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Joshua
Barney and the Chesapeake Bay Flotilla
A Documentary History
Site
Reviews
The goal for my web
site is to present a series of introductory essays accompanied by a number
of documents that will trace the creation, short life, and denouement
of the Chesapeake Bay flotilla during the War of 1812. I anticipate that
the site will be an extension of the printed documentary series, The
Naval War of 1812: A Documentary History, but an improved one.
A review of several
documentary editing editions has shown that many do not have web sites,
and those that do are still very much wedded to letterpress or microfilm
editions and have no intention of presenting a comprehensive edition online.
Some projects see an online presence as one limited to a few documents,
with advertising the sale of the printed edition as the main goal (for
example, the Founding Fathers projects with the exception of the George
Washington Papers).
When one opens the
home page for the Papers of George
Washington, one is immediately struck by the contrast with the sites
of the other Founding Fathers. There is color, if muted, and there is
a plethora of images and links to attract every type of person from school
child to scholar. I find this site useful as a partial model for what
I wish to achieve in a site. While at first glance the home page seems
congested, one can scan quickly to find a list of topics on the traditional,
left side bar. The more visual cues lead to the children’s learning
center and the sales pitches.
In a November 2002
interview with the chief editor of the Washington Papers, Philander Chase,
I learned that he decided in 1995 to establish a web site to address the
many repetitive research questions that the project was receiving. Thus
FAQs, not a desire to adapt his project to a new media, drove Dr. Chases’s
decision to go online.
After the site received
many compliments and generated more inquiries, the project decided to
embark on presenting a very limited sampling of documents from a cross-section
of its four series--thus giving the reader a flavor of Washington’s
writings during the colonial, revolutionary, confederation, and presidential
periods of his life. As a result, the documents that they have selected
(for example, on the Whiskey Rebellion, the first inaugural address, or
Washington’s advice on marriage) represent snippets of his life’s
writings.
The site has reached
a plateau stage now, with no grand plans for expansion. The editors do
not foresee embarking on a massive transfer of documents to an electronic
format--possibly because it will be many more years before they have completed
the letterpress edition.
While the Washington
web site is not a formal example of how a documentary edition should be
established online, how the editors presented their documents is a fine
model for others to emulate. The “Documents
& Articles” link on the home page takes the reader to a
page where he can choose the time period that most interests him. If he
picks “Selected
Revolutionary War Documents” he can then choose “General
Orders on Profanity” or some other topic in this group of twelve.
Besides a transcription, the editors sometimes provide the reader with
an explanatory essay, a facsimile, and annotations. It is this latter
apparatus and the way it is presented on the page that I find useful as
a model, even if the documents are not contextualized. I will improve
on the Washington site by presenting a progression of documents, connected
by introductory notes that will provide the narrative theme to tell the
story of Barney’s flotilla.
I have also found
the Washington Papers’ use of interactivity helpful. I will use
the pop-up
dialog feature on my maps to indicate when Barney’s flotilla engaged
the British.
A group of projects
has joined with the Association for Documentary Editing (ADE) to experiment
with the Model Editions Partnership (MEP)
that seeks to make scholarly editions of historical documents available
to a wider audience via the Web. Two such projects are the Documentary
History of the First Federal Congress and the Documentary
History of the Ratification of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
In addition, the First Federal Congress project has developed its own
home page and adapted a traditional exhibit, Birth
of the Nation: The First Federal Congress 1789-1791 to an online
format. This exhibit forms a partial model for presenting documents online.
My Chesapeake Bay
flotilla web site is designed around discreet themes with introductory
essays to place the documents within context. Most of the documentary
editing editions that exist today are biographical rather than topical.
Of the twelve projects that are represented in the experimental Model
Editions Partnership, only two, the Documentary History of the First Federal
Congress and the Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution
and the Bill of Rights, are non-biographical. I chose them to study because
their topical approach most resembled my own. The MEP project of mini-editions
is a useful experiment in showing the potential for online editions. Unfortunately,
the site is practically moribund, not having been updated in over two
years.
The First Federal
Congress project has published about fourteen volumes and anticipates
about six more, but the project director and coeditor does not plan an
extensive online presence. The First Federal Congress mini-edition contained
one overall essay and seventy-six documents that linked to lists of nine
biographies and twelve images.
The Ratification
project will have published seventeen volumes by January 2003 and anticipates
printing nine more in the next ten years. In an email interview in November
2002, John Kaminski, the project director and coeditor, was hopeful that
all published volumes and supplements would eventually be available online.
The Ratification project’s contribution to the ADE’s mini-edition
consisted of three essays and fifty-six documents that linked to three
maps and an index. Dr. Kaminski has obtained a $10,000 private grant to
assist in preparing his volumes for the Internet.
By focusing on themes--the
creation of the executive departments during the first Congress and slavery
and the ratification of the Constitution--these two projects followed
more closely my idea of what my site should contain than did the Washington
project. Unfortunately, the model used by the MEP for presenting its documents
is not aesthetic. Lengthy introductory text was not adapted to the Web,
except sporadically by adding links to annotations, maps, and biographical
sketches.
The Washington Papers’
layout of their documents is more user-friendly because it retains the
basic home page navigation bar on the left and gives the reader the option
of a descriptive essay and a facsimile to view along with the full text.
The First Federal
Congress project decided to adapt its Birth of the Nation exhibit
to the Web and was more successful in presenting transcriptions on its
own web site than it was on the MEP’s mini-edition site. Perhaps
this is because an exhibit is more visual than textual. What the FFC staff
achieved in this site was a successful marriage of imagery and documents.
The site’s limited focus also signaled success. While the MEP site
was strictly utilitarian, the FFC’s web site is annoying because
its graphical rollovers detract from the content.
The final site studied
for this proposal was the Thomas
A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University. This project, dating to the
late 1970s, faces the staggering challenge of documenting five million
pages of Edison’s technical, business, and personal papers. To date
they have produced 227 microfilm reels and four of a projected twenty
letterpress volumes.
The project was an
early exponent of computer technology for document control purposes and
recently decided to place the entire printed version of the Edison papers
online as it becomes available. Because the project has lost all of its
funding from oil and electric companies, however, it has very limited
resources to update its outmoded document retrieval system. This project
is one of a few that have fully embraced the potential of the Web, but
funding problems may hurt their efforts. Their database searching system
is more complicated and less helpful than some other more recent systems,
such as that used on the Liberty,
Equality, and Fraternity site, because, as the Edison staff note,
“the expense of computing power and memory in 1980 dictated a limited
indexing of subjects.” While this site uses an archival format and
mine is more narrative, I will use it to help me in comparing the database
part of my site.
The different paths
these projects have taken represent the dilemmas faced by the documentary
editor in the twenty-first century. I have not found one project that
addresses all the aesthetic and technical dimensions of my site. I have
drawn ideas from them all.
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