Creating a Born-Digital Documentary Edition: Dolley Madison Digital Edition

The first installment of the born-digital documentary edition known as the Dolley Madison Digital Edition (DMDE) appeared in 2004.  Begun with the help of the Virginia Center for Digital History, it was the first publication of Rotunda, the Electronic Imprint of the University of Virginia Press.  Since that time four additional installments have come out.  I was the creator of this project and remain its editor.  Funded by both the NEH and the NHPRC, it can be accessed at http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu:8080/dmde/.

The fact that this was to be a born-digital publication meant that from the beginning I found myself rethinking the structure and presentation of the product.  It was not a book, and I have never thought of born-digital electronic publications as simply books delivered in an electronic format.  Rather, it is an electronic archive that combines the virtues of the (virtual) printed page with the possibilities for searching and querying that are made possible by structured information.  For this reason, I knew I needed to build my project, at least in part, through a database.  Creating the best-possible database has been a long process, but has evolved into DocTracker.

This will be a presentation of the DMDE and how DocTracker manages and structures its information.