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Joshua
Barney and the Chesapeake Bay Flotilla
A Documentary History
A
Digital History Project Proposal
Christine
F. Hughes
Documentary editing
projects have been in existence since the founding of the Republic. While
twentieth century editors have adopted more stringent guidelines governing
their craft, such as strict transcription rules and more annotations,
their end product was still the same--printed volumes of documents that
contained a wealth of information, but that usually sat on library shelves,
receiving only occasional use.
The goal of this
digital history project is to cull material from the Naval Historical
Center’s The Naval War of 1812: A Documentary History series
and present it online--not in its static, linear format, but with hypertext
linking to graphical interfaces and searching capabilities that will enhance
its usability and attract a more diversified audience.
The following pages
will discuss the project’s parameters, its content, and anticipated
audience. I will provide a detailed site map of the themes that I will
pursue, with a few examples of how I will link documents to other resources.
I hope to show that in using the World Wide Web to present these historical
documents, I am not just making them available to a potentially greater
audience, but that, through easily accessible hypertext, I have given
them contextual meaning.
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