Editorial Process
Roopika Risam
When preparing The Ada Journal Reader for publication with Reanimate, editors Karen Estlund, Radhika Gajjala, and Carol Stabile provided me with a table of contents for Ada essays they were including in the volume. Their rationale for selection is thoroughly documented in the Reader Editors Introduction. I subsequently took over preparation of the texts for ingestion in the Manifold platform that we use at Reanimate.
Preparing the volume was an adventure. As with any publication, editorial practices, policies, and styles at Ada were ever-evolving. The journal privileged clear communication and offered pathways for authors to share their research and tell their stories rather than overdetermining article style. This is particularly important because Ada writers were working with new media at a time when style guides did not yet know what to do with new media — Ada was creating a scholarly future.
In the process of preparing the text, I respected these varied practices over uniformity for the sake of uniformity, to preserve Ada's legacy of scholarship driven by care and community needs. As such, The Ada Journal Reader reflects the many hands that have touched Ada over the last decade. And in the preparation of the reader, my hands are visible too. There are several minor exceptions to my editorial decision to leave the articles as originally published: 1) I used consistent case for all headings in the reader; 2) I formatted all block quotes consistently; 3) In the case of publications that were listed as forthcoming at the time of publication, I added citation information; and 4) I replaced links (with Wayback Machine links or alternate sources) where necessary and removed dead links where appropriate.
This approach gives the volume, as published by Reanimate, a measure of consistency, while still allowing the history of Ada and its evolution as a journal shine through.