I don’t have a proposal per se, just some thoughts about the main topic that interests me, which is digital publishing of scholarly texts and editions and archives.  I’m interested in learning more about best practices for digital publishing, especially the TEI, which seems to be emerging as a standard. I’m concerned with issues regarding access to digital scholarship and the relative merits of open access versus subscription based texts and collections whether based in academic presses (like UVAs Rotunda Press) or commercial operations (like Adam Matthew Digital). Does open access threaten preservation? Do subscription based collections undermine the democratic possibilities of digital scholarship?

Having just come back from a visit to a collection of 19th century letters and journals preserved at the Massachusetts Historical Society for my own literary research, another issue I’ve been thinking about even more speculatively is the future of archives in the digital age. What will researchers have to look at in the future, when so much of the day to day communication in which people are engaged is unpreserved/preservable? What kinds of written communication are really in the “cloud” (ie. text messages, facebook posts and chats)? This may be a non-issue, but I thought I’d throw it out there!