Goals for your own editions
Chelcie Juliet Rowell • Monday, July 11, 2022 • Advanced Digital Editing: Modeling the Text & Making the Edition • NEH Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities
1. Who is your edition designed for?
Speaker notes: Let’s dive right in! This is an idea generation exercise for identifying or articulating the audience for your digital edition, adapted from the Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap. Identifying the audience and purpose of your digital edition helps you to make intentional decisions at every step of project planning and implementation, including decisions around sustainability, as you’ll hear from Chelsea Gunn tomorrow.
| User | Needs | How are their needs met? |
|---|---|---|
| Who do you imagine using your edition? Who already uses your edition? | Why do you imagine they use it? What needs do they have? | What do you imagine they get out of it? |
Adapted from Module A3, Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap, The Visual Media Workshop, University of Pittsburgh.
2. Reflecting on your audience(s)
- Did you list several types of users? Sort them into primary and secondary. Your primary audience(s) are the users you’re intentionally designing for.
- If you listed the “general public,” could you be more specific about the types of people you feel constitute that group?
- How will your edition meet the needs of your users, whether actual or imagined? What skills and knowledges do you assume your users have that would allow this interaction to succeed?
- Who might you have as unanticipated users? What other publics have access to your work?
Adapted from Module A3, Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap, The Visual Media Workshop, University of Pittsburgh.
Speaker notes: I have a good example to offer of refining an identified user from “general public” to something more specific! A few years back I worked on a digital project called 18th-Century Common led by Dr. Jessica Richard at Wake Forest University. When the project was first conceived, the project team identified their audience as simply a “broad public audience.” But as the project unfolded, they developed a more specific idea of “enthusiasts of the long 18th century who are outside the academy.” So perhaps lifelong readers of Georgette Hayer romances, or folks who watched Bridgerton or the 2005 film adaptation of Pride & Prejudice, for example.
3. What are you making?
- Format. What format will your edition take? What features will it include?
- Need or opportunity. What might your audience need from your edition and why?
- Key benefit. How might your edition address the audience needs?
- Alternatives. What are alternate ways the audience might have this need met?
- Advantage. How is your edition’s approach different or better? Or both!
Adapted from Project Blueprint, National Public Radio (NPR) Training.
Speaker notes: Regarding number 1, try to be more specific than just “digital edition.” Does it include digital surrogates of manuscripts, or just text? Is it a critical edition? Diplomatic edition? And so forth. Regarding number 4, the alternatives you articulate might be competitors, such as other editions of the source texts, perhaps a print edition or a digital text-only edition that doesn’t include digital surrogates, whereas YOUR edition will include the digital surrogates. Or perhaps the alternatives you identify aren’t so much competitors to your edition, but rather other ways of accessing the information. For example, perhaps an alternative to a published digital edition, is to encode the text and perform queries locally on your machine, without making the edition public to viewers in order for them to perform their own interpretation. In this case the alternative is like a more minimal version of your project, which you pursued due to limited resources, which you’re now committed to expanding upon because you’ve got more money or time. Woohoo!
4. Mad lib for refining your edition goals
[ Edition title ] is a [ format ] that [ key benefit ] for [ audience ] who [ need or opportunity ].
Unlike [ alternatives ] this edition [ advantage ].
Adapted from Project Blueprint, National Public Radio (NPR) Training.