Acts of Disruption in the Eighteenth-Century Archives: Cooperative Critical Bibliography and the Ballitore Project

Abstract:This essay outlines a method of intersectional feminist book history that we call "cooperative critical bibliography," a practice of engaging faculty and students at different ranks and at different institutions in the act of collaboratively transcribing and digitizing historical archives of understudied communities, often those that comprise the quotidian and domestic daily lives of everyday people. Cooperative critical bibliography's non-hierarchical method centers the shared expertise and scholarship of students as they participate in broadening the accessibility of historical knowledge and revising standards of the historical literary canon through transcription, digitization, and shared reflection. By creating a pedagogical space that resituates learning and institutional connections non-hierarchically and elevates the material needs and experiential expertise of students to a crucial research skill, this practice offers an inclusive model of student-centered training that makes humanities and archival work welcoming for students of color, first-generation, and early career scholars: all groups who have been marginalized in university settings and in the fields of archival studies and book history.