Working with the Financial Records of George Washington: Data and Database

The Papers of George Washington Financial Series (PGW-FS) is a born-digital project that will publish all of Washington’s financial records – a total of several thousand distinct documents, including receipts, invoices, day books, and double entry ledgers that each comprise thousands of discrete transactions. These documents record in depth and in detail every aspect of Washington's business enterprises, from the account books detailing activities at Mount Vernon and his farms to the books he kept while away at war and during his presidency.

In order to realize their vision, PGW-FS is working with Documents Compass and the developers of DocTracker. This partnership has allowed the project to confront the numerous challenges inherent in these documents.  This paper will discuss the following topics: (1) different types of financial documents are formatted in distinct, though standardized, ways, and the formatting of financial documents carries implied meanings; (2) transactions are full of dittos, abbreviations, and short hand, that raise a question of what kind of fields should be created to capture the transcription and clear text; (3) the account books present issues of currency, valuation, and barter; (4) a hierarchy of documents exist, and therefore the same transaction may be recorded in a day book, account, and ledger, etc., generating multiple instances of the same transaction; and (5) how these challenges should be accounted for in the development of the database and final display of information and explained / visualized for the user.

This presentation will explore these issues and the technological solutions that will make GW's financial documents not only available (as a free online resource) but also intellectually accessible so that scholars will be able to interact with, search for, and restructure the data to suit their scholarly needs.  We hope that PGW-FS will become a model for documentary editors and digital humanists.