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Who Built America? and TK3

Permalink for this paragraph 0 MKG: Can you talk a bit about the Who Built America? book and about how early multimedia texts built in TK3 relate to the ones we have today?

BS: In the early days of CD-ROM production at Voyager, we were keenly aware that the high cost of programming presented significant obstacles to would-be electronic publishers. Needing to have an expensive programmer work extensively on each project created two big problems. The first was that we had to put really high price tags on the CD-ROMs, which seriously limited the size of the market. And the second was that the authors weren’t involved in the process of production during what I would consider really key moments. And so my sense was that if the electronic publishing culture was going to be as diverse and rich as print publishing, we had to enable authors to wield the tools of digital production themselves.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 And so, when I left Voyager to start Night Kitchen, we took the authors of Who Built America, The American Social History Project, as the most important model of TK3’s future users. Roy Rosenzweig, Steve Brier and Josh Brown were engaged scholars enthusiastically embracing the use of digital technology in their work as historians. If we could make something that those guys could use to produce the second volume of Who Built America without having to hire a programmer, then, I figured, we were on the right track. Although they didn’t end up doing the work themselves, WBA 2 was indeed built in TK3 and still works today.

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