Accounting for History, in the Classroom and Beyond

Since I am a user of and advocate for XML/TEI transcription and markup in the classroom, I see my students as producers of digital history resources that can be reused by other students and researchers. Thus in my practice as in digital scholarly editing in general having access to high-quality, high-definition images of the documents to be transcribed is essential. For many years, I have used a teaching module that includes access to digital images of locally produced account books along with workshop sessions scheduled during class meeting times. Energetic students have not only produced good first-run transcriptions and markup for use in a full scholarly digital edition but also interpreted the traces of social and economic relationships that they have found in the accounts they have studied. More recently, I have scheduled an intensive practicum for the weeks between Memorial Day and the Fourth of July. Students learn some basic information about accounts as a genre of primary sources, the fundamentals of reading nineteenth-century script and of XML/TEI, and the use of the oXygen text editor.