Jefferson's Travels: A Digital Journey Using the HistoryBrowser

FAIN: HD-50291-08

University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA 22903-4833)
Scot A. French (Project Director: October 2007 to March 2010)
William Ferster (Co Project Director: October 2007 to March 2010)

Development of an interactive web-based tool to integrate primary documents, dynamic maps, and related information in the study of history, with the prototype to be focused on Thomas Jefferson's trip to England in 1786.

The Jefferson's Travels Project is a joint undertaking of the Virginia Center for Digital History and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation to develop a highly interactive web-based tool that uses Thomas Jefferson's travels as initial content. A specially constructed interactive browser (the HistoryBrowser) provides for fast and easy navigation along the time and place dimensions. The HistoryBrowser encourages primary source documents to speak more directly to the audience by providing visualizations of the relationships, chronologies, and causal events. They will often contain word-based narrative, in written or oral forms to help connect the resources, but the browser allows for a new form of storytelling, using guided visualizations. These visualizations use new methods of interpreting and presenting historic inquiry, such as animation over time, charts, maps, data, and interactive timelines to graphically show the relationships between multiple kinds of information.