Envisaging the West: Thomas Jefferson and the Roots of Lewis and Clark

About the Project

Envisaging the West: Thomas Jefferson and the Roots of Lewis and Clark is an electronic archive of over 150 letters, 3 journals, 25 statutes and treaties, a bibliography of Jefferson’s geography books, 22 map images, and a geo-rectified cartographic database of 8 interactive maps. This collection reveals the evolution of Jefferson’s thoughts on the west as he and others made plans for the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1803-1806. These conceptions of the region, while certainly informed by the best information of Jefferson’s time, are also burdened by accepted geographical theories of the age.

Envisaging the West: Thomas Jefferson and the Roots of Lewis and Clark is a collaborative endeavor between the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln <http://cdrh.unl.edu/>, and the Virginia Center for Digital History <http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/> and the Geospatial and Statistical Data Center < http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/> at the University of Virginia. The project team has enjoyed financial support from the University of Virginia’s Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Project <http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/lewisandclark/lcbp/>.

This project evolved in concert with a course offered at the University of Virginia in the fall of 2002 and spring of 2003 that enabled a limited number of students from a variety of majors to both study and gain hands-on experience in the scholarly opportunities available at the intersection of history and digital media. Students enrolled in MDST 382: History and Digital Media learned how to conduct archival research, digitize a variety of source materials, mark up text, create digital audio and video files, and develop dynamic presentations from their findings under supervision of a faculty member. Topics of inquiry included a variety of Lewis and Clark-related historical sites in and around Albemarle County, early Albemarle County explorers, Native American settlements, family homesteads, and public monuments.

If you have information to share about the contents of this digital archive, please contact:

Douglas Seefeldt
Assistant Professor of History

Center for Digital Research in the Humanities <http://cdrh.unl.edu/>
319 Love Library
Lincoln, Nebraska 68588-4100
(402) 472-4547 (Center)

Project Staff

Douglas Seefeldt – Project Director, UNL/UVa
Leslie Working – Project Manager, UNL (summer 2005-spring 2007)
Laura Weakly – Metadata Encoding Specialist, UNL
Zach Bajaber – Digital Resources Designer, UNL
Mike Furlough – GIS Data Set Manager, UVa
Blair Tinker – GIS Programmer, UVa (2003-2005)

Graduate Research Assistants

Daniel Becker – GIS Programming, UNL (summer 2006-fall 2006)
Leslie Working, UNL (fall 2004-spring 2005)
Dave Geraghty, UVa (summer 2004-summer 2005)
Brian Schoen, UVa (summer 2003-fall 2003)

Undergraduate Research Assistants

Michael Dozler, UNL (fall 2006-spring 2007)
Edmund Etheridge, UVa (summer 2003-spring 2004)
Andrew Sallans – GIS Programming, UVa (summer 2003, summer 2004)