The University of Virginia has pioneered and created a wide variety of resources for scholarsand teachers in the Humanities. The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) and the Electronic Text Center demonstrate the university's broad range of efforts to tie humanities to information technology.

Pioneering the use of SGML as a common basis for developing diverse projects and emphasizing networked approaches to multimedia, this regional center has also hosted seminars such as "Making History on the Web," a summer seminar which brought together K-12 educators, librarians, and college educators to create multimedia tools for a sample history survey course. A report on this seminar was published on H-MMedia.

The University of Virginia History department, also features a number of sites which also serve as good examples of this regional center's initiatives. Of particular note are HIUS 323, HIUS 316 and HIUS 324.

Future plans for the center include a course on "Digital History and the American Civil War."

Students in this four-hour course, aided by the Teaching with Technology Initiative, will integrate social, military, and political history with techniques of scanning, image manipulation, and web authoring. Using official records, newspapers, censuses, pensions, diaries, letters, and other sources from the Civil War era, student will create both web sites and historical narratives related to the two communities featured in the Valley of the Shadow Project, a web and CD effort based at UVa. Prospective students should familiarize themselves with the site before registering.

Students will spend most of their time together in collaboration, working in a small workshop set up with computers, scanners, and other tools. They will meet for group discussion each week in the time listed above and will consult with the instructors outside of class, probably in the evenings. Students will also need to travel to archives and historical sites to conduct research at several points in the term. Those who register for the class should have a working knowledge of either the Windows or the Macintosh operating systems; HTML and Photoshop would be helpful.

As far as the Valley Project itself, you will have noticed that it's been completely redesigned over the last few months and has been additionally funded by another NEH grant.

The CD from the Valley Project will be out in October from Norton, in a slipcase with an accompanying book.