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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The above screen shot is of a Google Maps OpenStreetMap application, created by the website Bomb Sight, that locates every German bomb dropped during the London Blitz (October 7, 1940–June 6, 1941). The creators used World War II bomb census maps previously available only in the Reading Room of the National Archives in London. Now [...]

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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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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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Earlier today we posted two photographs of the Monticello Guard, one of Charlottesville’s National Guard units during World War I, parading across town in 1917. In the second image, the boys are marching down West Main Street in the direction of the Corner (seen at top, above), and it occurred to us that it would be [...]

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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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A cool new crowd-sourcing project from my alma mater, the University of Iowa*: take one of the Civil War diaries the library has scanned and posted online and start transcribing. Here’s what Lot Abraham was up to on New Year’s Day 1864: January 1, 1864. Clear Creek, Near Vicksburg, Mississippi. Weather clear and cold. In [...]

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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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In his recent military history, John Keegan writes, “The American Civil War is one of the most mysterious great wars of history . . .” We’re never done exploring that mystery, especially in these sesquicentennial years, and now the Library of Virginia offers a new and useful research tool: the Civil War Research Guide. 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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Most but not all entries in Encyclopedia Virginia have a time line. (This one, for instance, does not.) At first, a time line seems like a simple thing; it takes a subject and reduces it to days, months, and years, succinctly outlining the life of a poet, or a governor, or a civil-rights activist. Still, [...]

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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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Artist Rob Matthews binds Wikipedia’s featured articles in “dysfunctional physical form” as a way “to question its use as an internet resource.” The picture speaks for itself, I guess, but let me play devil’s advocate. For one, how does this “question” Wikipedia’s use as an Internet resource? Presuming one finds such a book intimidating and [...]

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Encyclopedia Virginia (Beta) is now officially live. We’re adding content every week, and we’ll use this space in part to highlight newly posted entries. You can also check the blog’s sidebar for updated content, or subscribe to the encyclopedia’s RSS feed, which can be particularized to the kind of content you prefer to read. In [...]

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I was sitting on my front porch the other morning reading Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner. It was a beautiful morning—clear, warm, breezy—and with my coffee and a decent view of the Blue Ridge, I was in heaven. So it seemed appropriate that I stumbled onto this passage, in which a traveling salesman visits [...]

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