Frances Osborn Robb, a scholar who has worked on the Encyclopedia of Alabama, writes in to correct some information we included with an image of Confederate president Jefferson Davis’s inauguration.
I read the short information on the color lithograph of Davis’s inauguration. I presently have a book manuscript under review by the University of Alabama Press on [...]

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Just for fun: Go to the New York Times online and punch “George Pickett” into the search engine there. What you’ll find is Encyclopedia Virginia’s entry on the famous Confederate general. The Times has begun to syndicate our content, beginning with Pickett, in their Times Topic series. The goal for the Timesis to have such articles provide background knowledge and context [...]

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Here’s a story of an encyclopedia editor (that’s me) who tries his hand at editing Wikipedia, with mixed results (see Bix Beiderbecke), only to find five dollars at the end! In fact, it’s such an awesome story, it’s picked up by the Los Angeles Times.
Except for the part about five dollars. They left that out.
UPDATE: [...]

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In a Washington Post article from November, Rob Pegoraro investigates the burgeoning world of “augmented reality”–a concept that makes your mobile phone (as of right now it has to be phone working on the Android or iPhone platforms) into a tool that uncovers layers of information in the world around you.
Let’s take this faux scenario: [...]

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Alert reader Sue Perdue, director of Documents Compass at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, saw the article we linked to yesterday on the business of encyclopedias and thought of Ball of Fire, the 1941 Howard Hawks romantic comedy starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck.
Above is the movie’s trailer. “Educators from all over the world [...]

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A new article in Inside Higher Ed takes an in-depth look at the business of online encyclopedias, including Encyclopedia Virginia. Here’s a taste:
Size Matters
From a business standpoint, the most attractive aspect of Wikipedia might be the fact that unpaid volunteers create and edit most of the content. But to consumers, the site’s greatest draw, aside [...]

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The Onion pretends to do what the Charlottesville CBS affiliate did for real. Go figure.

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Marijean Jaggers of Charlottesville has generously featured the EV blog on her “Blog of the Week” segment that airs every Tuesday on CBS-19. You can read about it here and watch the video here (don’t ask me who that shaven-headed weirdo with the Commie propaganda poster is, though). Jaggers is a blogger herself at STLWorkingMom, [...]

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For all you tweeters out there, you can now check us out on twitter at the @encyclopediaVA handle. Although we’ve been on twitter for a little while, we are just now starting to use it to send timely content about Virginia’s history and culture. Because of the flexibility of our content, we’re using the Twitter [...]

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Part of the whole point of putting Encyclopedia Virginia on the web is so that we can update our history as it changes and so that we can fix mistakes when they are pointed out to us. We were alerted to one possible mistake by a reader of our entry on the Jamestown property owner [...]

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