Sue Perdue
Director
Documents Compass/Virginia Foundation for the Humanities
Susan Severtson
Director, Communications
Virginia Foundation for the Humanities
Documents Compass was established in January 2008 as an intermediary resource for publishers and scholar/editors. Created to help plan and develop documentary editions, the service locates, develops, and employs the tools best suited to each project’s needs, and facilitates transcribing, proof reading, tagging, and copy editing.
Its first grant, awarded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, provides funds to explore the feasibility of creating People of the Founding Era (PFE), a biographical data source that will be the first electronic prosopography of the modern era. Unlike biography, which examines the life of a single person, prosopography is the study of groups of people, with special attention given to the group’s common characteristics and patterns of activity.
Documents Compass will develop a database that includes native-born and naturalized Americans born between 1713 and 1815 as well as their children and grandchildren. By enabling scholars to study individuals and groups, the PFE will be an especially versatile research tool for better understanding the United States of America in the decades before, during, and immediately after its founding.
Especially important is the fact that the project will make use of data mining techniques to draw information from existing digitized material. The Founding Fathers documentary editing projects, which have been in place for decades, have been consistently verifying and tracking biographical information relating to the people of the founding era. The PFE project will not only use this data as a base, it will produce an interoperable source of biographical information which will inform the ongoing work of the editing projects.
This presentation will include a description of the project’s concept, and the progress made in the start-up phase, showing the data source, the data mining results, the techniques being used to edit and expand the data, and the expectations for the results of this feasibility study, as well as implications for ongoing data compilation.
http://www.DocumentsCompass.org
Handout (PDF)