Teaching Digital Editing and Manuscript Studies: A Project-Based Short Course Approach

This article describes the objectives, structure, and teaching plan of a two-day workshop offering basic skills in paleography, codicology, and digital text encoding. This short course provides students with a supported experience of the full editing process. The teaching model here is project-based and collaborative: participants jointly produce a basic digital edition of a manuscript artifact (in this example case, a medieval manuscript roll). Combining manuscript studies with digital text encoding allows for substantive training in introducing both areas of study, while also helping to overcome barriers to access—especially for students who are newcomers to paleography and digital scholarly editing. The peer-teaching model of this course addresses several limitations in the digital editing training commonly available to undergraduate and graduate students. The model is adaptable to semester-long graduate or undergraduate courses, and to situations where access to physical manuscripts is limited or impossible.