Friday, May 29, 2015

Sandra Standish to Attend Editing Institute

By Casey Gamble 


During the Spring Semester of 2015, Sandra Standish, Access Services Supervisor of the Park Library, completed an independent study under the direction of John Fierst at the Clarke Historical Library.

Sandra with a photo of Angie Bingham
In her research, Sandra focused on the letters of Angie Bingham Gilbert, the daughter of the missonary Abel Bingham.  The Bingham Family Papers are one of the Clarke Library's major collections. Angie Bingham's life spanned the development of two Michigan cities, Sault Ste. Marie and Grand Rapids. In Sandra's research, she found that Angie Bingham's experience "provided a gendered lens through which to view missionary movements, frontier development, and the changing roles of increasingly mobile, educated and independent women from the Jacksonian era to the Gilded Age."

Sandra is completing her M.A. in History from CMU. Her research on Angie Bingham will be taking her to Lincoln Nebraska in June 2015, where she was elected to attend the Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents. This is an annual five-day workshop for individuals new to historical documentary editing, where attendees will learn about the core tasks of documentary editing—collection and cataloging, selection and digitization, transcription and encoding, annotation and contextualization, proofreading and verification, organization and layout, and copyediting and indexing. Admission to this event is competitive, limited to only 18 people, one of whom is Sandra. 

Letters of Angie Bingham

The graduation speaker for this event will be Beth Luey, author of numerous books, such as Handbook For Academic Authors; Revising Your Dissertation; Expanding the American Mind; and Editing Documents and Texts. Luey will also join the resident faculty of the Editing Institute on the last day for a session on the funding of documentary editions and the future of documentary editing. The resident faculty will include Cathy Moran Hajo, Ondine Le Blanc, and Jennifer Stertzer, and Bob Karachuk.


Congratulations to Sandra!  We wish her the best and look forward to hearing about her progress.