by Holly C. Shulman, University of Virginia

I began work on the Dolley Madison Digital Edition (DMDE) about eight years ago, but my roots in media history and digital technology go back to the 1980s and 1990s. In the 1980s I was a graduate student at the University of Maryland, writing a dissertation on short wave radio as a medium of international communication, and the creation and wartime experience of the Voice of America (VOA).  I come from a media family. All of us, my parents, my siblings, at some time in our lives have been journalists, written books, or produced radio or television shows (or some combination of all of these). My father had gone into broadcasting in the 1930s, not quite at the beginning of radio, but close to it.  During the war he had worked for the Office of War Information, and become head of the Overseas Branch and director of the VOA.  So it seemed a family-friendly decision to write about radio broadcasting, and logical to include a discussion of how the various forms of media shaped the content they provided.  Short wave radio was a good instance of that problem:  radio is a unique medium, and shortwave imposes distinct limits on what you can produce (to begin with, forget about production values, you can’t achieve that level of sound quality).  What the Voice could accomplish in the midst of war was not only a function of diplomatic policy, domestic political maneuvering, and military context, but of the very nature of the medium of radio and how the VOA writers and producers chose to deploy their own artistic goals. When I finally discovered the World Wide Web, I’d thought about media, about form and content, about how television was not simply radio with pictures nor were movies plays on celluloid.  It meant that I never considered web publication a process of simply moving print from paper to screen.

In 1993 I took a job as associate director of an honors program at the University of Maryland in Science, Technology, and Society. The very first day I walked into my new office and sat down at my new computer, I encountered Mosaic.  Mosaic was the precursor of Netscape and its release in many ways began the web (not the internet) revolution.  At my new job I was surrounded by undergraduates majoring in engineering and computer science.  I could not have been in a more adventurous or fruitful environment. By 1994 I had organized workshops and internships on the World Wide Web, and off we went, exploring HTML, and what impact the Web would make in local, regional, national, and international communications.

When I moved to Charlottesville at the beginning of the century I decided to shift my historical focus and work on Dolley Madison.  I had married the editor of the Papers of James Madison, and Dolley was the perfect Virginia project.  Initially I thought I’d simply set about writing a biography of her.  But I soon realized that exploring the history of someone who lived in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was going to be a very different experience than writing 20th-century history.  For my original work I went to archives around the United States and Britain, interviewed the participants in three countries, and listened to VOA broadcasts and BBC sound recordings.  But my ability to work with these materials was shaped by proximity to the events. I was old enough to share, if not the experience, at least something of the worldview of the writers, producers, and broadcasters of the wartime VOA.  I knew them both imaginatively and literally. I grew up in the shadow of the war, and my very notions not only of the importance of mass media, but of social justice and world order were rooted there.  And my father’s name (he was already dead by the time I began work on my dissertation) was my calling card.  I had access to those about whom I was writing; some of them even spent days with me and shared their old letters and papers.

I experienced the world of Dolley Madison as a shock. As I approached Dolley’s letters I knew I could not read them as I had the letters of the head of the French Desk of the Voice of America, or one of its writers, or an assistant secretary of state.  I had encountered a different country: the past.   I made the decision, therefore, to edit a documentary edition, and examine the letters one by one, exploring each person mentioned and working out each political, literary, diplomatic, or personal reference.  I realized I could not leap through this material; I had to crawl, spyglass to the ground.  I began by apprenticing myself to a master in the craft of documentary editing, David Mattern, and together we produced the Selected Letters of Dolley Madison.  But that book contained only three hundred letters, and Dolley wrote or received nearly ten times that number.  And so the idea of doing a supplement to the book as an electronic edition surfaced.  I was excited; I could unite my old interest in media with my new one of the Early Republic.  I would edit a born-digital documentary edition in the field of history.

My web experience in 2001 and 2002 was still pretty much confined to HTML and hyperlinks, so it was not clear to me how to make an edition of which I would be proud and to which I could devote the next decade of my life.  I turned out to be extraordinarily lucky as the University of Virginia Press got funding at about the same time to create an electronic imprint, soon called Rotunda, and to my delight and amazement I – or the Dolley Madison Digital Edition – became its first publication. I soaked up the attention.

I brought to the DMDE what I think are three important convictions.  The first was that no two media present ideas in the same way. I understood that the web was not simply paper delivered by digits, that reading would be a different experience on line.  The second was a conviction that the World Wide Web was a communications revolution in which historians would have to participate.  The third was that most readers, even scholars and certainly college and graduate students, would not be able to make a lot more sense of these documents than I did without my identifying the cast of characters and the many political, literary, social, economic, and family references.

Most documentary editions in the field of history do not strive to identify everyone (and every place, title, and so on) mentioned in every letter.  I set out to encompass them all and to make sure that when the reader learned that a Mrs. T was talking to a Mrs. S, they could quickly ascertain that Mrs. T was Anna Maria Thornton and Mrs. S was Margaret Bayard Smith.  That has taken me a great deal of time.  Moreover, that decision had two distinct implications.  One was that no annotations would be tied to a single letter, as footnotes are to a document in a print volume.  There are few alternatives in the world of print; there are more in the World Wide Web. That is not to say that traditional annotations are not sometimes the most efficient way to communicate a comment or explain a letter, but I wanted to explore how the web could create new ways of visualizing information and communicating ideas.

Thus my annotations became discrete modules of information, independent chunks of text, which the reader could access independent of any other material.  This reshaped the very writing of notes and identifications (IDs).  Glossary entries would change and grow over time as they clarified a reference while simultaneously explaining that reference within the text of the ID.  I also became aware of how many different Mr. Smiths were mentioned.  Technically, this required a database and a way to generate unique identifiers. That way I could be certain that the reader would get the correct John Smith, of whom I might have seven – or even the right James Madison, who shared his name with several of his contemporaries, including his cousin, the Bishop James Madison.  Over the years I have increasingly come to appreciate the importance not only of identifiers, but also of building a system for name authority into which all of us could tap. It has yet to happen, but it will be a great leap forward when it does.

At no point was I tempted to experiment with non-linear order; however messy the contingency of life as we live it is, moment by moment.  We need order and we write according to linear, structured, arguments. In a documentary edition letters are relatively discrete blocks of text.  That is a tremendous advantage in the world of digital editions.  But to do this, I needed a more powerful tool than HTML.

Rotunda introduced me to XML, and to the luxury of working with a MarkLogic server that was created to provide just the right tools.  I could now tag, and the press could create query structures that would enable the reader to call up letters and texts that would have an inner, linear, coherence, no matter now complicated the search.  Readers can now browse though letters in the DMDE by chronology, author, recipient, topic, and so on.  They can flip through the pages as they would a book, if they wanted to try to replicate that experience.  They can pull up all the letters Dolley wrote her sisters, or Anna Maria Thornton wrote her.  They can move deeper into the text and search for every time a person was mentioned – even if they are looking for Margaret Bayard Smith and the letter simply says Mrs. S.  They can limit that search by location or chronology or type of document.  They can pull up all the letters that relate to slavery or friendship, and so on. In each of these examples, the reader gets results that are ordered and logical.

The result of all this is the Dolley Madison Digital Edition.  Since the first installment appeared in 2004 I have changed some of my thinking and expanded the documents I choose to include.  A graduate student at the University of Virginia, Jean Bauer, created a database template for me to convey ideas about Dolley’s social networks derived from her invitations.  I now include legal documents, newspapers, and third-party correspondence — but I am now editing Dolley’s letters as a widow, and so new strategies are called for to explore her problems as she navigated her world alone, without her beloved husband.  I have confronted the problems of financial documents, and vastly improved my original database so that it is now an authoring as well as management tool.  But all of these developments have been built on my original decisions, a product of my experiences.

Holly C. Shulman, of Documents Compass, is editor of the Dolley Madison Digital Edition and Research Professor in the Department of History at the University of Virginia.