CfP: PULSE: The Journal of Science and Culture
Sponsored by the Department of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Call for Proposals for SourceLab, Vol. 5. Theme: Documenting Disability in History. Deadline: Friday, August 25, 2023 (for development during the Fall 2023 semester)
SourceLab is a digital documentary publishing initiative sponsored by the Department of History at the University of Illinois. We train students to create reliable and free digital documentary editions of digitized historical sources, in response to the needs of teachers, researchers, and the public at large. Though we sometimes digitize new materials, our focus is creating editions of the vast ‘found’ archive of documents already on the web—the huge number of historical sources that people could use in their teaching, research, or public history projects—if only they knew more about them and could cite them with confidence.
For Fall 2023, SourceLab is issuing a call for proposals for a new series, publishing sources for the history of disability. Do you know of a digitized source (in any format) that you think could have wide interest for teachers, researchers, and the public at large? Would you like to use a reliable edition of it yourself? Consider responding to this call to see if our student teams can create a prototype edition of it this Fall.
This call is open to the history and study of disability from all time periods and geographic locations. Nor do we limit ourselves to items in English and we can work to produce translations. Our main limitation is one of scale. For example, we are interested in shorter individual documents, not entire collections or archives. Such projects are more manageable for our student teams.
We offer this call because disability is a lived human, social, and cultural experience that transcends individual medical diagnoses. Text, images, films, audio records, and government data have shaped private and social institutions as well as cultural beliefs surrounding disability. SourceLab’s commitment to bringing humanistic inquiry into digital spaces broadly construes the definition of sources to include film, radio, music, television, books, magazines, newspapers, posters, booklets and pamphlets, photographs, and textual documents. Other possibilities include material objects such as prostheses, technical aids, adaptations, and tools—we can reproduce these with digital photography.
Our editions present these sources for scholarly use and historical interpretation. We describe each source’s origins, provenance, current archival location, and publication history. We investigate its copyright status and provide reliable citations. We stabilize digitized materials in the online world to help make sure they do not disappear. All our editions are peer-reviewed by our Editorial Board and outside reviewers to ensure their accuracy and scholarship. They are licensed as Open Educational Resources for free use.
Have you found a digitized source on the Internet you’d like to see produced into a digital edition for teaching, research, or public history? Have you digitized something in your own archival work that you’d like to share with a wider audience? Please let us know about it. We’re now seeking new projects for development by students this coming Fall, as part of our course HIST 207: Digital Documentary Editing. We’d love to create an edition that suits your needs.
For more information about the program, see our brochure, “SourceLab: An Idea.”
SourceLab is a digital documentary publishing initiative sponsored by the Department of History at the University of Illinois. We train students to create reliable and free digital documentary editions of digitized historical sources, in response to the needs of teachers, researchers, and the public at large. Though we sometimes digitize new materials, our focus is creating editions of the vast ‘found’ archive of documents already on the web—the huge number of historical sources that people could use in their teaching, research, or public history projects—if only they knew more about them and could cite them with confidence.
For Fall 2023, SourceLab is issuing a call for proposals for a new series, publishing sources for the history of disability. Do you know of a digitized source (in any format) that you think could have wide interest for teachers, researchers, and the public at large? Would you like to use a reliable edition of it yourself? Consider responding to this call to see if our student teams can create a prototype edition of it this Fall.
This call is open to the history and study of disability from all time periods and geographic locations. Nor do we limit ourselves to items in English and we can work to produce translations. Our main limitation is one of scale. For example, we are interested in shorter individual documents, not entire collections or archives. Such projects are more manageable for our student teams.
We offer this call because disability is a lived human, social, and cultural experience that transcends individual medical diagnoses. Text, images, films, audio records, and government data have shaped private and social institutions as well as cultural beliefs surrounding disability. SourceLab’s commitment to bringing humanistic inquiry into digital spaces broadly construes the definition of sources to include film, radio, music, television, books, magazines, newspapers, posters, booklets and pamphlets, photographs, and textual documents. Other possibilities include material objects such as prostheses, technical aids, adaptations, and tools—we can reproduce these with digital photography.
Our editions present these sources for scholarly use and historical interpretation. We describe each source’s origins, provenance, current archival location, and publication history. We investigate its copyright status and provide reliable citations. We stabilize digitized materials in the online world to help make sure they do not disappear. All our editions are peer-reviewed by our Editorial Board and outside reviewers to ensure their accuracy and scholarship. They are licensed as Open Educational Resources for free use.
Have you found a digitized source on the Internet you’d like to see produced into a digital edition for teaching, research, or public history? Have you digitized something in your own archival work that you’d like to share with a wider audience? Please let us know about it. We’re now seeking new projects for development by students this coming Fall, as part of our course HIST 207: Digital Documentary Editing. We’d love to create an edition that suits your needs.
For more information about the program, see our brochure, “SourceLab: An Idea.”