Which, given Mrs. Adams’ role as a protofeminist could be very interesting.
(Referring to MGibson’s post above.)
Even the words have changed their meaning in some cases. If one FF said to another, “Your argument, sir, is obnoxious,” he would have meant it was unpopular, not disgusting.
I don’t see why they can’t at least do a preliminary release. Scan the letters and release them as text. Then publish the annotations and indexes as they become available.
English has changed a little bit in 200 years, in case you haven’t noticed. Just because we speak it differently than they did doesn’t mean they were smart and we’re dumb.
I wouldn’t be surprised. There’s already at least one Church of Coltrane in San Francisco, and I bet a lot of American Deists are attracted to the faith by the fact that Thomas Jefferson believed in it.
I don’t know about you, but I think we could stand an electrocution or two.
You say that like it’s easy, but it’s incredibly time-consuming and expensive work. And the annotations and indexes don’t just “become available.” They have to be done by someone, and paid for by someone.
The founding fathers didn’t write their letters on typewriters. These documents are handwritten, often in awfully difficult handwriting, and sometimes criss-crossing in palimpsest, so in order to “release them as text” you would have to have someone read and transcribe every single one. More modern typed documents could be scanned and then run through Optical Character Recognition software for digitization, but that just won’t work with 18th-century handwriting.
I think the first half of your suggestion is a good place to start, but even that’s expensive and time-consuming. We could scan the letters and release them as page images only (jpeg files, or something similar). To save time, they could be sorted simply by the boxes and/or folder in which they currently reside. This would mean that they would not be searchable in any real, computer-type sense of the word, and that people who wanted to look at them would have to look at them individually to find what they want, much like going through an archive box in Library of Congress Manuscript Reading Room.
The next step could then be to have volunteer members of the public transcribe the documents into plain text format. The volunteer operation could work in a similar way to Project Gutenberg’s e-book proof-reading system. Once the letters are transcribed into text files, they would then be searchable, thus speeding up the research process for scholars and other interested parties. But even this phase would require even more cash, because you don’t just get the library’s email guy to throw together the type of database-driven website that you would need for people to make the most of a project like this. Tech people also cost money.
The annotation stuff would have to come later, and would have to await people who are interested in doing it in their spare time, or an infusion of cash from somewhere. As Sampiro suggested earlier, this is something that is very unlikely to be cost-effective in market terms. There simply aren’t enough people interested enough in paying money for this information to justify a private, for-profit enterprise. And half of the Americans whining that this stuff isn’t yet digitized would probably whine even more loudly if told that their tax rates were going to increase in order to support the project.
I know the professor who oversaw, for the better part of three decades, the collection and annotation and publication of the Dwight D. Eisenhower papers. As this article notes, to compile the papers of one president required sifting through about 35 million documents and editing them down to about 10,700 which made it into the 21-volume set. Admittedly, a 20th-century president probably produced more paperwork in his life than most 18th-century men, especially given the size of the bureaucracy in which he worked, but even for the founding fathers we’re still talking about staggering volumes of material to go through.
[quote]
You say that like it’s easy, but it’s incredibly time-consuming and expensive work. And the annotations and indexes don’t just “become available.” They have to be done by someone, and paid for by someone.
The founding fathers didn’t write their letters on typewriters. These documents are handwritten, often in awfully difficult handwriting, and sometimes criss-crossing in palimpsest, so in order to “release them as text” you would have to have someone read and transcribe every single one. More modern typed documents could be scanned and then run through Optical Character Recognition software for digitization, but that just won’t work with 18th-century handwriting.
/
[quote]
I find this all incomprehensible, and mhendo’s comments not relevant. Little Nemo’s suggestion seems perfectly correct and relevant.
I’ve done a lot of work with old documents. Land Deeds, reports, and financial records have been “published” in the form of microfilm , or you can order photocopies, In some cases I’ve gone to state archives to handle and copy the original documents. The point is, they’re available. They’re not held back because they haven’t been transcribed or commented upon. I’ve spent hours trying to transcribe the sometime illegible and appalling handwriting on these documents. No one has transcribed them. I don’t know if anyone official will EVER comment upon them. But the historical resources they represent are available for historians. In fact, I prefer to see the raw, original documents – I might not agree with some government historian’s interpretation. I know that I didn’t, in several cases.
0That’s all the OP is asking for – just scan the original documents so that We The People can read and use them, and to hell with your transcriptions and interpretations.
Princhester, I think you don’t understand what’s going on here. It’s not that Americans think that Hamilton or any other of the Founding Fathers was so important that every word they wrote was sacred. It’s that it’s that Americans think that it’s important to preserve the writings of important people (mostly Americans, but also important people from other countries) and see that their writings are in print, if only in expensive editions. This seems to be less common in other counties.
I’ve never discussed this with an Australian before, so I don’t know much about the frequency of this sort of preservation there, but I recall a review by a Brit that showed me how much more important this sort of thing is in the U.S. In a biography of C. S. Lewis by a Brit, he made a comment about the Wade Library at Wheaton College in Illinois where a lot of material about the Inklings (and particularly Lewis) is preserved, including manuscripts, copies of books by the Inklings, books about them, and books that had influenced them. This author made a snide crack about the library being a shrine to Lewis.
To this I reply, “No, you’ve completely misunderstood the purpose of the Wade Library.” It’s like the Presidential Libraries in the U.S. Every president of the U.S. since Hoover has had a library established (often near where he grew up) in which all the papers of his administration are kept, annotated, and available for research. This doesn’t mean that Americans think that these people were saints. In fact, most Americans don’t even consider Gerald Ford to be a significant leader, let alone a saint. The Presidential Libraries weren’t created to worship the former presidents but to preserve an important piece of history.
The same is true of the many projects that are taking place in American university libraries at the moment to preserve the writings (by keeping those papers and publishing annotated editions) of many important literary, political, and miscellaneous figures, many of who aren’t American. There are apparently a huge number of these projects going on at the moment. It seems to be a particularly American thing to do. No one on these projects considers this preservation a matter of worship, just of making sure that important writings are not lost. For an example of this preservation that has reached something close to popular publication, do a search on the Library of America and see how one publisher is making copies of important authors available in durable and reasonably priced editions.
Chaucer, Shakespeare and Dickens wrote in English too.
Nevertheless some modern explanation is required. “Today I met X, who was gay.”
On another topic, a recently discovered letter shows that it was a sunny day when the Amendments to the Constitution were drafted. Combined with the fact that Puritanical views of clothing were gradually being discarded, we now know what ‘the right to bare arms’ really means. :eek:
GGGGGGGGGGGOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLL!!!
And i never suggested otherwise. I’m perfectly well aware that they’re available, and can be perused by anyone who has the time and the inclination.
I was simply taking for granted that there would be some benefit to having them digitized and available to people who, for whatever reason, cannot travel to the appropriate archives. And i think that’s hardly a controversial position. Millions of documents and publications from the colonial and early national period in American history are now available online, and it makes life immeasurably easier and cheaper for grad students, professors, and other scholars if they are able to view these items simply by opening up a browser window, rather than flying to the Library of Congress or the Boston Athenaeum or whatever other repository night have the material.
The “government historian”?
You do realize, i assume, that most of the transcription and interpretation of these documents is not done by some mythical “government historian,” but by university scholars and other similar folks. Yes, much of the funding for the Founding Fathers Project is allocated by Congress, but the people doing the annotating are experts in their field. According to the OP’s linked article, Pulitzer Prize-wining historian David McCullough says that his own work would have benefitted from having the annotated version of the papers available.
Well, that’s exactly what i suggested in my previous post, so i’m not sure what you’re whining about.
In case you had trouble grasping it, this was my recommendation.
-
First, scan the documents and make them available as straightforward page images (i.e., photos) so that people can read the original handwriting and see all the original corrections and other markings.
-
Have paid people and/or volunteers transcribe the papers into text files. This will facilitate the search process exponentially, allowing people to search for specific words within documents rather than having to wade through hundreds of documents to find the subject matter they were after.
-
Continue the process of annotation and interpretation because, despite your insistence that only the original documents will do, and that you always know best, the fact is that even experienced historians like David McCullough can benefit from the time and effort spent by people who have gone through the documents and explained things that might not be readily apparent even to an expert.
And to this, i would reply, "No, you’ve completely misunderstood the nature of A.N. Wilson’s critique of the Wade Center.
Wilson was not making some comment on the existence of research centers devoted to particular historical figures. He was not mocking the desire to collect and make available the historical papers and writings of important literary people like C.S. Lewis
Wilson was making a comment, which came in the context of his book’s wider argument about the way Lewis is remembered, on the specific tone and atmosphere of the Wade Center, the way in which it “keeps alive the image of an evangelical Lewis, simple in his devotion to ‘mere Christianity,’ and theologically occupied almost to the exclusion of all other interests.” (p. 304) Wilson is not arguing against the need for research centers; he is taking issue with the particular way that the Wade Center chooses to represent Lewis.
Now, you might argue (as quite a few people have) that Wilson’s focus on trying to rescue Lewis from this “evangelical” image is misguided or poorly argued. And you might also argue (again, as people have done) that he is unfair in his interpretation of the Wade Center. But he is not making some grandiose claim that demonstrates his ignorance of American document preservation techniques and motivations; he is offering a singular critique of how one particular institution goes about doing this in one particular case.
Well, i think the Prsidential Libraries are a great idea, and their mission of preserving the history of each presidency is an important one. The collection of documents and other similar projects undertaken by these institutions constitute important intellectual and cultural work.
But, for better or worse, many Presidential Libraries do, in fact, “worship the former presidents.” Have you ever taken a glance inside the Reagan Library? It might as well be named “The Apotheosis of Ronald Reagan.” People who visit the libraries, but who have no need to do sustained research in their excellent collections, could well be forgiven for thinking that their only purpose is to serve as a shrine. Unfortunately, as Presidents become ever more secretive about their administration’s papers, and increasingly intent on keeping potentially embarrassing documents out of the public eye for “security” reasons, the perception of the Presidential Libraries as little more than exercises in personal and political masturbation is probably only going to increase.
I agree that these are important and fascinating projects, and should e maintained. And the Library of America series is excellent.
As it happens, I’ve had occasion to deal with the George Washington Papers Project at the University of Virginia. They’re doing a lot of important work on a shoestring budget. It’s very time-consuming, but will ultimately be a great historical asset for the nation. I doubt there are any bombshells lurking in the piles of stuff yet to be sorted, annotated and published. Still, given a choice between a comprehensive record and a spotty one, I’ll take the former any day.
I agree with mhendo’s critique of presidential libraries today, though. Yes, their primary purpose is - or ought to be - preserving the documents and artifacts of each administration for the sake of history. But the public face of most such libraries, and the reason the tourists visit, is the celebration of the man whose name is chiseled out front. One critic likened them to pharaonic monuments, and I think there’s something to that.
Nobody says the Founding Fathers were perfect. Some were slaveholders, philanderers, etc. But we’re interested in learning more about these guys–not for the purpose of rewriting the Constitution.
You’ve got Ned Kelly!
Not a fair comparison. Collecting and annotating his writings would take, what? The better part of an afternoon? 
Thif if a concern for many documentf written from that time period. Furley a fimple text “fearch and replace” would help?
Old joke, couldn’t refift 
If you read the Post article in its entirety, you see that the Library of Congress is on the side of the *Let’s speed things up * group. It’s clear the groups who have the papers are thinking about digitizing in the sense of digitizing the volumes they produce, not digitizing the original material.
Well, they need to radically reconceptualize the product, as they don’t seem to be even considering simply digitizing and releasing the source material at all, ever. Since the technology simply didn’t exist when these projects started, it was likely never part of the plans to do anything BUT publish nice leather-bound annotated volumes, which would then be sold at prices most libraries can’t afford anyway. The article notes that the complete set of Alexander Hamilton’s 26 volumes of papers costs about $2600. His works are complete, the article says, mostly because he died young and there wasn’t as much material.