The following is a technical introduction to the digital edition, prepared by Rotunda staff. Please see also the Introduction to the Digital Edition by editor in chief Ted Crackel for historical background on the print and digital editions of The Papers of George Washington.
Relevant portions of this document are returned as contextual help when one clicks on the help link in the menu bar, available from most areas in the edition.
Relation to the Print Edition
The Papers of George Washington Digital Edition (PGWDE) contains the entire text of the fifty-five volumes of the print edition published by the University of Virginia Press through 2007, in six series: Diaries, Revolutionary War, Colonial, Confederation, Presidential, and Retirement. For the most part, documents and annotations are presented on screen in a format similar to that of the printed versions. However, PGWDE was conceived as an independent edition that would take full advantage of the online environment, so it differs in some respects from the print edition.
Digitization
All text in the printed volumes was rekeyed using an industry-standard double-keyboarding process. The resulting transcriptions were tagged in XML according to the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (P5 revision). Tagging was used to capture both document structure and data categories such as author, recipient, date, manuscript type and location, document cross-references, and references to repositories and entries in the bibliographies.
The underlying XML is converted programmatically to HTML for browser output (via XQuery coding and CSS stylesheets). In effect, this means that the digital edition has been “typeset” a second time; the appearance of documents in the browser reflects, but is not a facsimile of, their appearance on the printed page. We have also used the underlying tagging to add information to the documents: repository and short-title abbreviations can be expanded by mousing over them; note superscripts and document cross-references are hyperlinked to the notes or items they point to.
Differences from the Print Edition
Following are the major differences between PGWDE and the original printed volumes.
- Front matter
- Not all front matter from the original volumes is included in the online equivalent. In particular, the tables of contents for the digital edition are generated programmatically from underlying data and differ in some respects from the print versions. Within the editorial apparatus, “Symbols Designating Documents,” “Repository Symbols,” and “Short Title List” are omitted because the digital edition uses mouseover links within documents to expand the abbreviated references used in annotations and editorial material. Expansions of short title abbreviations in the digital edition are made against a new corrected and consolidated list of references, so the mouseover text may vary slightly from the title form given in the front matter of a particular print volume.
- Repository abbreviations
- All repository abbreviations throughout the edition have been updated to reflect the current usage of the MARC Code List for Organizations. Where a repository abbreviation in the digital edition differs from one in the print edition, the difference will be noted in the expansion provided by mousing over the abbreviation.
- Document format
- Indentation, alignment, and spacing of documents and diary entries in PGWDE generally follows print. Elements in openers and closers such as datelines, salutations, and passwords (the “parole” and “countersigns” in General Orders documents) have been regularized somewhat differently for browser presentation.
- Tables
- Most tables have been coded for rendering as HTML tables, using borders, spans, and alignments similar to those in the print edition whenever possible. Line breaks within cells do not follow print, however: if you widen your browser window, you will see cells resize to take advantage of available space. Certain features of complex tables such as rotated text cannot be reliably rendered under the current standards of HTML and Web browser technology. In a few cases, tables were so complex or irregular that we have substituted digitized images from the printed pages (underlying text has been captured, however, and is used during document searches).
- Corrections
-
This edition incorporates all necessary corrections
to the original printed volumes that the Papers of
George Washington editorial staff are aware of.
Altered text is indicated by a
dotted red border underneath the words;
mousing over the span reveals a pop-up box containing
the original version of the passage. Places where
text has been deleted are indicated using a
proofreader’s deletion symbol,
; mousing over it reveals the deleted text.
- Index
- Each back-of-the-book index was digitized and tagged using a custom XML schema. Editorial staff at the Papers of George Washington then created a new master list of index main entries, corrected and regularized, to use as the basis of the single consolidated index in PGWDE. Each main entry gathers all page references and subentries contained in the separate volume indexes. (“See” and “See also” entries are not present in the beta version; these will be regularized and added later.) Under the main entry, subentries for “id.” and “letters from/to” have been moved to the top of the list, with the remaining subentries in alphabetical order. Index references now give the title and date information for the first document or diary entry that appears on the corresponding printed page.
- Illustrations
- The print edition of PGW (particularly the Diaries series) contains various illustrations that accompany the text and provide the reader with additional information or visual pictures of people, places, and objects described in the documents. Most of these have not been reproduced in the digital edition, for two reasons: in many cases we do not have access to the original versions and would have to rely on imperfect scans from the printed page; and existing permissions to use graphic material apply only to the original print edition. Exceptions: line drawings contained within a transcribed manuscript have been copied from the print edition, and all facsimiles of manuscript pages from Washington’s journal of his Voyage to Barbados have been included in the digital edition.
Contents, Navigation, and Document Features
You can navigate through the digital edition in several ways, each based on a hierarchical view of the contents. These views are:
- Chronology
- Documents and diary letters are listed by date, regardless of source in the print edition.
- An online equivalent of the print edition, divided into series and volumes, with contents closely following the original.
- Index
- The consolidated index, organized into levels of main entry, subentry, and so on.
- Search
- Once you have entered a search that returns a result set, your results are navigable as a separate document set.
Views are accessed via the link or by compass devices.
-
Every view has an associated compass device composed of four points and a central button, each of which is a link to various locations in the corresponding hierarchy:
- Up (north point)
- The level above the present one
- Down (south point)
- The first item in the level below the present one.
- Previous (west point)
- The immediately preceding item.
- Next (east point)
- The immediately following item.
- Home (central button)
- The top of the hierarchy.
A compass point is active (colored red) only if there is an adjacent item in the respective direction. Thus, the north point is not active when the reader is at the top of a hierarchy and the south point is not active for documents at the bottom. An east (or west) point is not active unless there is an immediately following (or preceding) item at the current level of the hierarchy. Clicking any active link of a compass switches to the corresponding hierarchical view of the edition’s contents.
-
A trail shows each step in the path from the highest level of the current hierarchy to the present location:
Chronology > 1740s > 1748 > March 1748 > Diary Entry, 11 March 1748
Parts of the trail corresponding to higher levels form active links, and clicking such a link takes the reader to that level.
If the reader selects a different view then the trail changes to conform to the chosen hierarchy:
-
The upper levels of each hierarchy provide lists of links that group similar items (e.g. decades in the chronology view or series in the print view):
Clicking a link takes the reader to the corresponding sublevel.
-
At the bottom of a document, a right (or left) arrow appears when there is an item immediately following (or preceding) the present one in the current view:
Right and left arrows perform just like the east and west compass points of the same view.
Chronology and Print Views
The chronology view arranges items according to their dates. Only documents contemporary with George Washington are included, so some editorial matter is absent from this view. Descending through the map, one encounters decades, years, months, then individual documents ordered by date.
The print view orders items in the same way as the print edition. Everything is represented in this view, including editorial material. The print hierarchy progresses through series, volumes, sections, then documents arranged as in the print volumes. Although documents generally occupy the lowest level of the map, it is possible for one to be above another, as in the case of documents with enclosures.
The chronology and print compasses behave in a coordinated way when operating with individual documents. If a document occurs in both maps then points will be active in both compasses. Clicking one of these compass points will select the associated item and switch to the corresponding view.
Index View
The top level of the index view begins with the entry for George Washington and is followed by a table linking to the first letters of all other entries. Index entries typically contain links to page references where the index term is mentioned and relevant subentries.
Like the print indexes, the online index remains page-based. A referenced page may contain more than one document. If so, a special graphic
alerts the reader that a number of documents must be scanned to find the relevant one (just as with the print edition). Terms from the index entry are highlighted to assist the reader in this task. The document (and its date) identified in the entry is the first on that page.
A document reached via an index entry will produce active points in the print compass. It will also produce active points in the chronology compass if the document occurs in that hierarchy. However, the reverse is not true: For both chronology and print views, the present document does not affect the index compass if the document is referenced by the index. This limitation is necessary because the index may contain multiple references to a document.
Document Features
Within PGWDE documents, text that is distinctively colored or highlighted is either a link or an active informational item.
- Note superscripts link to their endnotes and vice-versa. Click on the number to travel to the link. Example: Head Quarters, White Plains1
- References to other documents in the edition are highlighted in maroon. Clicking on the reference will open the linked document in the current window. Example: (see GW to Hancock, 11 November)
- Abbreviations are shown with dotted underlining. Mouse over the text to see an expansion of the abbreviation. Example: Varick transcript, DLC:GW.
-
Corrections made since the print edition are
shown with dotted red underlining. The original text
is given as a mouseover. Example: Theodore
Brandon
Parker. Deleted text is indicated by a deletion mark,
with original text given as a mouseover.
Example: John
Adams.
Searching
Searches in PGWDE can be constructed using any combination of full-text query, author and recipient selectors, and date ranges. Results are returned, by default, in order of relevancy score. (A document containing many occurrences of your search terms, or one in which your search terms cluster together, will rank higher than a document containing fewer terms or ones farther apart.) A successful search produces a set of results, each consisting of a clickable pointer to the matching document.
The maximum number of results returned by a search is currently limited in order to improve performance. The maximum number is set via the preferences page, and ranges from 100 to 20,000. For fast searching, it is best to set the maximum to a conveniently low number. If you are interested in seeing more of the results for a particular search, set the maximum to a larger number and run the search again.
Full-Text Search
Capitalization
Searches are case-insensitive when you use lowercase letters. For example, if you search on chambers you will retrieve letters with rooms and chambers and David Chambers. Searches containing capital letters are case-sensitive: searching on Chambers will retrieve David Chambers but not rooms and chambers.
Automatic “and” queries
It isn’t necessary to specify and between terms, as the search returns a result only if it contains all of your terms. You can refine your results further by supplying more terms. For example, to research the punishment of deserters, try searching for guilty desertion to return documents containing both those words.
Phrase searches
To restrict a search to an exact phrase, enclose the search term in quotation marks. For instance, "guilty of desertion" would retrieve only documents with that precise formula.
Thesaurus matching
Our search engine software enables creation of a thesaurus to define matches between a given term and any number of synonyms or alternate spellings. In PGWDE ’s search this function is used to include common abbreviations and alternate spellings of key terms. For example, choose will find choose and chuse, and honor will expand to honor and honour. A search on Philadelphia will also retrieve letters containing Philada, Phila, or Philad.
Stemming
The search engine automatically expands nouns and verbs to match any form that derives from the word stem by a change in number, tense, or conjugation. For instance, goose will also match geese; fight will also match fights, fought, and fighting. Stemming is also supported for French-language documents: a search on permettre will find permet, permettez, etc.; a search on œil or oeil will match yeux.
Wildcards
Search terms may incorporate wildcards: an asterisk (*) matches zero or more non-space characters. A question mark (?) matches exactly one non-space character. For example, battle* matches battlefield. A wildcard search can be used to find matches that stemming will miss. For example, rebel* matches rebellion and rebellious but rebel does not.
Field operators
Currently, one advanced operator is available to restrict a search: prefixing note: to a term or phrase will limit matches to editorial notes only. For example, note:smallpox will find documents with smallpox in the notes; note:"Benjamin Franklin" will look for references to Ben Franklin there. A note operator can be combined with other terms; for example, the query horses note:"Boston Harbor" will match documents containing horses anywhere and Boston Harbor in the notes.
Additional Search Paths
Automatic Completion of Author and Recipient Names
Searches can be narrowed to documents authored or received by a particular person. When you begin typing in the Author or Recipients field and then pause, a drop-down box will appear beneath it with a regularized list of all names that start with the letters you have typed. For instance, typing “T” will display a list of all authors whose family name begins with “T”, and typing “Taylor” will populate the list with authors whose last name is Taylor. Use GW in both author and recipient searches for George Washington. To browse a complete list of authors or recipients, type “*” in the entry field. Names in the drop-down list can be selected using either the mouse or keyboard. Author/recipient searches can be combined with full-text queries or used independently of the full-text search.
Date Range
The search form includes date range controls to allow a search for documents written on a particular date or within a range of dates. Dates can be entered manually (in the format YYYY-MM-DD) or selected using the calendar control that appears when you click on the input field or the button next to it. To specify a single day, enter its date in both the start and end date fields (the calendar controls are coordinated to make this more convenient). The date range fields can be used by themselves or combined with a query to refine a full-text search.
If the start or end fields are left blank, they default to the dates of the earliest and latest documents in the collection, respectively. To find references to Charlottesville before 1760, for example, you could enter the search
Find:
Charlottesville
1741-01-01 start...
1759-12-31 end...
In general, the narrower the date range of a search, the lesser the number of results returned. There are years for which there are few or no documents in the PGWDE; a search that is restricted to these years will return a correspondingly low number of results.
Preferences
User preferences may be set for the following items:
- Compasses
- Show or hide compasses for the current document.
- Notes
- Show or hide editorial notes.
- Search results per page
- The number of search results to be displayed per page.
- Search results maximum
- The maximum number of search results returned. Higher settings will result in significantly longer search times; we suggest keeping a lower setting and refining searches when using common terms in order to return a useful result set.
- Duration of preferences
- The length of time that these preferences remain in force. Choosing “session” means that preferences are reset after your current browser session.
Cookies must be enabled in your Web browser for you to set preferences. (Check the help documentation for your browser software if you are unsure how to do this. Most Web browsers enable cookies by default.)
Logging In and Out
Some parts of the digital edition are universally accessible while others are available only to purchasers. A reader can view protected material in two ways:
- User name and password
- An individual subscriber gains access via the log in page with a user name and password.
- IP authentication
- Access is gained by virtue of an institutional purchase. Access is automatically granted if the Rotunda system recognizes the user’s computer as belonging to the institutional network.
It is possible to be subscribed to one Rotunda publication but not another. Readers who attempt to access protected content without a subscription will receive a status message such as:
User 'xyz' is not subscribed to this publication.
A free trial is available for those who would like temporary access to the edition.
Browser Requirements
This edition has been tested and found compatible with the following Web browser versions:
- Mozilla Firefox (version 1.5 and above, all platforms)
- Mozilla Seamonkey (version 1.0 and above, all platforms)
- MS Internet Explorer (Windows only; version 7 fully; version 6 fully via extensions [see “Note on Internet Explorer 6” below])
- Opera (version 9 and above, all platforms [see “Note on Opera” below])
- Safari (version 2 and above, Macintosh OS X)
Certain features such as the compasses will not operate correctly unless JavaScript™ and cookies are enabled. Cookies are also required to set user preferences.
Unicode is used to encode the text. If characters such as apostrophes and quotation marks are incorrectly rendered then the character encoding of your browser should be changed to Unicode (UTF-8).
If you encounter any unusual behavior or formatting in PGWDE that you feel may be browser-related, please let us know using the Report a Bug or Error link found in the footer of every page.
Note on Internet Explorer 6
We are using the IE7 JavaScript library to enable standards-compliant behavior for versions of Internet Explorer prior to version 7. You may notice occasional screen updates as documents are reformatted by this code. We have tested the results using IE6; IE5 may work as well, but we cannot guarantee compatibility. We encourage readers to upgrade to Internet Explorer 7 if possible (requires Windows XP), or to install one of the other supported browsers, to ensure an optimal reading experience.
Note on Opera
By default, Opera creates a popup tooltip containing the text of the “title” attribute of any HTML element with a title. This will obscure the JavaScript tooltips used in our mouseover expansions of abbreviations. If you move the mouse away from the highlighted text and then back, the Opera tooltip should disappear.
Planned Enhancements
Like most digital publications, The Papers of George Washington Digital Edition is a dynamic product. It will grow as new volumes from the print edition are integrated, as corrections are made, and as new features are added. Here is a list of some of the improvements we plan to offer.
Ongoing Corrections
PGWDE incorporates all of the corrections to the print edition that editors at The Papers of George Washington had recorded in their internal database since the first volumes were published in the 1970s. During their collaboration with UVa Press on preparation of the digital edition they have discovered additional needed corrections; these were added to PGWDE during March 2007.
All of the document cross-references (references to other documents within PGWDE that are hyperlinked in the digital edition) were tagged by hand as part of the digital conversion process. We have proofread these cross-references and fixed erroneous links, but with over 43,000 tagged references some errors may remain. We encourage readers to report any they may find via the bug-report link in the footer of every page.
Improvements and New Features
We are planning a number of technical improvements to make PGWDE faster and easier to use. In addition, we intend to add features of particular interest to our scholarly users. A partial list:
- Search speed: Our first priority is to optimize our search code for speed and utility. Currently we truncate large result sets to the 500 most relevant; we plan to remove that limitation soon.
- Search categories: Our underlying XML data includes tagging for manuscript data, including document type (e.g, draft, autograph signed) and repository location or other archival information. We will make these searchable fields. A doc: operator will be added to enable searching for text within documentary material only (excluding editorial notes).
- Search snippets: search results will include brief passages of your search term(s) in context.
- Index: We will make the index searchable. As time allows, we will further regularize entries in the consolidated online index: all main entries have been edited, but there are duplications and inconsistencies at the subentry level. Index speed will also be improved: it is currently being generated dynamically from underlying data maps, but once its content is stable we hope to substitute a static version.
- Revision history: Currently, information about corrections to the edition is visible by mousing over text that has been changed. We plan to add the ability to list corrections by volume and page number (for owners of the print edition interested in adding corrections to their own set), and to allow readers to generate a list of corrections made since a given date.
We welcome feedback from readers on any other improvements and additional features that they would like to see in PGWDE.