During the Summer 2020 semester, I participated in the course DIG3152 Intro to Electronic Textual Editing, taught by Dr. Clayton McCarl of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, during which I worked to edit two letters from the 1840s by Jacksonville resident Elisa Hatch. I transcribed and encoded the documents using TEI-XML, and created the exhibit to explain them. In the Fall 2020 semester, with the assistance of a generous grant from the UNF Office of Undergraduate Research as well as support from Dr. McCarl, Susan Swiatosz, and Jennifer Bibb, I was able to conduct a second round of editing and contextual research on selected documents edited during the summer course. These items consist of various documents, including several from the Varnum Family Collection and the Fleming Family Collection. The goal of this second round of work was to ensure the accuracy of all transcriptions and the adherence of each project to the editorial standards of the North Florida Editorial Workshop (NFEW). I also sought to expand the exhibit that introduces each document and collection on the NFEW website (nfew.org). The finished materials aim to supplement the information available in the Thomas G. Carpenter Library’s finding aids in addition to making the documents more accessible to researchers, scholars, and the general public, thus providing valuable opportunities for extending the narratives of local history in Jacksonville and the wider areas of Northeast Florida.
