Editorial Process
Roopika Risam and Carol Stabile
There are many philosophies on how to edit texts. Our choices emerged from our need to balance the multiple audiences we aim to reach through Reanimate, from scholars to high school students to general interest readers.
Our main priority was to preserve Fredi Washington’s voice, her beautiful writing style, her use rich use of language. Therefore, the text presented here is Washington in her own words. At the same time, The People’s Voice, like periodicals of its time, had variable approaches to style. Sometimes, titles of shows are italicized, sometimes they are bolded. Sometimes, there are typesetting errors in the text. There is a consistent lack of consistency in formatting of headings, titles, and other elements of style. Therefore, we have selectively used sic to indicate that we have left the original errors in place, to reassure readers that they are a product of the base texts, not from our editorial process. We have also selectively inserted words or letters in brackets [ ] when we felt it necessary to assist readers with parsing the text.
Each text appearing in the reader has been vetted by multiple readers: first, an initial transcriber who transformed our scans of The People’s Voice into text, using Markdown. (Given the material shape of the materials, transcription was more efficient than OCR and manual re-keying.) Each text was then examined by an additional reader. Then, each text was verified against the base text a final time, before a final proofread by one of the series editors, when we checked concerns, infelicities of text, and editing against the base text.
Because our project is pedagogical in nature, all transcription and editing was undertaken by high school, college, and graduate students under the guidance of a series editor. All of these students were compensated for their contributions and have bylines on the reader.