In this presentation, we will share our experience working with Scholarly Editing to create a digital edition of fourteen stories centering Black and Black-Native life and humanity, which are derived from Louisiana's colonial archive.
After a brief overview of the Keywords for Black Louisiana (K4BL) project and our guiding principles, we will walk through the process of undertaking the digital edition, choosing the stories we have foregrounded, designing the components of our edition, and collaborating as a team to transcribe, translate, and encode the primary source documents. Our discussion will address the ways in which we have utilized, remixed, and stretched the Textual Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines to highlight the presence and lived experiences of named and unnamed enslaved people, connecting them and their stories using specific keywords such as kinship and wellness. To conclude, we will place this micro-edition within our broader vision for the digital life of the project: a pair of interoperable static sites. As a whole, we make the case that digital scholarly editing—when guided by scholarship in Black Studies and Critical Digital Humanities—can offer a toolkit that can be adapted explicitly to confront the violence of slavery's archive and build a praxis of recovery, repair, and refusal.