The West Virginia GeoExplorer Project: Using Digital Technology to Study Time, Place, and People

Abstract

The West Virginia GeoExplorer Project:Using Digital Technology to Study Time, Place, and People William D. Theriault On Saturday, October 29, 2011, Shepherd University’s Historic Preservation Program presented a symposium on the West Virginia GeoExplorer Project (WVGP). The program marked the culmination of a one-year grant sponsored by the West Virginia Humanities Council to assist in the design and creation of an innovative, web-based resource for exploring the history, culture, and architecture of West Virginia.1 WVPG’s audience is broad. It includes middle-school students who need to complete a class assignment and graduate students who need to find, organize, and analyze mountains of information. It also includes traditional professional and amateur historians, preservationists and park rangers, genealogists, city planners, and technology buffs; both reluctant users of digital devices and those who regard smart phones as extensions of their body. WVGP’s content currently focuses on Jefferson County, West Virginia, but it can be expanded to accommodate other counties, the entire state, or the nation. (See Part V.) This paper is aimed at traditional and public historians who are interested in place and local history and in making the insights gained from their research accessible and useful to the public. The first part explains how the West Virginia GeoExplorer Project started and became what it is today. Parts two and three include a nontechnical explanation of what WVGP does and how you can use it. Part four describes how WVGP works. I. Background The seed for the West Virginia GeoExplorer Program was planted in the mid-1970s. After finishing my doctoral dissertation (typed several times on an IBM Selectric), I left academia with a diploma and a score of shoeboxes full of 4” by 6” index cards—the raw material for my dissertation. Most of the cards were gone by my second move, but I hadn’t lost the urge to find a better way to collect, organize, and reuse what I had researched. [End Page 39] Moving to Jefferson County, West Virginia, in the early 1980s, I discovered an area that had a rich heritage and a wealth of historical information. Unfortunately, much of it was not accessible to people who wanted to research the county’s past. For the scholar who needed to be familiar with this topic (or at least some part of it), there was no detailed, extensive overview of primary and secondary sources for writing Jefferson County history. Perhaps this lack was the reason almost half a century had passed since anyone attempted a comprehensive history of Jefferson County. Or maybe it was the sheer magnitude of materials available and their dispersal throughout the nation. Or maybe it was the lack of adequate finding aids that might have put the researcher in touch with the resources. For the student who wanted to write a decent research paper or the teacher wishing to incorporate local sources into the history curriculum, the best bet had been to examine the publications of the Jefferson County Historical Society and the other major works on county history. Yet, the historical society Magazine was thinly indexed, and most other volumes on local history were placed in special reference collections. Old histories had become artifacts, kept from general circulation because of their rarity, fragility, and economic value. For landowners who wanted to learn about the place where they lived or the original settler of their property, there was no straightforward way to identify and acquire relevant materials.2 Aspiring genealogists probably had the easiest job because of the large number of persons researching family history. Yet they too were often at a loss to locate the closest, most reliable resources. The original, 1990s Explorer project grew out of my need to replace the note cards and shoeboxes with a more reliable way to store and organize the source materials I had accumulated. At the same time, I hoped to share what I had collected and learned with others. My approach was shaped by the technology available in West Virginia at that time. Internet connections were slow and often unreliable in rural areas; personal computers had very limited data storage, processing, and graphical capabilities; and sophisticated mapping features were...