A guest post by Peter Hedlund, Encyclopedia Virginia Programmer One of the goals at Encyclopedia Virginia is to create intuitive and interesting ways for users to find content on our site. With this end in mind, we redesigned our site last summer. But one aspect of the original site persisted: the Explore Virginia map. Still, we found [...]

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A Facebook “friend” of Encyclopedia Virginia left the following comment on a post linking to yesterday’s blog item featuring father-daughter collaborative drawings of all the United States presidents (like the one above of Woodrow Wilson): No, I don’t like and I am still trying to figure out the relevance of this posting. Who there continues [...]

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We’re at work on our entry about Sally Hemings [see update below], and I’m pretty sure that no piece of writing in the encyclopedia has ever been so fussed over as this one. Although we received a wonderful entry from our contributor, it went through a rigorous editing process and now we’ve sent it to [...]

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It’s worth pausing to take note of a few things we’re working on here at the encyclopedia: We’ll be launching a complete redesign of the site, perhaps as early as tomorrow. This has been in the works for more than a year, and a big thank you to the folks at NewCity in Blacksburg for [...]

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Above is a screenshot of a very cool, interactive, digital map of Middle Earth based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series of novels. You can find an interactive map/time line here. Here at the encyclopedia, we’re always looking for forward-thinking, intuitive ways of presenting information, and this is something we love! [...]

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Our entry on indentured servants in colonial Virginia has been published for awhile, but I wanted to spotlight it now because a) it’s a really good entry, I think; and b) it’s just plain full up with links to primary sources. It’s been at least a year, maybe two, since we came up with the idea [...]

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Yesterday’s post on an epic article in the Washington Post about the “sorry fate” of Carter’s Grove, the old James River plantation built in 1750, contained this paragraph: Before the house, the land was the site of Martin’s Hundred plantation and Wolstenholme Towne, an ill-fated English settlement founded in 1620, just a few years after [...]

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Encyclopedia Virginia‘s programmer Peter Hedlund (left) and editor Matthew Gibson (right) at a fund-raising event for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities on May 20, 2012, in northern Virginia. (Kyle Samperton, Washington Life Magazine)

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We are at work editing our entry on the Maryland Campaign, which culminated in the titanic Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862. Perhaps strangely, we didn’t include this on our original list of Civil War entries—it didn’t happen in Virginia, after all. The comparatively minor Battle of Shepherdstown, which ended the campaign, did, so we [...]

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From yesterday morning’s Washington Post: As classrooms become better equipped with interactive white boards and other gadgets, more teachers are looking for digital content and adopting an assumption that prevails in much of the World Wide Web: That content should be free. “Now that expectation has entered the American classroom,” said Jay Diskey, executive director [...]

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According to the Chicago Tribune, Facts—born in 360 BC to the ancient Greeks and raised, over the millennia, by various schools of epistemology—is dead at the age of 2,372. It was the victim of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, blogs, and the Internet. It was only recently, in the age of scientific advances and the H-bomb, that [...]

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From Robert Wright: While a student at UC Berkeley, Roland Saekow had the idea for a tool that would help people visualize history—all the way from the big bang to yesterday—and zoom in on whatever parts interest them. Called ChronoZoom, it’s kind of like Google Maps for the fourth dimension, and it will get richer [...]

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Yesterday the encyclopedia staff road-tripped it to Richmond, where we gathered with our friends at the Library of Virginia to inaugurate a new era for Encyclopedia Virginia and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. We are now officially partners with the Library in this ambitious encyclopedia project of ours and, in particular, have become the [...]

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The idea of this post is juxtaposition. (It’s also about burying the lede, so please read the whole thing!) First, there’s the image above, from 1863, of a former slave who enlisted in the United States Army. (No black Confederate, this guy. Go figure.) And then there’s this, from The Commercial Appeal of Memphis, Tennessee: [...]

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You’re an encyclopedia of Virginia history, people often say to us. So where’s your entry on Thomas Jefferson? The short answer is: It’s coming! It’s coming! And maybe once it’s here, we’ll get Jack Jouett to ride around Virginia warning everybody. In the meantime, though, it’s worth explaining what takes so gosh-darn long. As I’ve [...]

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I received an anonymous comment last night related to our Henry “Box” Brown entry: The date Henry Brown entered his box was March 29th, not March 23rd as written on this web page. While one might believe with all credibility that the 29th is the correct date (after all Brown writes in his own narrative [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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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