Covering Europe, the Americas, and portions of Asia from the 17th through the 19th centuries, the EE project is, in its own words, “reconnecting the first global social network”. According to the director of the project, Dr. Robert V. McNamee, “Tens of thousands of fully annnotated letters, some from definitive scholarly editions, others edited and published exclusively in EE, are uniquely integrated chronologically and geographically to recreate the conversations that gave rise to the modern world. Thousands of correspondents are identified and provided with biographical notes, while increasing numbers of maps, graphs, translations and lesson plans (the latter written by academics using EE) are provided to help students, teachers and researchers understand and make best use of the depth and breadth of information in this primary-source collection. EE welcomes submissions for the publication of additional letters (from one letter to thousands of letters), and accepts new and corrected biographical notes and annotations as part of its regular technical and content updates.”³

At least sixty printed editions totaling 190 volumes of manuscript correspondence have been digitized and augmented with an “nts” database of annotations.  The database currently includes over 59,000 letters and documents, with more than 100,000 correspondent entries and over 250,000 scholarly annotations. The major languages represented by the manuscripts are English (45%) and French (45%), with other documents in Dutch, German, Greek, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. Dekker in The Charleston Advisor notes that “While the project originally chronicled . . . European thought, more American content is being added . . . as of February 2011, there are 517 American writers . . . [compared with] 111 Dutch, 2107 English, 2214 French, 217 German, 179 Italian, 50 Russian, 415 Scottish, and 575 Swiss.”⁴

Future content under exploration with various archival collections includes correspondence from musicians, scientists, and physicians.⁵

The addition of a digital publishing platform is intended to expand the scope of content at minimal cost through distributed contributions. “The project leaders have invited the community not only to assist in locating this correspondence in special collections, but also to add scholarly commentary and other born-digital material to it . . . To date, six collections of correspondence have been offered to EE, bypassing traditional publication through an academic press. A review board will be cxreated to assess the material.”⁶