Books have historically been constrained by the limitations of print medium, and even digital books are usually just electronic replicas of bound volumes. In response to these challenges, the Stanford University Spatial History Project has teamed up with Stanford Academic Technology Specialists in the Jasper Group and developers at Portland, Oregon-based Open Sourcery, to create an interactive medium for readers to access and explore Railroaded's collection of over 2,000 footnotes, links to sources, visualizations, and downloadable supporting data files.
This dynamic format offers readers a new way to access, consider, and manipulate the volume’s material, while also allowing 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.
Click here to learn more about the "Discursive" installation profile.
