This workshop will introduce the principles of digital genetic editing, which focuses on encoding draft manuscripts using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) XML data model. Participants will get a hands-on introduction to the TEI by examining and encoding a selection of unedited manuscript material of an 1834 antislavery anthology, The Bow in the Cloud (edited by the British abolitionist Mary-Anne Rawson).

Christopher Ohge is Lecturer in Digital Approaches to Literature at the Institute of English Studies in the School of Advanced Study, University of London. He is the associate director of the Herman Melville Electronic Library; he is also currently working on a digital critical edition of Mary Anne Rawson’s The Bow in the Cloud and applying network analysis tools to study the anti-slavery print culture of Great Britain. He previously served as associate editor at the Mark Twain Papers & Project at the University of California, Berkeley. His publications on Melville, New England Transcendentalism, Mark Twain and others have appeared in American Literary History, The Library, Scholarly Editing, Leviathan, and elsewhere. His first book, Inventions of the Text, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.