Books have historically been constrained by the limitations of print medium, and even digital books are usually just electronic replicas of bound volumes. Stanford University's Spatial History Project has partnered with developers at Open Sourcery to create an online augmentation to Richard White's latest publication, Railroaded, that provides an interactive medium for readers to access and explore the collection of over 2,000 footnotes, sources, visualizations, and downloadable data files.

This format holds the potential to give readers a way to access and manipulate the material in the footnotes and to give longer life to the book itself. The dynamic nature of the site will allow White and his team to continue to annotate footnote discourse and develop visualizations as analyses and insights evolve.

In addition to its direct benefit to Railroaded, we believe that this site represents a new genre of hybrid digital publishing and are excited to share this Drupal installation profile with the open source and scholarly communities, for free. By doing so we hope that other authors � of monographs, dissertations, theses, and of purely digital publications � can implement this unique infrastructure of modules to present their own scholarship.