The term “documentary,” as in the Association for Documentary Editing, refers to the practice of publishing collections of writings, letters, speeches, and/or other records.

As Mary-Jo Kline and Susan Holbrook Perdue explain in A Guide to Documentary Editing: “this lively and productive area of scholarly endeavor evolved over more than a half century, and it would be difficult for a newcomer to understand [...] without some understanding of the intellectual debates and technological innovations that generated these discussions.” To learn more about this backstory, read the “Introduction” to Kline and Perdue’s Guide.

Before you post any content to the web, consider who you want to be able to use it and what types of support these users might need. Without significant enhancements such as textual transcriptions, indexing, annotation, and search capability, historical materials may remain largely inaccessible for researchers, students, and other users even after they have been made available online. Through the process of editing your documents for digital publication you can help your eventual users to be able to navigate and search your collection as well as to understand the information obscured by features such as hard-to-decipher handwriting, vague or confusing references, inconsistencies in spelling and punctuation, and textual revisions (additions, deletions, substitutions, etc.).

In the end, however, you will need to decide what is needed for your project’s audience(s) and what is feasible for you to create and maintain. Many excellent editions forgo at least some of the features that will be discussed on this page, and many others include ones not mentioned here. If you are undertaking your editing work as part of a larger encompassing project, you may also need to make choices that align your editorial style and policy with the other types of content or user interactions you want to support. You should pursue the options that you feel will best help you to reach the goals of your project and address your target audience(s) needs.

There are a variety of online and in-person training resources available for new documentary editors or project leaders. You can refer to the ADE Education pages on this site for links to resources including readings drawn from the ADE’s curriculum and workshops and training programs hosted by the ADE and other scholarly or professional groups.

A documentary edition aims to:

• Create verified, trustworthy text
  • This process includes transcription, regularization or other emendations, and verification for accuracy and consistency. These subjects can be explored further in the Transcription slides from the ADE's 2019 Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents.
• Make documents available to a broad audience
  • As you pursue your project you will need to make many decisions about policy and technology, such as selecting which documents to include or exclude, choosing a publication platform, and designing your website. To guide these decisions, you might begin by asking some questions about who the eventual audience(s) will be for your project:
    • Will your project address itself to researchers in one or more fields, students, the general public, or a mix of audiences?
    • What kind of uses do you anticipate your audience(s) making of your project?
    • Do any of these groups or use cases take priority over the others? Which ones are the most crucial to support?
  • The answers to these questions should provide you with a basis on which to assess your choices about where to invest time and resources as you plan and develop your project. To gauge how well your expectations match the actual interests and needs of your audience(s), you might consider collecting feedback, formally or informally, from test users. User feedback can provide you with new ideas about how your site might actually be put to use, as well as reveal potential new audience(s) you might reach.
• What software or methods can I use to make my collections indexable and searchable?
  • Users will likely want to navigate your materials through some form of indexing and/or search. As you consider available platforms for digital publication, you may want to think about how each enables different ways to organize and search text and metadata (information about content or objects such as date of writing, subjects or topics contained in a document, format, and geographic information).
  • There are several content management systems (CMS) that are widely used for publishing digital collections that include support for indexing and search, such as
    • Omeka,
    • Drupal,
    • WordPress,
    • Islandora,
    • FromThePage,
    • Scalar.
  • The indexing and search tools that often come built-in or are readily available as add-ons to these CMS options provide a good solution for many projects, especially where there is existing local support available for one of these platforms by a project’s host or partner institution, such as a university or library. Every CMS has its own advantages and disadvantages, however, and there are many established alternatives that may better meet your particular technical and editorial needs. It is also possible to pursue your project within an existing framework or infrastructure that already has its own system in place to make items discoverable and searchable, such as the many individual publications that comprise the University of Virginia Press’s Rotunda digital collection or the projects participating in the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory. Widely used digital platforms for editing and publishing historical documents are discussed in these ADE 2018 Institute slides about Platforms.
• Another way that you can make your content machine-readable to support search and indexing is through textual encoding, most commonly done for documentary editions in the form of XML (eXtensible Markup Language) using the community-maintained Text Encoding Initiative guidelines. Textual encoding allows you to embed detailed, structured information within documents that can then be processed in a variety of ways, although it is not in and of itself a publishing platform. To learn more about textual encoding and what you can do with it, you can view these 2019 ADE Institute slides on Textual Encoding and XML/TEI or visit the "Teach Yourself TEI" guide on the TEI Consortium website.
• Provide context to make content accessible
  • To be able to understand and interpret what they are reading, most users will need at least some additional explanation of a document’s contents and contexts, such as defining obscure or archaic terms and identifying people, places, and events mentioned.
    • Will your users be able to understand the text without significant annotation?
    • What types of annotation and other supporting materials, such as prefaces, appendices, and glossaries, will you include?
  • Keep in mind the size of your collection as you assess how heavily you will annotate and introduce your documents, as this can be a time consuming process that should be guided by your project and its priorities. For example, the same document might be annotated very differently depending on whether it is being prepared primarily for historians, literary scholars, a mix of scholarly readers, students, or a general audience. You can read more about how to formulate an effective annotation policy in these ADE 2019 Institute Annotation slides.

This issue will primarily affect editors of 20^th- and 21^st-century materials. If you are not sure of the copyright holder, you will need to do some investigating to establish who is authorized to give permission for use and publication. For materials held in a public or private collection, you should first establish whether that institution has had the copyright transferred to itself when it took possession of the physical artifact. If not, and there is no other known rightsholder(s), you will need to conduct a good-faith, documented search for them. A party may retain copyright for content whether or not they remain in possession of the physical artifact(s). To get an overview of these copyright issues, you might read Columbia University Libraries’ “Copyright Quick Guide” or, if you are focusing specifically on unpublished materials, the Society of American Archivists’ (SAA) “Copyright and Unpublished Material: An Introduction for Users of Archives and Manuscript Collections.”

If you plan to make use of reproductions such as digital scans of documents, you should also check with the holding collection to find out if they impose restrictions or fees on the reproduction of their holdings. Many collections will require you to order and pay for page images or copies through their own system, as well as to follow their rules for attribution and licensing.

The process of securing permissions and acquiring digital reproductions can sometimes be a lengthy one, it is best to begin as soon as possible once you decide you would like to pursue a project that contains copyrighted and/or restricted use materials.

The best place to start would be any local or affiliated institutions, such as libraries, universities, museums, and historical societies with which you or a main collaborator have an existing relationship. Institutional partners may also be able to provide services and other types of support besides direct funds such as technical infrastructure, technical or grant writing advice, and access to professional or student staffing. You may also be able to apply to private foundations or donors who are interested in issues related to the themes or content area of your project. To learn more about seeking funding from private sources such as universities, foundations, and individual donors, you can see these Private Funding Sources ADE Institute slides.

State, Federal and non-governmental organizations offer multiple national grant programs that could support your project, including:

• NHPRC (National Historical Publications & Records Commission)
• NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities)
• ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies)

Successful applications to competitive national grants will need to demonstrate a high level of preparedness and detailed planning, usually including a narrative description of the project, evidence of work underway or already completed (e.g. example transcriptions, annotations, text encoding, links, or screenshots), work plans, budgets, contributor bios and CVs, references and/or letters of recommendation, and other components. If you would like to speak with someone about your grant proposal ideas, you can attend informational sessions held by national grant program representatives in person and online. If you are just getting started and have access to a local college or university, you might look to see if any information sessions about applying to grants are offered. Academic and professional conferences will also often offer special sessions or mentorship opportunities for prospective grant applicants, which might help you to find advice specific to your field(s). Each of the granting organizations linked above also provides extensive resources for prospective applicants on their websites.

If you are considering applying from an academic or cultural institution, you will also need to discuss with their grants office or administrator any requirements that institution may impose on grant applications and budgets. A hosting institution usually will be able to contribute at least some form of resources to the project (or “cost share” in grant speak), while also requiring some amount of funds be diverted from the grant award to cover the costs for hosting the project and/or helping to administer the grant.

You can look at a listing of ADE-member projects here, including print, digital, and hybrid editions. Scholarly Editing, the ADE's journal currently in the process of relaunching, has also published small digital editions and reviews of published digital and print editions on its site. For in-depth reviews of digital editions and collections, you might want to take a look at the RIDE Journal, which provides a helpful set of questions for reviewers of digital scholarly editions.