facing dimension of the project was the accessibility and discoverability of the documents. The Omeka website that he created made browsing and searching the online archive easier, and consequently made the historical value of its contents more apparent to users. Additionally, through his various presentations, Hemmingway solidified the notion of Editing the Eartha M. M. White Collection as being not only, or not primarily, a project about the editing of a specific set of documents, but rather a space for experimenting with methods for project outreach and the formation of student leaders.

Creating positions of responsibility like the one Hemmingway assumed with Editing the Eartha M. M. White Collection is a way to provide formative opportunities to talented students who are interested in careers in public history, as well as in libraries, archives, and cultural heritage management. This is particularly valuable at institutions like UNF, which does not currently have degree programs in these areas. Through partnerships between academic departments, the library, and the Digital Humanities Institute, UNF is able to create spaces in which such students can discover their potential and find future direction.

This is certainly true in the case of Hemmingway. He graduated from UNF in Spring 2022 and is now enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of Georgia. He plans to focus on conducting public history related to historical memory and gender in the US South. Although many other factors have also come to play in his success, he credits his involvement with Editing the Eartha M. M. White Collection and his experiences as a student assistant in Special Collections as having a direct impact on his academic and professional trajectory.

The benefits of involvement with this type of project are not limited to leaders and project interns. Since 2016, several students in addition to Hemmingway and Wilson have presented about their work on this project at on-campus events, including a panel at HASTAC 2017, a presentation to the University’s Board of Trustees, and several events held annually on campus: the School of Computing Symposium; the Digital Projects Showcase, hosted by the Digital Humanities Institute; and SOARS, our annual undergraduate research showcase. In most cases, the participants were presenting on academic work in a public forum for the first time.⁵⁷

This work has also been a way for these students to broaden their understanding of humanities scholarship. Students have expressed that their involvement with this project allowed them to discover categories of academic work, as well as scholarly communities, that they did not know existed, both with respect to public history and the digital humanities. They have also expressed satisfaction at being able to contribute in a lasting way to a project that they regard as meaningful.

Student engagement with digital projects can also help institutions to build digital humanities curriculum and programs. Workshops like those we describe here can be an entry point for participants to discover semester-long digital humanities courses, as well as related majors, minors, or certificates. Digital humanities centers or institutes can also draw on the communities of students that coalesce through these workshops, appointing them as student representatives or involving them through other capacities, a type of partnership that can be important when seeking to design curriculum, expand programming, and raise the institutional profile of the center or institute.

After the disruptions caused by COVID-19, we are now making plans to resume our annual in-person workshops in Spring 2023. A new student leader will be identified to replace Hemmingway, and that individual will organize, promote, and operate the open workshop series, manage the project’s social media, and present on the project at various events. We also hope that Editing the Eartha M. M. White Collection can play a central role in developing an online museum of North Florida African American History, a project led by the Africana Studies Program at UNF, with support from the Digital Humanities Institute and in partnership with numerous community organizations. As a step in this direction, faculty at UNF are currently seeking funding to begin a series of public events to take place at various venues in the historically African American neighborhoods of Jacksonville.⁵⁸ One of the proposed events for Spring 2023 will be a digital editing workshop with community members, paired with a discussion of how UNF might best utilize the materials in the Eartha M. M. White Collection to reconnect with and benefit Black communities in Jacksonville.⁵⁹

Because the project has always focused primarily on developing methods for collaboratively building the digital archive, we have never sought to fix a prospective completion date. We have prioritized thinking about the pedagogical, theoretical, and practical aspects of engaging the campus, and one day the larger community, in a collaborative process of this sort. At our current rate, many more years—a decade at least—would be needed to exhaust the supply of materials available to edit in the Collection. Well before we might reach such a point, however, the website of Editing the Eartha M. M. White Collection may transition from being a showcase for this pedagogically focused endeavor to a more permanent digital archive, dedicated to the public presentation of finished materials in a sustainable fashion. Such a transition ideally would be carried out in a fashion that integrates the project more closely with the digital offerings of the library.⁶⁰

If Editing the Eartha M. M. White Collection eventually reached such a state of completion, with no remaining material to edit, the project—with a more general name perhaps—could also continue as an input to other digital endeavors focused on local African American history, a kind of Black Jacksonville digital editing workshop that could function on a regular, ongoing basis. The materials edited might come not only from UNF’s Special Collections but also from local repositories like the Jacksonville Historical Society, the St. Augustine Historical Society, and the Jacksonville Public Library.

The workshops described in this article can serve a variety of purposes. They can create spaces in which communities can participate in the recovery of local history and help shape narratives about the places they live. These events expand the base of contributors who engage with a project, attracting students, faculty, staff, and members of the broader public. For both digital projects and archives themselves, they can be a mechanism for connecting with stakeholder communities, gaining the perspective and support of those groups, and engaging with those constituencies in the conduct of public history. In addition, they can be a means for creating hands-on opportunities for the students who will serve as the next generation of scholars working at the intersections of public history, archives, and digital humanities.

The model discussed in this article is not inherently specific to digital editing projects, nor to projects related to archival materials. Any digital public history undertaking involving work that can be divided up and distributed in small units could employ or adapt this paradigm. With the exception of the more specific details related to implementation, most of this essay could apply in other settings.

The model does, however, work particularly well with textual projects. This is in part because the work involved with transcription and encoding can be organized in a fashion that presents relatively low barriers for new contributors. It is also because of the immediacy of archival documents. No specialized background or interests are necessary for participants to become curious about personal letters and other writings that provide insight into the past. The opportunity to contribute to the online dissemination of unpublished materials has a broad appeal, particularly when those documents can—as in the case of the Eartha M. M. White Collection—play a role in recovering stories that have been overlooked, lost, or erased.

For their help and support, the authors would like to thank Dr. Noelle Baker, Dr. Felicia Bevel, Jennifer Bibb, Dr. Karen Cousins, Dr. Patricia Geesey, Dr. Laura Heffernan, Dr. Gregory Helmick, Dr. Aisha Johnson–Jones, Dr. Wanda Lastrapes, Dr. Tru Leverette, Courtenay McLeland, Dr. Dan Richard, Andy Rush, Dr. David Sheffler, Joshua Smith, Joleen Stahl, Susan Swiatosz, Susan Williams, and Dr. Richmond Wynn. They would also like to thank the following entities at UNF: Thomas G. Carpenter Library; Digital Humanities Institute; Department of History; Center for Instruction and Research Technology; Africana Studies Program; Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures; Office of Undergraduate Research; Office of Research and Sponsored Programs; Center for Community–Based Learning; African American Faculty Staff Association; Black Student Union; and Department of Diversity Initiatives.