Rethinking Accessibility: Developing, Editing, and Publishing Digital Editions

Stertzer will discuss the project’s experimentation with and development of digital tools and platforms to facilitate all aspects of editorial work, digital publication, and broad accessibility. In order to be a viable solution for editors, a platform must provide the major workflow components of creating a digital documentary edition—content management, editing interface, content markup and visualization, and user interface development / publication. Developing this platform requires not only content expertise but also demands familiarity with the documents themselves: how documents are structured and formatted and how they (and the information they contain) relate to one another – in many ways requiring us to think of documents as data. Additionally, she will discuss the opportunity to rethink access and experiment with different types of annotation and indexes and design multiple user interfaces for searching, browsing, and viewing the materials, driven by the goals of intellectual accessibility and user engagement.