A push for more research in the editing world led a group of professors and students to make TrackEDT: a tool that can change the entire editing field.
Analyzing manuscript edits to use in research usually requires spending hours copying and pasting editorial markings and comments by hand, a prerequisite that makes research in the editing field scarce. Hoping to simplify this process, Associate Professor Matt Baker (Editing, Business Communication) and University of Northern Colorado Assistant Professor Jordan Smith set out to develop a computer program that would take on the brunt of the heavy lifting. After three years of development, and with the help of numerous programmers and undergrads, Baker and Smith finally succeeded. In December 2025, their research and methods for creating the tool will be published, and with it, TrackEDT, a program that can extract comments and edits from a manuscript and import them to an Excel document in mere seconds.
Edits for the Editor
Baker notes that in the past couple of years, “there have been multiple calls for more data-driven research in editing and publishing.” Without the proper tools, however, extracting editing data—such as comments left by an editor and any added or deleted words and punctuation—from manuscripts proves a tedious and incredibly time-consuming task. “If we could just create something that would open up Word documents and export them into a different format,” says the research team’s newest programmer Lauryn Wilde (Editing and Publishing ’23), “then we could do some quick analysis to figure out what an editor is doing.”
To help simplify this task, the team, which is part of an editing and publishing research group funded by the Humanities Center, created TrackEDT to more efficiently harvest editing data. This tool will be available in December 2025, when an article of it will be published in IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication. TrackEDT will simplify editing research by extracting thousands of comments and marks almost instantaneously. Once published, this tool can be used to answer dozens of questions in editing research, from “What usage issues do editors most frequently revise?” to “How do edits done by novice and expert editors vary?”
I hope our tool allows editors to take a broad view of what they’re doing and start to see connections in the way that they edit
In addition, Baker has already begun using TrackEDT to help his editing students by creating a comprehensive spreadsheet of edits they’ve made throughout the semester and then giving them the chance to see how they’ve evolved as editors. “I hope our tool allows editors to take a broad view of what they’re doing and start to see connections in the way that they edit,” Baker says.
Celebrating the Process
As Baker prepares this tool for widespread use, he recalls the process of getting TrackEDT publication ready—a feat only possible with the help of talented programmers. The team first utilized the talents of undergrads Ashlin Holbrook (Editing and Publishing ’22) and Scout McMillan (Editing and Publishing, Applied English Linguistics ’24), finishing with Wilde. “The Lord led us on, step by step,” Baker recalls. “Student involvement and research lead to inspiration and revelation, both for the faculty and for the students.”
Read more about their research on the Office of Digital Humanities’s blog.