Building accessibility: platforms and methods for the development of digital editions and projects

This chapter will discuss the work of the University of Virginia Digital Publishing Cooperative, a grant-funded project with the goal of building the necessary infrastructure to facilitate and support the conceptualization, development, publication, discovery, preservation, and sustainability of digital editions and projects. Major components of this work include evaluating the potential communities of users, understanding how intended audiences might use editions, and how these things affect editorial decisions and publication goals. 

Most current editorial projects, including those that have a print existence, are working towards creating digital editions as well as other types of digital outputs. The digital edition—a collection of historical documents that have been transcribed and edited following a consistent, transparent, and well-informed editorial methodology, and then published online—achieves the primary goal of a scholarly edition: to make historical documents accessible, both textually and intellectually. Additionally, some editors may wish to present their findings in ways we call digital derivatives. These can include early access to their document catalogs, initial transcriptions, or metadata (document, person, place), as well as blog posts, articles, data visualizations, presentations, and so on. These digital derivatives can make available the outputs of editorial work throughout the process, thereby making historical and intellectual content accessible before, during, and after an edition’s scholarly editing and publication. The term digital projects describes the web environment in which most digital editions and their derivatives exist. These ecosystems assemble the range of intellectual content created by a project, including blog posts, articles, data visualizations, timelines, presentations, and so on that can be available alongside more traditional outputs. These opportunities provide editors with a variety of approaches to make content accessible and intelligible, and appeal to large, diverse audiences. 

Another component of the work of the UVA-DPC has been to develop a platform that enables editors to easily build digital editions while also allowing them to create and integrate various digital derivatives, thus reducing a major technological barrier and providing a way for more projects to publish digitally. Furthermore, this editorial platform includes both built-in standardized metadata (encouraging interoperability, reusability, and sustainability)  as well as the flexibility to capture project-specific information, ensuring editors can develop content-driven components. End users of the UVA-DPC digital projects could range from scholars who are interested in transcriptions, annotations, and indexes presented in ways that align with traditional print edition to audiences who might be more comfortable exploring content by means of data visualizations and image-based icons. These users could also be those interested in large datasets from multiple projects for the purposes of  deep textual and data analysis. At the core, however, is a platform that contains well-structured content that enables variety in publication outputs.