Biographical dictionaries in the digital era

By any measure biography is popular today. With films, dedicated television channels, books, magazines, and multiple forms of social media disseminating biographical information online at an unprecedented rate and feeding an ever escalating interest in the lives of real people, intense public engagement with biography may be considered a defining feature of the early-twenty-first-century cultural landscape. Not coincidentally, interest in biography has soared from the mid-1990s alongside the phenomenon of mass public access to the World Wide Web, and especially since the emergence of Web 2.0 and social media in the past decade. National dictionaries of biography provide a compelling demonstration of the benefits of computer-assisted research methods. These online biographical dictionaries and reference resources are increasingly allowing quick access to information while providing enhanced data-rich environments for sophisticated analysis and visualization, enabling new research findings in fields of biography, prosopography, genealogy, family history, and social history more broadly. Major national dictionaries of biography have been migrated online in the last decade and a half. The American National Biography (1999), Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (2001), Dictionary of Canadian Biography (2003), and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) were first to move online, then the Australian Dictionary of Biography (2006), followed by the Swedish, Welsh, Ulster, and Irish national biographies (a notable exception is the Diccionario Biográfico Español, 25 vols, 2011, which remains in print only [Carter 2013]). In their digital forms these dictionaries have taken different approaches (chronological and sequential volumes, as in the case of Australia and Canada, or complete series as for the American and UK examples). Their interfaces and priorities have also varied, driven by different histories, epistemologies or technical considerations (Carter 2013). In this chapter I focus on the transition from print to digital of the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB), a 50-year print publishing project that was first launched online in 2006 and substantially redeveloped in 2010-13. Now conceived of as a virtual research environment in its own right, ADB online allows for user analysis of complex biographical and historical datasets, including faceted searching, relationship mapping, and visualization of search results. The ADB is a working example of key issues that need to be considered in migrating any major project from print to digital form. I begin this chapter by outlining the ADB’s history in order to establish the context for its publication online and subsequent redevelopment. Although the online product was designed for speed and ease of use, the process has been time-demanding and involves an ongoing program of manual indexing that is providing a solid foundation for future applications, including social network analysis, data mining, and dataset interoperability.