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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Encyclopedia Virginia was on TV last night. NBC29 in Charlottesville gave the project a thumbs up on the news last night. You can watch the video here.

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The University of Virginia takes notice of Encyclopedia Virginia today:
EV also embraces the interdisciplinary nature of its entries. For instance, the entry for the “Wreck of the Old 97″ – which relates the story of the 1903 crash of a Southern Railways freight train in Danville – connects topics under transportation with music, folk life, [...]

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This e-mail made the rounds here at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities yesterday:
Dear Board Members and Staff,
I am delighted to report that “With Good Reason” has just been named to receive a 2009 Gabriel Award in the category of “Best News/Informational Radio Programming.”  Presented by the Catholic Academy for Communication Arts [...]

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The thing I love about BackStory is that they’re great at stirring the pot. Take their recent show on Independence Day. It prompted this comment on the website:
I found several aspects of the piece on the Declaration rather sensational and disingenuous—a rather second year way of making things look important.
It goes on, but I like [...]

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BackStory had a great live event on Friday. Now they’re asking for your help with show ideas.
BackStory invites you to propose a topic for our fall season below and let us know why you think it would make for a compelling hour of radio. Which concerns facing Americans today could use historical unpacking by the [...]

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If you look at our blog entries individually, you will see a “Welcome to reader-supported content” balloon toward the bottom of the page but above the comment box. This balloon and the badge underneath is part of a “micro-patronage” system that is currently under development to help content providers (newspapers, blogs, etc.) earn revenue so [...]

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All the buzz lately in humanities circles has been the nomination of Jim Leach as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities. (If you don’t hang out in humanities circles, you should. The buzz is great!)
Leach, you’ll recall, is a moderate Republican with thirty years in Congress who was thwacked in the Great Republican [...]

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This week’s Virginia Vignette is about an escape from Libby Prison in Richmond during the Civil War. Around 109 Union officers tunneled out, with fifty-nine of them eventually reaching the safety of their own lines. The last two sentences of the Vignette prompted skepticism from some readers, however. Here’s what we wrote:
A prison employee, suspected [...]

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When one considers the term massive–or “collective”–resistance, we might try and channel Thoreauian idealism and think of a movement by a downtrodden people to subvert or protest a tyrannical status quo. In the case of Virginia history, however,  “Massive Resistance” was anything but a subversive movement for high moral principles. Massive Resistance was the political–and [...]

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