Introduction to The Papers of George Washington Digital Edition

Theodore J. Crackel

The Papers of George Washington Digital Edition (PGWDE) is the joint product of the University of Virginia Press’s Rotunda imprint and The Papers of George Washington at the University of Virginia. The intellectual content of this edition was produced by The Papers of George Washington, and the staff of Rotunda prepared it for digital publication. The Founders, Washington Committee for Historic Mount Vernon, generously provided funding for the project.

Development of the Digital Edition

Rotunda, created in 2001 by the University of Virginia Press for the publication of original digital scholarship, was initially funded with grants from the Mellon Foundation and the Office of the President at the University of Virginia. In the fall of 2001, the executive director of Mount Vernon, James C. Rees, initiated discussions with the editors of The Papers of George Washington and the Press about the possibility of digitizing the Papers for Mount Vernon’s Web site. Soon thereafter the Press made a proposal to create a digital edition of the fifty-two published volumes and future volumes. In June 2004, Mount Vernon committed funds to support the project.

In early September of that year, the leadership of Rotunda and the Washington Papers met to discuss the design of the digital edition and the role each team would play; they concluded that the Rotunda staff would work on design and production issues, and the Washington Papers would focus on content. The Rotunda staff immediately undertook the task of digitizing and encoding documents, preparing graphics, and designing an interface—in essence, determining how the product would look and function. In the meantime, a newly created Washington Papers team identified and compiled a list of known errors in the print volumes and corrected them in the digital edition. They also worked to resolve the often varied ways individuals, unique topics, and identical sources had been identified by fifteen different editors over a period of almost forty years; and, based on that effort, to derive a cumulative index and new short-title and repository code lists.

In October 2006, the first iteration of PGWDE was unveiled at the opening of Mount Vernon’s new Ford Orientation Center and Donald W. Reynolds Museum and Education Center, to be followed in February 2007 by a site-licensed version published by the Press.

History of the Papers of George Washington

The Papers of George Washington was launched in 1969 under the joint auspices of the University of Virginia and the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, and was headed by Donald Jackson. Under his leadership, members of the new project launched document searches and prepared Washington’s diaries for publication. The Diaries Series was released in six volumes from 1976 to 1979.

In 1976, W. W. Abbot replaced Jackson as editor in chief. At this time, the correspondence was divided into five chronological series: Colonial, Revolutionary War, Confederation, Presidential, and Retirement. The Colonial Series was completed in ten volumes (1983–95). The Revolutionary War Series was begun in 1985 and the Presidential Series in 1987.

Dorothy Twohig, editor in chief from 1992 to 1998, undertook and completed the Confederation Series, published in six volumes from 1992 to 1997, and the Retirement Series, totaling four volumes, published in 1998–99. Under Philander D. Chase, who headed the project from 1999 to 2004, the focus was placed largely on moving the two remaining large segments of the papers—the Revolutionary War Series and the Presidential Series—forward in an expeditious manner.

In 2004, Theodore J. Crackel became editor in chief. During his tenure, a digital edition team was created and the project reorganized to facilitate an orderly advance to its completion; at the current publication rate of two volumes per year, several members of today’s professional staff could see the release of the last volumes and the final augmentation of the digital edition before their retirement. In 2006, PGWDE’s first year of publication, sixteen of the projected forty volumes of the Revolutionary War Series and thirteen of twenty-one of the Presidential Series had been published.

The Digital Edition: Current Version and Future Plans

Rotunda, in its inaugural publication of The Papers of George Washington Digital Edition, offers the first fifty-two volumes of the print edition. This online version will be a living edition, regularly updated and corrected. New volumes will be added to PGWDE within a year or two following their initial print publication. Also, new documents will be added as they are found, and transcriptions and annotations revised when more authoritative versions are located of documents already in PGWDE—for example, when we obtain a recipient copy of a document for which we originally had only a draft. In the years ahead we hope to add full transcriptions of documents excluded from or only partially included in the print edition.

Biographical sketches of Washington’s correspondents and other individuals—identified by “id.” in the index—appear in multiple volumes and series of The Papers. This duplication reflects the new material that has become available during forty years of research producing the print edition. PGWDE will consolidate all of this information into single biographical sketches.

Time and experimentation almost certainly will suggest other desirable enhancements, and these will be added as time and resources allow. One such now under consideration is to include links to images of the original documents. Please be on the lookout for notices of enhancements as new features become available.