RC Position Descriptions
RC Tech Positions Overview
Assistant Editor / Project Manager
RC assistant editors / project managers are PhD students/candidates at the University of Colorado Boulder on half-time Research Assistant appointment. Currently CU English funds two assistant editors on rotating terms. These positions report directly to the general editors of Romantic Circles and are responsible for:
- day-to-day operation of the site, including developing and monitoring the site’s content and features, code, databases, file system, server infrastructure, and appearance;
- regular site updates and maintenance, including updates to Drupal core and modules, Composer dependencies, PHP, databases, SSL and security protocols, etc.;
- coordination of RC initiatives and publications, including regular communication with the general editors, section editors, and contributors;
- managing RC’s PR and social media presence and marketing/distribution initiatives;
- project management of teams of computer science capstone students and individual contributors, as appropriate;
- facilitating and implementing all stages of the digital publication process for RC Praxis, Editions, Unbound, and Pedagogies volumes, including copy editing, TEI encoding, layout and design, proofing, and publication;
- researching and implementing best practices for DH and leveraging metadata;
- training and management of RC individual contributors and future assistant editors at CU, including maintenance of this documentation;
- and other duties to be assigned by the general editors.
Individual Contributors
To keep up with technical and production schedules and demands, RC increasingly encourages volume and section editors to secure funding from granting bodies and/or home institutions to fund the copyediting and/or TEI endcoding of new RC volumes, especially in the case of lengthy editions. These contributors will be trained initially by the current assistant editors and will, ideally, use this documentation site as a resource in completing their editing and coding duties. Depending on RC’s needs, individual contributors may be asked to perform other duties, including author communication, proofing, etc.
General Workflow
Distributing workflow and load
There is, and likely will continue to be, an ever-present tension between RC production aspirations and the various editors’ hoped-for production schedules, on the one hand, and site maintenance, innovation, new initiatives, DH best practices, and — perhaps most importantly — staff training, on the other. On some level, RC’s student assistantships and internships are intended to provide a DH learning sandbox for early career scholars to find a sure footing in the field, but these needs and desires must, of course, be weighed against promises made by the general/section editors and the time-sensitive considerations of tenure cases depending on RC volumes being published, etc.
At CU, there will be a senior assistant editor and a junior assistant editor, the distinction between them simply consisting of time working on the project. In general, the senior assistant editor will focus on the site’s backend stability, code, and updates, while the junior editor facilitates editor communication and production logistics. This breakdown, however, is entirely dependent on the skills and interests of individual assistant editors, and should be continuously reassessed and renegotiated.
File/code management systems
RC’s tech staff uses two separate services to store, distribute, and synchronize files: Google Drive (images, original text files) and GitHub (TEI files). Individual Contributors will code and sync their TEI files using git, as described in the RC Git Guide.