University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign: Director, Vernon Burton and Assoc. Director, David Herr

Two major projects have been spearheaded by this center including the RiverWEB and Text96, which are outlined in greater detail below.

A Knowledge Network for the Mississippi River Basin

T.S. Eliot referred to it as "a big strong brown god." Mark Twain called it the "Body of the Nation. " In his legendary book, "Life on the Mississippi," Twain vividly portrayed the sweep of the mighty river, weaving a tapestry of narrative and lore over its ancient origins and endless twists and turns, both in fact and in its human history: the Mississippi's vast banks luring the earliest European explorers; the often fatal encounters between the explorers and the river's indigenous peoples; the drama of the steamboat; the reality of slavery; the sound and fury of the Civil War, raging across land and water; and the ceaseless struggle of civilization to "tame" the Mississippi and its major branches, the Missouri, Ohio and Illinois rivers.

This epic struggle continues to this day, a persistent expression of the nineteenth century view that our destiny as a species is to "conquer" Nature. Nevertheless, the great floods of 1927 and, more recently, of 1993, serve to remind us that there are limits to "engineering" Nature. As the country becomes more "cost conscious, " the escalating price of flood disasters is inducing government and citizenry alike to learn to adapt differently to the ways of the river. The establishment by the White House of the multi-agency Scientific Assessment and Strategy Team (SAST) expressed a growing recognition among government, scientists and engineers that more flexible approaches to flood plain management and flood prevention are needed. Developing such approaches will, in part, rely on current efforts to better comprehend the behavior of entire river systems. Nevertheless, a wealth of information, data and tools already exists with which to understand and dynamically explore the rich interplay of human settlement with the geology, ecology, and hydrology of the Mississippi Basin, from its uppermost reaches down to the Delta and into the Gulf of Mexico.

During 1996 and 1997, an alliance of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the Geographical Modeling Systems Laboratory and History Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Illinois State Museum and several other prospective partners, will work locally, regionally and nationally with numerous organizations in education, business and government to develop a multifaceted education and outreach program we term RiverWeb

The overriding vision of RiverWeb is to empower government, business and the citizenry-at-large to make informed choices that support sustainable development in the Mississippi River Basin and address environmental issues of vital importance to their communities. As its name implies, a major goal of RiverWeb is build a multidimensional, multiscale, multidisciplinary, digital information architecture for the Mississippi watershed, a framework that will enable broad public access to and use of knowledge, tools and data required for integrated river management, wetland conservation and land use.

As an unfolding program, RiverWeb will eventually encompass the following components whose individual scope will depend on funding or cost-sharing by participating organizations and agencies:

A World Wide Web (Web)-based, multi-layered, virtual exploratorium of river history, culture, science and management, parts of which could also bemade available on CD-ROM.

RiverWeb Data Archive: This is a self-contained RiverWeb component featuring data archives that are representative of the various kinds of multimedia material that put users in touch with information about their environment. Each archive will be designed as a CD-ROM and will be interactive with the greater RiverWeb WWW site. The first archive is planned for historical census data. We will work to incorporate a user interface that allows remote data queries, general data access, and GIS on-the-fly map development.

The "Living WebTM," a multifaceted program of training, education and outreach projects centered on the Web and targeted at schools, colleges, libraries and their communities.

Implementing RiverWeb in part or whole will pose substantial challenges, technically, administratively and content-wise. We will actively seekpartners among a variety of agencies, educational institutions and industries in order to develop funding and implementation strategies consistent with the primary mission of RiverWeb: to excite, educate and empower both individuals and communities to manage their destinies in greater harmony with the ways of the river.


The University of Illinois Text Project (Text96)

UI-TEXT96 will scan and convert to simple HTML text 30,000 pages of historical documents--primary sources. This textbase will be used for supplementary reading and termpaper assignments in the freshman and sophomore history survey courses in US History and Western Civilization at UIC and UIUC. The textbase will be stored on the World Wide Web and become a permanent asset for teachers and students.

The materials we are focused on are "primary sources" created by public and private agencies at the time. They include government documents and studies, almanacs and yearbooks, serious periodicals (like The Nation), major books, presidential papers, and compilations of oral history like the "slave narratives" compiled by the WPA. Major sources like the STATISTICAL ABSTRACT now exist in cd-rom versions for the current (1995) edition; there is no electronic source for data pre 1980. Our textbase will thus include many important sources for both students and researchers. We will NOT be including textbooks, scholarly monographs or secondary sources, nor will we duplicate operations like LEXIS, which have court cases on- line. Project Gutenberg, which focuses on novels, will not overlap with ours. We believe there are no similar projects anywhere.

The text will be encoded in ascii format, with basic header information giving the source. Text will be marked up in HTML format for WWW storage. This simplified format will not convey the full richness of the original source material, of course, but it will meet the editing standards that instructors now employ in selected supplementary readers and anthologies. The original sources are all available in the library, and researchers who want to investigate further can easily do so using paper sources.

All of the texts we will use are in English. We will use translations of foreign language materials; we will not use handwritten documents. The ascii format will mean that students and instructors will be able to read the text without any special software--even the dumbest terminal can handle it. Anyone with MOSAIC, NETSCAPE or LYNX will have WWW access to the textbase. Occasional maps, graphs and photographs that are encountered will be scanned into GIF or JPEG format, so they can be downloaded and examined using basic software. Tables will be input as plain ascii, and also as spreadsheets (in Lotus 1-2-3 .WK1 format, which can be read by practically every spreadsheet.)

What UI-TEXT96 will do for teaching:

  1. The textbase will allow instructors and teaching assistants to compile their own free "readers" of primary source materials, and will facilitate student research into primary sources using computerized access and search. Distance learning will become a reality as students can research term papers from their dorms or apartments much easier than they can at any library. In an era focused on hardware solutions to computerized learning, UI-TEXT96 will stress content of the sort that experienced professors prefer to use but cannot because of the limitations of paper.
  2. Historians teach through source documents the way scientists teach through laboratories. The problem is that the sources are hard to assemble and hard to use. Putting a 10-volume collection in the Library Reserve Room is not an option when the originals are out of print. The old paper books simply cannot tolerate having several thousand students thumb through them looking for information, or xeroxing the same sections hundreds of times. Cheap reprints are possible in literature, but are not feasible in history. Teachers and scholars have realized for 10 or 20 years that electronic texts are the solution, but until 1995 the process of creating electronic files was far too expensive. Editing projects that retype original materials, proofread by eye, and add SGML markup can typically cost $30-$100 a page. That is feasible for certain very-high-value materials, but out of the question for undergraduate readers. We can do the job for $3 a page, and provide a model that has the potential to become the "standard" model for history teaching.