Digital History and Creating an e-Text of Richard Ligon's A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados

In his A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657) Richard Ligon takes his readers on a journey from war-torn England in the 1640s and into the Anglo-Atlantic world. His lively account is one of the most important remaining testimonials describing life in the early modern Caribbean and the development of sugar colonies and slavery, and an excellent primary source for undergraduates. A digital edition of the History has now been produced and placed into the public domain. A new edition will soon be available in EPUB format (for portable electronic devices) at http://www.davidchansmith.net/the-richard-ligon-project/. The e-text will also be added to the social reading site SocialBook where instructors can have their classes annotate the text.

The current edition of the e-text provides an introduction situating the text and examining its major themes, explanatory footnotes throughout, hypertext links, a bibliography, a modern map, and modern typeface. Page references to the 1657 edition have also been preserved. The e-text is fully searchable and readers can zoom into images to reveal greater detail. Creating this e-text presented a number of technical challenges, including producing an attractive layout and obtaining the keyed text and illustrations. Using Adobe InDesign, it was possible to produce a professional layout of the text with careful attention to readability as well as generate output in multiple file formats. Institutional support was essential. The Text Creation Partnership and Harvard University Libraries generously shared their resources for this project, including a fully keyed text and reproductions of images from an original copy.

The digital format allows for ongoing revision through reader suggestions, allowing the e-text to become interactive in a way that is much more difficult for print media. In the case of the critical apparatus such as footnotes and even bibliography, ongoing revision means that as new knowledge becomes available it can quickly be integrated into the e-text and become accessible to the readership. Part of this process involves inviting readers to contribute to the project as collaborative editors by returning comments or corrections. Rather than a fixed expression of singular editorship, the e-text becomes an evolving, collaborative project that draws upon a wide pool of knowledge.

It was important to communicate to the readership the limitations and purposes of the e-text, which was designed for undergraduate audiences. It is neither a critical edition nor an authoritative text for use by scholarly researchers. One major textual change illustrates the priority given to the e-text's teaching function. In the original book a table of contents was affixed at the end. This was a conventional seventeenth-century practice, but that diverges from what modern undergraduates expect. The table has therefore been moved to the front of the book and its titles have been interpolated into the text at the head of the sections to which they refer. These changes have the effect of helping undergraduates find information quickly and breaking up an otherwise continuous flow of text.

Finally, authors of e-texts must actively advertise and convince teachers and undergraduates to adopt this untested medium. Emails to professional listservs and institutes have helped to promote readership. The feedback so far has been positive with the text in use in courses in Europe and the Americas.