The Seward Family Digital Archive is a digital-documentary editing project housed at the University of Rochester. Based on the large collection located at the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections (RBSC), the Seward Family Digital Archive collects, digitizes, transcribes, annotates, encodes, and publishes the vast collections of a prominent nineteenth-century American family for a broader public.

 

The Seward Family Digital Archive follows three generations of family life (ca. 1790-1880) in order to reconstruct the lives of  Seward family members as they experienced the market revolution, abolitionism, and the Civil War. While the project focuses on the family of prominent statesman William Henry Seward, the Seward Family Digital Archive demonstrates the nuances of family life and culture in nineteenth-century America. The correspondence, diaries, and photographs reveal nineteenth-century ideas regarding romance, death, sickness, gender, and friendship. The Seward Family Digital Archive allows historians and researchers to grapple with the big events of the nineteenth-century while exploring the meanings of every day life for this American family.

 

 

Since 2015, I have served as the TEI and Technologies Manager for the Seward Family Digital Archive. In addition to maintaining the digital archive, I have been tasked with training undergraduate students with the basic XML encoding skills necessary to transform transcriptions into complex and interactive documents. Students enrolled in project-related courses follow their letters from a physical manuscript object into a transcribed, digitally-annotated, and encoded document ready for publication on the digital archive. Students combine historical research and documentary editing to create digitally-interactive and accessible source material.