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Tenisha Armstrong>> The King papers project relies on Stanford undergraduates to help
us in the immense task of editing the Papers of Martin Luther King Jr.
Between 10 and 15 undergraduates work at the King papers project each quarter, and many
of them stay throughout their entire academic career.
Our goal for students is to teach them graduate-level research skills, and as such they participate
in all aspects of manuscript preparation.
All students are eligible to work at the King papers project.
In fact, we welcome and encourage students from all disciplines and majors to apply.
Former students overwhelmingly say that the research experience they gained at the King
papers project has helped them in their course of study.
Students learn historical methodology, proficient research skills, the rigors of scholarly publication,
how to critically analyze historical documents, professional interactions with archivists,
and oral history techniques, among other things.
Aside from our goal of teaching students graduate-level research skills, we are also helping to train
the next generation of historians or documentary editors to continue this important work.
Many are unaware of what documentary editing is, and that it is a career option for those
interested in pursuing history professionally.
Having a documentary editing project on campus gives students the opportunity to work with
primary documents—an opportunity they may not get in their history classes.
In fact, conducting research at the King papers project is akin to the experience science
students get working in a laboratory.
In other words, it's hands-on learning that augments their classroom instruction.
Mark Cheathem>> One of the main benefits that undergraduate students take away from working
on the Papers of Martin Van Buren is the ability to contribute original historical scholarship
to the field of history.
This is an opportunity that many undergraduate students at other institutions like ours in
particular don't have, and we're happy to help the students have that opportunity and
to be able to put that on their resume.
Particularly if they're trying to go to graduate school in a history program, or law school,
working on the Van Buren papers--working on a presidential papers project--is a huge benefit
to them, and makes them competitive with other applicants.
David Gregory>> As a recent graduate of the history program, working on the Papers of
Martin Van Buren has allowed me to contribute original scholarship to the field of history,
which I would typically not be able to do until graduate school.
Mark Cheathem>> One of the ways that we prepare students to work on the Papers of Martin Van
Buren is by asking them to take either Digital History, which is a sophomore-level course,
or Documentary Editing, which is a senior-level course.
These two courses expose students to the digital humanities, and teach them the various facets
of the project.
This is something that will certainly benefit them when they advance to graduate school,
or go to law school, or just go into a career field.
Being able to talk about digital humanities, being able to – in particular if they're
in education -- use digital humanities to teach students, is an important asset, and
it's one that we're happy to provide to our student workers.
Paige Hrobsky>> Coming from a history -- undergraduate major, I get to work with primary source documents
instead of just reading about them through a textbook.
I also can understand how to handle them, how to access them, how to read them.
And as a student interested in law school, it gives me an insight into legal precedent
set by Martin Van Buren, and lawyers, and their profession -- how it evolved into now.
So it gives me a little bit of a better understanding of the profession I want to go in.
Mark Cheathem>> Most of what students do, however, is work on transcription.
Many of them are nervous.
Most students don't think that they can do the job because they’re not used to cursive,
or they're not aware of the historical context of many of the documents.
But what we found is that most students are capable of doing transcription.
We verify that transcription, of course, but most of the time they're able to get 70, 75
percent of the transcription accurately, which is immensely helpful to those of us who are
on the editorial staff.
Ally Johnson>> I think that, as a future educator, working on the papers has helped me get more
comfortable with primary source documents, and learn more about this period—so that
in turn, whenever I'm in the classroom, I'll be able to show my students more primary documents
and be more knowledgeable about them, and also have more content knowledge about this
period to share with them.
I’ll have more of a better insight.
Christy Regenhardt>> Our undergraduates are really immersed in primary sources in a way
that most undergraduates don't get to be.
They often work with us for multiple years and during that time they're transcribing,
they're proofreading, they're cataloging, they're sometimes doing digital encoding of
those documents.
They also do background research for us on those documents and on other historical issues.
And we've had some really great undergraduate projects.
We had a group of students who got together and created a walking tour of Eleanor Roosevelt's
Washington, DC, and went out and actually did the tour themselves -- did the mapping,
created it through Map Box.
And then we mounted on the website with very little editing from the senior staff.
Another group of students got together and put together examples of Eleanor Roosevelt's
handwriting, based on the model that the Jane Addams Papers did, and we've used that—and
other scholars have already thanked us, because Eleanor's handwriting is very hard to read.
So, it's been very useful to us.
One of our undergraduates said that they've become a far more careful reader because of
their work at the project.
And they no longer skim over block quotes--that they are more likely to interrogate the primary
sources that a scholar is using in their monographs.
For our graduate students, they are getting to go through the entire publication process,
both in print and in digital editions, and go from the very basic kind of picking which
documents are going into the book through indexing the volume at the end, and going
and talking to the publisher.
They're also spending a lot of time in archives, sometimes weeks at a time.
They’re occasionally getting extra training.
They might go to the Institute for Documentary Editing or Digital Humanities Summer Institute.
And they're learning a lot more about that kind of--the other options available for PhDs
in history, other than just the kind of traditional academic career path.
Scott Heerman>> Both as an undergraduate and a graduate student, I worked at two different
documentary editing projects and I attended the Institute for Documentary Editing--otherwise
known as “camp edit”--in Madison, Wisconsin.
My experience with documentary editing make me a better scholar in several different ways,
the most important of which is it taught me to think critically about the archive itself--why
it exists, what biases it has, and how it can be understood.
I learned through documentary editing that sources can only be understood, not only in
their historical context, but in their archival context.
And documentary editing gave me the skills to filter through the various biases, the
various imbalances that exist in archives, in order to get closer towards the past--closer
towards an understanding of the society in which my subjects lived.
I think supporting these projects in history departments is incredibly important--not just
because they offer invaluable scholarship to a wide array of people working in many
different fields, but because they offer experiential learning to undergraduate and graduate students,
as all of us think very critically about the past, about the sources we use to understand
the past, and about how our own biases, and the biases of the archives ourselves may inhibit
or enhance that project.
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