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Guidelines for Editing Africanist Texts for Publication

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

David Henige
David Henige*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin
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Extract

The Association for the Publication of African Historical Sources (presently headquartered at the Department of History, Michigan State University) is now administering one umbrella National Endowment for the Humanities grant for editing, translating, and publishing significant African texts, and hopes to administer more in the future. In aid of this, the following guidelines, which should for the moment be considered to be in a draft stage, are offered in an effort both to bring uniformity to these editions and to stimulate thinking towards making the guidelines more thorough and enduring. Readers are urged to send suggestions for the latter to: David Henige, Memorial Library, 728 State St., Madison, WI 53706, U.S.A. If all goes well, it might be possible to publish an improved set of guidelines in next year's HA.

As discussed briefly below, efficient mobilization of word processing programs should enable intending editors to achieve better results at less cost. Such word processing programs as are now available are probably not equally suitable and any readers who have used any programs extensively or who have developed variants of their own, with respect either to editing or to linguistic transcription, are also urged to submit brief statements (up to ca. 1000 words) as to their experiences, whether good or bad. These could then be published en ensemble, also (probably) in the 1991 HA.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 17 , January 1990 , pp. 379 - 387
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1990

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References

Notes

1. Most would agree that the most egregious examples of such lost opportunities are the numerous volumes that emanated from Frank Cass in the 1960s.

2. The example of the published work of John Barbot comes immediately to mind, although most Africanist historians could cite many other examples without much difficulty.

3. E.g., the MS version of William Snelgrave's published work which Robin Law discusses in this issue of HA.

4. A notable case, and possibly a special one as well, are Islamic texts in which embedding secondary and tertiary citations in the text was commonly practiced.

5. Dennis Tedlock has tried to devise such a system for Zuni texts. See his The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation (Philadelphia, 1983).Google Scholar

6. APAHS hopes to be able to provide advice, and perhaps more, on specialized fonts as a part of its activities under the NEH grant.