Editorial Profile
I learned editorial markup as a graduate student "on the side," beginning with a lengthy revision job that involved copyediting, for publication, a dissertation on word order change in Chinese. This job was undertaken on volunteer terms, in part because I wanted the experience of implementing a lengthy and systematic mansucript revision, but also because I wanted to digest the subject matter. In fact I accepted the job as a gesture of friendship. Later I picked up freelance work here and there at Berkeley, where I was also teaching expository writing to freshman undergraduates. The two activities reinforced one another, and this experience helped me to find work as a freelance copyeditor for Asian studies titles some years later, under contractual arrangement with the University of Hawaii Press.
The snapshot here illustrates the covers of two books that I was privileged to work on during the period I was writing up my dissertation in Honolulu. Although copyediting is very much a "back room" activity (similar to cataloging), a well-turned-out product remains a pleasure to contemplate, even though my contribution may be transparent. After submitting my dissertation at Berkeley I returned to Honolulu and joined the staff of the Center for Korean Studies at UH, coordinating manuscript review, copyediting and production for the journal Korean Studies and managing other publications of the Center. In 1991 I found my first "real" academic job and moved to Hong Kong, but editorial projects continued to find me there. One project on which I am pleased to have worked during that period is Cheung Yat-Shing's Bibliography of Yue Dialect Studies, to which I contributed copyediting and validation of the bibliographic entries in their English translation.
After my return from Hong Kong, another type of editorial project took shape in connection with my new role as caregiver. My mother's former student, organist Julia Goodfellow, had kept in touch with our situation and knew about the advancing progress of the dementia from which Roberta suffered. She was concerned to create and preserve a record of Roberta's oral repertoire for posterity, and she realized there was not much time left to capture it. For me, the signs that my mother was in the process of losing her control of this repertoire were all too apparent, and I hoped that by facilitating the creation of a written oral history as dictated by herself, I could provide her with an anchor to the past that would help her to weather the personal disintegration she apparently was facing. Over a period of two years, the manuscript was developed and edited, with Julie serving as coauthor with Roberta. The book, entitled Swell to Great: A Backward Look from My Organ Loft, appeared in December, 2000. If you are interested, you can visit The Bayberry Design Company to order a copy, or go to their Roberta Bitgood page (it's a framed site) to preview some of the captioned photos, spectacularly rendered for us by Bayberry's own Bill Stewart.
