But a review of thousands of pages of his papers archived at the University of Tennessee and interviews with his former aides show that he displayed little enthusiasm for divisive battles over abortion and other issues that motivate religious Republican primary voters.
Now, a paper archive has emerged that reveals how the Punch and Judy phenomenon grew and waned in popularity, with remarkable Victorian photographs, rare books, scripts, drawings and newspaper cuttings, which have never before been seen by the public.
So in reality, like everyone else, Briggs works from the paper archive - the surviving drafts and versions of works in progress, and what Woolf wrote about her aspirations and anguishes about her writing, in diaries and in letters to friends.
The group is also collecting a paper archive of witness accounts of netting sightings from across the city, complete with license plate numbers and descriptions of suspects, he said.
Doing research in a paper archive is to doing research in a Web archive as going to a fish market is to being thrown in the middle of an ocean; the only thing they have in common is that both involve fish.
The work, published as a paper through Cornell University's open scientific paper archive, arXiv, details the researcher's efforts to add the ability to apply a global theme to sentence generation using a system called a variational autoencoder and the results, including what could easily be mistaken for poetry.
You can't search it the way you can search the Web, because it's too big and what's in there isn't sorted, or indexed, or catalogued in any of the many ways in which a paper archive is organized; it's not ordered in any way at all, except by URL and by date.
And the U.S. Department of Agriculture is building a full-text paper archive called PubAg.
The explicit goal of going paperless should be to streamline processes and improve quality, rather than to save money by not having to maintain a paper archive.
No one really knows what the archival future of digital publications are, in the British Library comprehensive paper archives stretch back many centuries.
