The end of the 19th and early 20th centuries saw great archaeological activity in Egypt, a period that came to be known as the ‘Golden Age’ of Egyptology. Our digital project began in 2010 with the unpublished diaries of Mrs. Emma B. Andrews, who traveled the Nile with the millionaire lawyer turned archaeologist, Theodore M. Davis for over two decades between 1889 and 1914, and whose work is an important yet underutilized resource for the history of this time (Ketchley 2020). Mrs. Andrews was present when Davis discovered eighteen of the forty-two tombs now known in the Valley of the Kings, and her writing provides a detailed record of excavation often lacking in contemporary publications. Over the past decade, the project’s research corpus has expanded to include a wide range of unpublished correspondence, diaries, travelogues, historical ephemera and historical newspapers, which give an overview of the social, geographical and political history of Egypt at the time within the broader context of history of archaeology and Egyptology, gender studies and the social, cultural and political history of the Victorian era.

The objective of our project work is to transcribe, encode and publish open digital editions of our primary source material. Our TEI tagging captures a range of named entities including people, places, boats, hotels, literature and artwork, and is the starting point for our historical research. These indices of named entities provide contextual information to enrich the online reading experience, while generating data for research and analysis. Our work on the Andrews diaries is now nearing completion, and we are beginning the process of encoding several unpublished collections of letters written by ‘hidden women’ in Egyptology: often the wives, secretaries, or relatives of their more famous male archaeologists.

Our ‘Travelogues’ sub-project similarly focuses on histories of Nile travel. It comprises a SQL database created by scanning a bibliography of published Nile travel memoirs, to produce OCR text which will then be cleaned and structured (Kalfatovic 1992). We use the Internet Archive API to associate IIIF manifestos with the books in our database, when available, which enables scholars to explore the publications on our website in the embedded Mirador viewer. Our initial work focused on a limited number of travelogues as a proof of concept, and also gave us the opportunity to document our workflow. We have now moved on to phase two of this work, which is an expansion of the available content, and additionally automated encoding of the texts to enable social network analysis and geolocation.

The project team comprises a faculty member and groups of undergraduate and graduate interns who work on disparate tasks: transcription, tagging, editing, web development, research and publication. Many of the students who join us have no previous experience in this type of work; they come from multiple departments across campus and from a range of diverse backgrounds. To date, we have offered internships to over 200 students who learn a range of digital humanities skills.

This poster will describe the scope and significance of the primary source material and our research goals and outcomes, including a project roadmap and milestones. It will highlight the practical strategies we have developed for managing the workflow of our project team. These include the development of technical and user documentation (Github, Notion, YouTube), data management and sustainability strategies (Github, UW server space, repository storage), communication protocols (Slack, Github, Notion), collaborative workspaces (Tropy, Github, Google Docs, Slack) and instructional material to onboard new student team members (Google Docs, YouTube, Zoom). The objective of the poster will be to provide a blueprint for effectively managing a collaborative team working to process and publish historical textual material.