Related to my other proposal—a sort of general discussion of text encoding—I wonder if anyone would be interested in trying to put ideas about text encoding into practice by trying to imagine into existence a small mini-edition of some interesting but neglected text.¹ We would need to thing through the entire process: questions of textual scholarship (what state of a text to represent; what annotations or apparatus does it need to be useful to readers; in what formats should be encoded; what outputs can/should we provide; how/where could it be hosted).

We probably wouldn’t have enough time to complete such an endeavour, but we would have enough time to get started.

1. As a starting suggestion for a text that could benefit from such an edition, I don’t think Hope Mirrlees’s early twentieth-century poem Paris has a good digital representation on the web right now—though a rather raw looking PDF is available.)

Collaborative world building is a process by which students learn to think critically about social forces at play in a given place at a specific moment in history and how these forces influence the lived experiences of the people who live in the world. Students write a metanarrative describing the governance, economics, social values, and cultural influences and then populate a wiki with entries for people, places, and things and pin them to a map. Collaborative world building is useful for creative projects such as creating post-apocalyptic futures, alternate histories, or fanfiction in preexisting worlds and could be used in courses in literature, history, or other humanities. Participants will learn about the pedagogical theories underlying collaborative world building including its roots in role-playing games and will participate in the creation of a brand new world of their choosing.