The Dolley Madison Digital Edition is a born-digital comprehensive edition of the correspondence and ancillary documents of Dolley Payne Todd Madison. Rotunda, the electronic imprint of the University of Virginia Press, published the first installment of the edition in 2004. Editors are currently at work on Volume X, set to be published in the Spring of 2017. The DMDE was the first publication of Rotunda and is now available as part of Rotunda's American Founding Era Collection.
Protocols
The DMDE attempts to identify every person, place, organization, and citation that is mentioned in the correspondence. Annotations are provided by associating names to text. A list is provided in the left hand margin to facilitate searching. In addition the DMDE provides editorial notes to explain issues that transcend individual letters but have not been the subject of serious historical research and writing. All documents are marked up in XML and conform to TEI.P5. Readers can both browse and search the collection or pull up the complete set of annotations, called in this edition the "glossary."
History
The DMDE was created by Holly Cowan Shulman working in close collaboration with the Papers of James Madison and Rotunda. The goal of the edition was and remains twofold: to provide a modern edition of Dolley Madison's correspondence; and to provide a model for a born-digital documentary edition in the field of history. There are two previous editions of letters of Dolley Madison. The first, edited by her great-niece, Lucia B. Cutts, was originally published in 1886. The second, edited by a Washington historian, Allen C. Clark, was published in 1914. Both are highly selected and heavily bowdlerized. The DMDE was preceded by a selective edition edited by Shulman and David B. Mattern, senior associate editor of the Papers of James Madison: The Selected Letters of Dolley Payne Madison, published in 2003 by the University of Virginia Press. The DMDE has been referenced in such publications as: Catherine Allgor, A Perfect Union; Jason Ripper, American Stories; Cokie Roberts, Ladies of Liberty; Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello; Johanna Drucker, SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing; David Lynn Holmes, The Faiths of the Founding Fathers; Woody Holton, Abigail Adams; Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House; Caroline Winterer, The Mirror of Antiquity.
