Readings on historical process emphasize that it is often a solitary game – picture the bespectacled and permanently stooped credentialled professional historian shuffling through stygian library stacks or sifting the mildewed reams of old manuscript archives in sepulchral silence. They (usually male and of sufficient income to earn a degree) inhabited an insular professional world. Historians also once had a narrow focus that reflected themselves and their interests, compounded by scarcity of the historical record. What treasured few records survived the vagaries of time and whose voices were recorded? The first need no longer be true, the second has been turned on its head, and attempts are being made to make history more egalitarian and comprehensive.

The digital dream is to make information more widely available without the constraints of the past. Much of what constitutes the traditional historical record being newly made today is born digital, and much of what was made in the past is being digitized through mass digitization projects – a more comprehensive view of the building blocks of history than ever available before. Further, digitization theoretically allows for egalitarian accessibility to primary documents regardless of geography and means, thereby allowing anyone to contribute to the “official” history.

There is a thorn hidden in this digital rose. Although so much more can now be accessed from anywhere, now there are often simply too many sources to process or comprehend and the traditional problems of scholarship have not been resolved. For example, Google Books hoped to make texts freely available. Wikipedia attempts to make general knowledge easy to find and written by anybody with the interest to do so. In other words, comprehensive and egalitarian. Laudable, but each demonstrates the continuing problems for scholarship. For Google, it was lingering copyright claims for books. Authors and publishers wished to continue to profit from their work, made more messy by the legalities of “orphaned” works for which neither could be found, but for which the copyright had not expired. In Wikipedia’s case, it continues to suffer from perceived inaccuracy and the self-selecting pool of editors of the content. The contributors, like academics of old, continue to be men with the means to spend the large amount of time needed to create the articles. The paywalls stifling access stayed intact and the range of voices creating the history is still narrow.

For all the continuing issues, history is a living thing – past events rippling across the pond of time to the present. Digitization and collaboration still represent opportunities to see the promise and relevance of history. The New Eden project attempts to be an example of these possibilities. The papers of the Constable brothers contain within them a snapshot of the United States in its early days as an independent nation. The brothers are articulate, observant, and engaging travelers. They came to this country because of their interest in the democratic experiment being conducted here. They wanted to see the people, places, and things that they had only read about in their native Britain. They did not just travel but wanted to know the why. It is a chance to see the foundations of the United States as they are being lain. This is doubly exciting as the papers are unpublished and consequently otherwise largely unknown. Digitization of them adds them to the pool of digital possibilities. However, the intent is to not just put them out there without comment. The authors intend to collaborate, each through their unique lens, and engage in conversations about what the papers are, where the brothers went, and how they fit into their larger context of time and place. We hope you join us for the journey.