jun 2016–aug 2018
Copyediting
I was a full-time copyeditor for three university presses, as well as a handful of authors and journals, for a total of more than 1.5 million words. For most books, I was hired by the press and in contact with the author throughout the process. Most of my clients asked for Chicago style, though a few had house styles.
Beyond learning Chicago style and the manuscript editorial process, this experience got me thinking about the user experience of editorial tools and the technical and logistical pitfalls of the current standard editorial workflow. Most authors and presses in the humanities still depend on desktop-based word processing software through peer review and copyediting, and PDFs during indexing, even though digital publishing exigencies call for real-time collaboration and encoding in HTML or EPUB. When I learned about projects like the University of Minnesota Press’s Manifold and the MIT Press’s PubPub, I became curious about the future of editing and publishing tools and platforms.