Digitizing the Documents That Built a Nation

As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, the UVA Center for Digital Editing (CDE) is doing something that feels both urgent and fitting: bringing the nation’s founding documents out of archives and into the hands of anyone curious enough to read them.

A $10 million grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities is funding the work, supporting existing CDE initiatives including the Washington Papers and Rotunda and funding new student internships, summer conferences, visiting scholars, a digital humanities educational initiative called eLaboratories, and the James Madison’s Montpelier archaeology lab.

A significant portion of the grant supports forgingUS, a new public website that will make primary sources from the founding era available to anyone. The Declaration of Independence will be among the documents included, alongside materials gathered from historical societies and existing CDE projects, presented with images, maps, and data visualizations.

Jennifer Stertzer, Director of the CDE and Director of the Washington Papers, sees the grant as an opportunity to build something lasting. “We’re building a technical infrastructure that isn’t bespoke,” she said. “It’s more like an ecosystem that provides support along the way” rather than a one-time publication.The broader goal is civic as much as scholarly.

Having a humanities toolkit would be beneficial to help us be better citizens today. To encourage that, and to make it not boring or overwhelming—that’s what this is all about. I’m hopeful that forgingUS can become a place that people can go and really engage with all of American history.

JSJennifer StertzerDirector of the CDE and Director of the Washington Papers

What distinguishes forgingUS from other anniversary commemorations, Stertzer says, is its focus on the documents themselves rather than the celebrated figures. “It’s thinking through all of the other conversations and correspondence that’s happening behind the scenes that resulted in important documents like the Declaration or the Constitution,” she said.

The site is designed to grow. “We view forgingUS as an ongoing activity that happens right through the present,” Stertzer said. “That gives us the opportunity to add more content, put content in conversation, and give users a chance to engage and explore.”

Beyond the site itself, the CDE plans to deepen its engagement with students and local historical sites in the Charlottesville community. “We’ve built in some space to think creatively beyond this initial work,” Stertzer said, “not in year one, but in subsequent years when we have a bit more time and breathing room.”

This story originally appeared in the 2026 Annual Research Report, produced by the Office of the Vice President of Research. Find more stories from this report here: https://news.research.virginia.edu/category/annual-report/

Video Transcript:

So the Center for Digital Editing is here at UVA, and the project that we’re currently, working  on is the Forging US Project. The goal is to curate content from  editorial projects, so projects like the papers of George Washington, the papers of Thomas Jefferson, and to bring  that content together in one  digital platform.

So digitizing the records are important because a lot of times people don’t have  access to the archives themselves. So the further we get into digitizing more and more records, the more of a complete picture that we get of both the history of the US, but also,

the world as a whole. You know, ultimately, we hope that  this site proves to be engaging for our audience, that they’re excited about coming and, seeing the primary  sources and learning, in this case, about the founding of the country, and we’re going to help tell that story.