The next generation in digital publishing
Electronic Enlightenment is significantly different from most other online academic resources: our content is not page images but full-text, keyed from source. And our combination of XML, XHTML and MySQL means that — potentially — every piece of data is separately searchable and therefore significant: from page numbers in a late 18th-century printed source, to an individual correspondent's age or location at the time of writing a specific letter.
And there's more to come, because the full functionality of EE is still in part only “potential”.
One reason is the limitations of present-day technology. For instance: EE's content includes a bewildering range of character types, from Syriac and Arabic to astrological and apothecary's symbols. EE treats even these uncommon characters as real, searchable text, using the international standard Unicode system. But not all current PC browsers can automatically display all these characters; that's why we recommend users of EE to install the Code 2000 font (which provides a wide range of Unicode characters) to supplement the fonts used by their browser.
In addition, the relative newness of advanced digital publishing in the humanities means that some researchers are not yet used to the range of possibilities offered by a resource like EE. We've tried to make the search pages as uncluttered and intuitive as possible, but some people may still feel there is simply too much choice. Expectations are changing quickly, however, and users can be reassured that EE is designed and built for the future.
More than a simple resource, Electronic Enlightenment is designed to be a virtual scholarly environment, where it is easy to go from person to letter to manuscript to annotation, with complex searches and serendipitous finds.