Digital Editing and Publishing in the Twenty-First Century

In the spring of 2025, Primary Source Cooperative participants Juniper Johnson, Serenity Sutherland, Neal Millikan, and Ondine Le Blanc published “Digital Editing and Publishing in the Twenty-First Century as a Cooperative for Small-scale Editions” in Digital Editing and Publishing in the Twenty-First Century (Scottish Universities Press). Because the volume focuses on conceptual approaches to editing born-digital material, it was an ideal forum for sharing the Cooperative’s work. The article details the Cooperative’s endeavors to use the editorial richness provided by text encoding while supporting scholarly editors—also content experts—who may not yet be well versed in XML environments. This approach puts the power and responsibility of digital publication in the hands of editors who have collaborated with archivists and developers to design and build, and now collaborate to maintain, the publishing apparatus for the Cooperative. The article also expands upon the Cooperative’s capacity to provide the tools and resources necessary for high-quality digital editions that editors of smaller projects may not have access to through their home institutions.

The authors represent two of the Cooperative’s founding editions, the Digital Scholarship Group at Northeastern University, and the internal Cooperative team at the MHS. This collaboration exemplifies the Cooperative’s mission to bring together subject expertise in the long 19th century with the various tools that digital humanities can provide when making primary source documents and historical data more accessible. Such an approach is in good company in this essay collection, which arose from the C21 Editions: Editing and Publishing in the Digital Age collaboration.

Juniper Johnson, Serenity Sutherland, Neal Millikan, and Ondine Le Blanc, “Digital Editing and Publishing in the Twenty-First Century as a Cooperative for Small-scale Editions,” in Digital Editing and Publishing in the 21st Century, James O’Sullivan, et al., eds. (Edinburgh: Scottish Universities Press, 2025), 165-188.