HIST105BL: Digital History

After locating the documents, project staff prepare a high-resolution color digital image of each page. Working from these electronic surrogates, project editors create authoritative transcriptions of the documents, markup their structural features according to the guidelines developed by the Model Editions Partnership and the Text Encoding Initiative, and provide explanatory annotations. The project will then publish the text files, linked to the graphic images of the originals, on a publicly accessible website.

Each collection contains high-resolution digital images of documents representing a variety of genres, from maps, photographs, broadsides, and cartoons to poems, speeches, and travel narratives. These images—unlike transcripts—convey a rich sense of the documents in their original forms, allowing teachers and students to do the work of historians.

Newberry staff researches and organizes the documents and provides introductions, discussion questions, translations, and bibliographic information for each collection. These collections are free and accessible to all over this website where visitors can search and download individual documents or entire collections as well as create and share their own digital collections.