In the most general terms, our objective this semester is to design and build a hypertext version of Virginia: A Guide to the Old Dominion. Since most of you have never seen or heard of the Guide, I should begin by giving you a general sense of the thing. The first section is a set of short essays on a range of topics including Virginia's history, literature, architecture, art, folklore The Negroand music as well as an essay on The Spirit of Virginia by the premier historian of the period, Douglas Southall Freeman. The second section is a series of guides to major cities, Charlottesville as well as Alexandria, Fredericksburg, Richmond, Williamsburg, Alexandria and a few others. The third section is a set of twenty four tours that lead tourists from, e.g., D.C. to the North Carolina line on U.S. 1 or from Winchester to Wytheville on Rt. 11.

What, exactly, the hypertext of the Guide will amount to is, I'm afraid, something that we'll have to determine ourselves in the design phase of the course. But to get that discussion started, I'd like to offer some observations about why I think this could be a significant project and to provide some suggestions about the direction it might take.

The significance of the project is partly intrinsic; the Guide is one of a series of state guides compiled by the Writer's Program of the Works Progress Administration during the Depression. And it is, by most accounts, one of the best in the series, well- researched, well written, well-illustrated. In a period when Faulkner, Penn Warren, Tom Wolfe, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Sherwood Anderson, Eudora Welty, Fitzgerald, and Richard Wright dominate the literary landscape, it would be too much to claim that the Virginia Guide is a literary masterpiece; at the same time, it is one of the best of the minor genre of travel literature -- and it deserves to be more widely known.

Beyond this, the project has, as I see it, two extrinsic values. First, it is a remarkable cultural artifact, a piece of the Federal Government's attempt to combat the Depression by transforming public perception and feeling about America itself. It was an open invitation to re-discover an America many thought had been lost or permanently damaged, to see again in its history, art and architecture, industry and agriculture, its record of bright accomplishment and its even brighter prospects. In a sense, it is but one of a number of WPA arts projects that enlisted unemployed writers, artists, sculptors, journalists, historians, actors and playwrights in an attempt to construct a new and vital American national identity. Second, it gives us an opportunity to measure change -- in the Commonwealth and in the nation as a whole -- between 1936, when work on The Guide was begun and the coming millennium that is nearly upon us, to create a kind of Then-and-Now portrait of the state.

These intrinsic and extrinsic values argue for something like the following: 1) that we create a digital version of the entire Guide;
2) that we select portions of the Guide to thicken, that is, to amplify with archival audio and visual materials that could not be included in the original version and with commentary and analysis of the original WPA project;
3) that we select portions of the Cities and Tour sections of the Guide to retrace, perhaps to locate whatever survives of the world they saw in the 1930s, perhaps to mark the changes that have taken place since then. 4) and that we, in passing, create a bibliography of resources for others who might take up the project and develop it further.

This last point leads me to a fairly important consideration. The project will obviously require a good deal of our time and energy, imagination and just plain hard work. While I anticipate that it could also be a lot of fun, if that's the only benefit we derive from this course, I don't think it will have been worth the time invested. However, we may be able to build something that encourages others to build on it, e.g., to hypertextualize or modernize cities and tours we don't get to, perhaps we will have begun something we can all be proud of.