Table of Contents

1. Overview 2

2. Objectives 3

3. Key Personnel 4

4. The Advisory Board and Its Impact 6

5. What We Did 7

5.1. Demonstrations and Lectures 7

5.2. Census of Online Resources on Atlantic Jamestown 7

5.3. Survey of Jamestown’s Archaeological Sites 8

5.4. Prototypes for Integrating Cartographical, Textual, Archaeological and Visual/Graphic Data in a Virtual Collection 8

5.5. Governance, Copyright, and Intellectual Property 15

5.6. New Funding 16

6. What We Learned 16

6.1. Opportunities and Limitations of Digital Archives 17

6.2. History and Archaeology: A Promising Partnership 17

6.3. Seeding Digital Scholarship and the Issue of Sustainability 19

6.4. Next Steps 22

Appendices:

1. Timeline of Jamestown Planning Grant

2. Advisory Board Members

3. Jamestown Census of Online Resources in Atlantic World Studies

4. Data Audit for the Jamestown and the Atlantic World Proposal Preparation Process

5. File Structures and Jamestown Rediscovery® Technical Details

6. Building and Distributing Resources in Atlantic World Studies

7. Proposal for a Dutch Colonial Records Project

8. William G. Thomas, III, Summary and Report

9. Paspahegh Final Report

1. Overview

In 2002, Virtual Jamestown at Virginia Tech, the Center for Digital History, University of Virginia, and the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, Jamestown Rediscovery™ began a multi-year project called “Jamestown Planning Proposal” (JPP) funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The project was directed by Crandall Shifflett, Professor of History at Virginia Tech and the founder of the Virtual Jamestown project.

Over the course of the planning period, we identified a number of closely related problems that confront digital archives, centers, libraries, imprint presses, and scholarly communities. Various proprietary, administrative, technical, and institutional issues must be disentangled. We did not solve all of the problems we identified. Resolution of some problems will require fundamental changes in how collectors and producers identify, assemble, digitize, present, publish, and preserve digital work. Some solutions will require paradigmatic shifts, such as mainstreaming of digital techniques within traditional disciplinary boundaries, changes in the professional reward structure, greater incentives for crossing institutional borders, and the development of common tools for exploiting datasets across a variety of projects.

Over the course of the planning grant period, we made adjustments to the original proposal to take advantage of unanticipated opportunities for realizing initial goals. For example, instead of hosting a final summit on the project, as proposed in the JPP, the project director participated in the University of Virginia’s Digital Technology Summit, organized by Bernie Frischer and the Institute for Technology in the Humanities. As another example, the JPP proposal also expressed the intent to found at Virginia Tech a new center for digital history with a focus on the Atlantic World. Instead, the project director accepted an appointment as Interim Director, Virginia Center for Digital History, where support for research and development of digital history has enthusiastic institutional support.

Taking the long view, the Mellon funding for planning has generated enormous synergy and given us the support needed to build alliances and seek out partners for exciting work in digital history. We built bridges of trust and collaboration between history, architecture, and archaeology, took steps to share ownership of intellectual property between institutional stakeholders, laid the foundations for new partnerships in using revolutionary technologies to produce scholarship, and demonstrated the analytical power of advanced technologies for analyzing and exploiting resources in historical work.

An Advisory Board of scholars, archivists, and stakeholders from England, Ireland, and the United States (see below) made two broad suggestions for future development: 1. use advanced technology to build “lost landscapes” of the Atlantic World; 2. work together with Virginia stakeholders to survey and make available in digital format the records of the Dutch in Colonial Virginia, i.e., a Dutch Colonial Records Project similar to the Virginia Colonial Records Project in 1957. As the William Thomas, III, Chairman of the Board noted, “Our planning process coincided with the steepest budget cuts in the history of the Library of Virginia, whose entire digital program was dropped. For the University of Virginia and other state institutions these cuts were numbingly severe. Few board members could offer partnership or commitment in these circumstances.” Nevertheless, the project director’s outreach efforts to the Dutch and the discussion of this initiative in the JPP advisory board meetings generated momentum for a survey of research and records on the Dutch in the Atlantic World that will be pursued by the Federal 2007 Planning Commission.

The JPP proved very productive in providing opportunities to experiment with innovative techniques for recovering lost landscapes, such as connecting architectural, geometrical, and textual forms, informed by the archival and material culture records, to envision a virtual world as a technique for research and scholarship. Historians, architects, geographers, and archaeologists combined to create virtual models of buildings not seen since the seventeenth century. New interrogations of the past, previously unimagined, arise when the archival, artifactual, cartographical, and visual/graphical records converge and challenge prevailing assumptions. Not only did collaboration during the planning grant demonstrate the merits of applying advanced technology to the study of the past, it also highlighted the limitations of the the printed publication to capture that past. Digital history requires new approaches to exploit and disseminate the insights that advanced technology has made possible.

While pioneering these complex partnerships between academic institutions, a private foundation, a digital history center, libraries, and individual scholars, the Jamestown Planning Proposal gave us a deeper understanding of and insight into the possible pitfalls but, more impressively, the merit of what has been labeled "new model scholarship” (used here interchangeably as digital history or digital scholarship). The integration of history, archaeology, architecture, and technology that the Mellon funding made possible has lead to further dialogue between the Virginia Center for Digital History, the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, the University of Virginia’s FEDORA project, the University of Virginia Rotunda Imprint series, and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities on two related initiatives: tools building for scholars and producing digital scholarship. The Virginia Center for Digital History plans a dramatic refocus of its mission, from that of a center for scholar-led Web projects towards assuming a leadership role in the publication of digital scholarship. Partnerships with tool builders, imprint publishers, research libraries, humanities centers, and digital journals will be combined with those alliances forged in the JPP to bring the Virginia Center for Digital History into the forefront of electronic publication.

2. Objectives

The initial goals of the JPP were to

1. create strategic partnerships to build a virtual collection of historical and archaeological data on Jamestown in an Atlantic Studies context

2. survey needs and resources of scholars as a prerequisite to designing an institutional and intellectual framework for future distribution of a virtual collection

3. collaborate on prototypes for cross-institutional archiving, searching, and indexing of a virtual collection repository

3. Key Personnel

Mellon funding allowed the project to bring together top people in their fields of expertise to do what they do best:

Dr. Mark Freeman

Mr. Scott Gillespie

Mr. David Givens

Dr. William Kelso

Dr. Earl Mark

Ms. Carole Schmidt

Dr. Crandall Shifflett

Dr. Julie Solometo

Dr. William Thomas,

Dr. Kimberly Tryka

After starting his career in teaching, Mark Freeman worked for twelve years for a software company dealing with archaeology, museum and library collections management. Specializing in digital archaeological information, Mark has given papers at several regional and national archaeological conferences. For the last five years Mark has run his own company, Stories Past, developing educational web components for archaeologists and museums.

Scott Gillespie is the Project Manager/ Programmer at The Virginia Center for Digital History. At VCDH his primary role has been to redesign the Virtual Jamestown site, assist with getting more primary documents online for the Geography of Slavery, and work with Crandall Shifflett to produce the Jamestown in the Atlantic World site. He has 10 years experience in developing educational software and websites.

 
David M. Givens is a staff archaeologist with the Jamestown Rediscovery Project. Mr. Givens specializes in archaeological Geographic Information Systems. His job involves the linking of volumes of spatial data and archaeological information into a viable and sustainable digital archive. He provides nearly fifteen years of knowledge in Chesapeake and Virginia archaeology and history to the group. David manages the Jamestown Rediscovery® website, a successful educational interface between the Rediscovery excavations and the public.
 
William Kelso, Chief Archaeologist, Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, Jamestown Rediscovery®. He discovered Jamestown Fort and directed the archaeological team for this project. He supported the project with access to archaeological site data, service on the advisory board, a conference presentation, and advice on Web presentation. He continues to make new discoveries at the Jamestown Island site. 

Earl Mark serves as Chief Technology Officer and Director of Information Technology within the School of Architecture, and as Associate Professor of Architecture. Prior to this appointment, he was a lecturer at the MIT Department of Architecture, a senior teaching fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and visiting lecturer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich. He holds a Ph.D. in Architecture with a Minor in Cognitive Science from Harvard University, a Master of Science in Media Technology from the MIT Media Lab, a Master of Architecture, and a BA in Architecture and Mathematics. In spring 1998, Earl Mark was the Thomas Jefferson Visiting Fellow at Downing College and a Visiting Associate of the Martin Centre, of the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge. In addition, he was a senior software engineer at Computervision Corporation. Mark is also actively involved in private practice at Johnson, Craven, and Gibson Architects in Charlottesville. Prof. Mark is responsible for directing the development computer based curriculum and facilities. He teaches, performs research, and has published in the areas of computer aided design, digital moviemaking and animation, and design research.

Carole Hamner Schmidt is a management consultant to the nonprofit sector. As a member of the Jamestown Planning Proposal team, Carole advised the project on governance issues including board structure, intellectual property rights, and business plan development. She drafted sample bylaws, memoranda of understanding, and copyright policies for university legal council to review. Through individual interviews with all stakeholders, she identified potential strengths and challenges to the collaboration and recommended strategies to negotiate differences. Carole brings more than a decade’s experience in nonprofit management and leadership development to her work with educational institutions and community-based organizations. Before establishing her consulting practice, Carole was Deputy Director of the Pew Partnership for Civic Change, a civic research organization founded by The Pew Charitable Trusts. While with the Pew Partnership, Carole directed strategic communications for grant-making and research initiatives exceeding $15 million in investment by the Trusts. She was also the principle author of the LeadershipPlentyÒ training program currently adopted by a host of national organizations.

Crandall Shifflett, Professor of History and Interim Director, Virginia Center for Digital History, created and manages Virtual Jamestown. He wrote the “Jamestown Planning Proposal,” hired the staff, and directed the project. He is currently Interim Director, Virginia Center for Digital History, working on a book manuscript on Virginia’s first Africans and the origins of slavery in America, and forging partnerships for the practice of digital history.

Julie P. Solometo is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at James Madison University. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Michigan in 2004 with a dissertation on the archaeological study of war, supported by six seasons of fieldwork on prehistoric fortifications in Arizona. Dr. Solometo is the Director of the Chevelon Archaeological Research Project, which involves students in the examination of prehistoric

Pueblo cultures. Her work with the Mellon Project involved assembling and interpreting available materials on the archaeology of Native American settlement in the greater Chesapeake Bay region and presenting this information through a demonstration web-site (http://www.virtualjamestown.org/paspahegh/siteMap.html).

The website uses the well-excavated archaeological site of Paspahegh to examine aspects of Powhatan life and culture at the time of European contact, including architecture and material items such as ceramics and copper. The website also compiles available historical information on the interaction of the Paspahegh people and the English colonists. Dr. Solometo also examined current representations of native peoples and cultures by visiting several museums and other outlets that present narratives of English colonization.

Kimberly A. Tryka was the Associate Director of the Virginia Center for Digital History (VCDH) from January 2001 through June 2005 and is currently the Project Manager for "The South". As Associate Director at VCDH she was responsible for guiding the technical aspects of VCDH projects and making sure the projects conformed to established library (or professional) standards, as appropriate. She is also the Reviews Editor of "Digital Humanities Quarterly" (DHQ), an open-access, peer-reviewed, digital journal covering all aspects of digital media in the humanities published by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO).

Her work with the Mellon project included guiding the creation of and setting up controlled vocabulary terms to be used with the Atlantic World Online Resources database (http://www.virtualjamestown.org/awresources/) and working closely with Julie Solemeto to create a demonstration web-site related to the Paspehegh (http://www.virtualjamestown.org/paspahegh/siteMap.html). Additionally she participated in meetings of stakeholders in the project, attended a seminar to determine what college instructors might want from an Atlantic World website, and consulted with members of the APVA about how their data might be used within an Atlantic World website.

William G. Thomas, III, is the John and Catherine Angle Professor in the Humanities, University of Nebraska and former Director, Virginia Center for Digital History and Associate Professor, Department of History, the University of Virginia. He chaired the Mellon Jamestown Advisory Board and led its meetings. In addition, at the Virginia Center, he supported the project’s requirements for graduate research assistants, Web presentation, and technical work. His interest in the project and advice during Board discussions led us towards the most promising and potentially productive pathways of digital history. (See Appendix 8 for Thomas’ summary and report on the project).

4. The Advisory Board and Its Impact

The planning process in the Advisory Board’s deliberations “had a wider impact than expected (see William Thomas’ Report in Appendix 8).” The Advisory Board included the top people in their fields, although the membership changed over the course of the project (see Appendix 2 for a list of the members and their affiliations). At first composed, as the Chairman of the Board noted, “almost exclusively of key stakeholders, such as directors of libraries, centers, programs, and projects,” membership shifted as the agenda moved in the direction of research and scholarship. After the initial meetings the board gradually incorporated more scholars in Atlantic World Studies who represented the leading institutions in the U.S., Ireland, and England. New board members “gravitated toward the problems of visual representation of data and to the collaboration between historians and archaeologists. The outcome of these early meetings was an overall commitment to sponsoring and building prototypes of integrated visual models of the James Fort and other sites. As the Director of the Virginia Center for Digital History recalls, the ‘lost landscapes’ ideas became the guiding strategy for work at [our Center] on prototype development that would integrate APVA field data, visual models created with Earl Mark's group in the Architecture School, and the textual record in Virtual Jamestown.”

5. What We Did

The work and accomplishments of the planning grant included

• presentations, demonstrations, and feedback on future plans

• a census of online collections on Atlantic studies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

• a survey of archaeological sites in the Jamestown area

• building virtual models of the Jamestown meeting house and statehouse and an Indian village

• bringing together historians and archaeologists in a 2007 conference

• establishing a dialogue on governance and intellectual property issues, leading to a Memorandum of Understanding between the Virginia Center for Digital History, the University of Virginia, and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

• proposing a digital Dutch Colonial Records Project for 2007 and beyond

• plans for sustaining new model scholarship on Jamestown in the Atlantic World

• raising additional funds of $100,000 to support projects on Africans and Indians in Jamestown history

• designing a new “Jamestown and the Atlantic World” web site to summarize the outcomes of the planning grant and coordinate and chart future development

Each task is elaborated in some detail below.

5.1. Demonstrations and Lectures

Presentations and demonstrations to groups of scholars, digital archivists, and other guests were made at two Library of Congress conferences, New York University (Professor Karen Kupperman’s class), Oxford University (England) (symposium on digital humanities), Council on Library and Information Resources, Brookings Institute Symposium, and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture conference on “Virginia and the Atlantic World” (see the timeline in Appendix 1 for more details).

5.2. Census of Online Resources On Atlantic Jamestown

While we did not attempt to produce the digital equivalent of the 1957 Virginia Colonial Records Project, we did make an extensive survey of online resources on Jamestown in the Atlantic World of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, whether in the form of individual scholar projects, library and museum collections, or other online sources. The results of that survey are briefly described here and more extensively given in Appendix 3.

From the census of electronic collections, we created a database of online resources relating to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European colonization in the Atlantic World. These resources include a variety of materials, such as travel accounts, promotional literature, missionaries’ accounts, legislation, maps, and images, as well as modern reports of archaeological research on various sites in the Atlantic rim, whether Spanish, French, Portuguese, Dutch, or English. The URLs listed in the database direct users to the main webpage. A keyword list was developed, in consultation with Karen Marshall, a subject librarian at the University of Virginia Library, basing the list on her previous work with the Mellon-funded American Studies Database at the University of Virginia, and modified by adding or deleting terms to fit Atlantic Studies interests. We annotated each collection so that users have some idea of what type of materials to expect when they visit the listed web-site. The database currently includes 105 records (see Appendix 3 for the content of the database).

5.3. Survey of Jamestown’s Archaeological Sites

Jamestown Rediscovery™ planned to survey 26 archaeological sites in the Jamestown area. But the survey proved too ambitious to complete for a variety of reasons. Part of the problem was the lack of a systematic approach to surveying site contents by previous archaeologists and the disorganized and incomplete state of much of the existing data. Hurricane Isabel (2003) and a personal tragedy for the archaeological survey team caused unanticipated delays on the Mellon-funded survey and required the hiring of another archaeologist and a request for a one-year extension of the planning grant. The 2007 event also proved to be a time-consuming and understandably diversionary activity for the archaeologists who had to devote much time to that event. Another challenge for the archaeology/history collaboration required getting archaeologists to communicate in laymen’s language to those outside their professional field. We learned that much more effort will be required to close the communications gap between archaeology and history but we also broke new ground in this endeavor (see “History and Archaeology: A Promising Partnership” below) and hope to build upon the momentum for the history/archaeology/architecture collaboration that this project engendered.

5.4. Prototypes for Integrating Cartographical, Textual, Archaeological and Visual/Graphic Data in a Virtual Collection

Historians, an architect, and archaeologists worked together to construct model sites that would be the basis for prototypes to integrate textual, cartographical, graphic-visual, and archaeological data. The project experimented with recreations of specific structures and sites, such as James Fort, the meeting house and statehouse at Jamestown, Paspahegh -- site of the first Indian contact group at Jamestown -- and a “virtual” Pomeiocc, an Indian village sketched by John White. Using AUTOCAD™, visualization and 3D modeling, we wanted to test these robust techniques for their potential to enhance teaching and research. Although we found recreations of lost landscapes to be labor-intensive and costly, the benefits included bringing technologists, archaeologists, geographers, architects, and historians together to create compelling visualizations of historical structures that can be examined and compared to the textual record. When artifacts found on the site are added to the visualization, another level of information can be analyzed on subjects like function, behavior, relationship, and use of buildings, people, rooms, and other issues of spatial history. To discuss the benefits of blending history and archaeology, the Society for Historical Archaeology planning committee for the next annual conference will invite well known historians in Atlantic Studies to the conference. As a result, the 2007 annual conference of the Society for Historical Archaeologists will open with a plenary session of historians and archaeologists to reflect upon the integration of history and archaeology and how scholars in these two areas might collaborate more extensively in rewriting the Jamestown story.

From the work of scholars such as Dr. Earl Mark, Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Virginia, and William Kelso, Chief Archaeologist, Jamestown Rediscovery™, on the Jamestown meeting house and statehouse, we created small modules that integrated archaeological, textual, cartographical, and image data, applied a variety of technologies to them for analysis and presentation, and stitched individual modules together with timelines and historical context. Warren Billings, Distinguished Professor and Historian of the Supreme Court of Louisiana, University of New Orleans, and author of a 2004 Library of Virginia book on the statehouse, wrote a brief essay to accompany the statehouse presentation.

Mark Freeman, an archaeologist, and David Givens, Jamestown Rediscovery™ Conservator, worked on an interface for the Jamestown prototype (see link or URL:) entitled “Stories of the Past.” Archaeological sites are located on a Chesapeake landscape, a brief historical sketch is provided, artifacts found at the site are described, and links are made to documents, images, and maps from the Virtual Jamestown digital archive.

An on-line module has been created to present this data, with each piece of information displayed within a spatial hierarchical structure. Other contexts have been added through the creation of animations and further temporal and thematic contexts can be applied as more sites are added. For an explanation of the technology, see Appendix 5.

The module serves twin purposes.

• As a Resources Gateway: making available the extensive related resources that are associated with these archaeological excavations.
• As an Educational Tool: presenting the archaeological information on-line, structured for multiple audiences.

While the Jamestown in The Atlantic project features 26, seventeenth-century sites around the Chesapeake, the initial focus for the module has been on two buildings on Jamestown Island. Building 160, a “mud and stud” building, was one of the earliest structures on the island. The Statehouse, built later in the century in five phases, was a large brick structure. Archaeology has played a large part in the understanding of these buildings, and it is hoped that this module will help present the evidence supporting the current level of knowledge concerning them.

Despite the limited development focusing on just two buildings it is important to recognize that the intent is to complete a number of early seventeenth-century sites to the same level of detail. While the existing structure can accommodate the 26 targeted sites, some further development work remains to be done to enable comparative analysis between sites.

Technology

The module has been created using Macromedia Flash MX Professional edition. The XML files are currently manually manipulated though derived from database files managed in a separate environment.

Module Structure

The screen is organized into three main areas:

Navigation

The navigation section includes three elements. On the left the Context tab presents a tree view showing the hierarchy of the available information. This is fed by an XML file (for technical details, see Appendix 5). Selecting an element populates the features, resources and central resource. The tree component allows easy movement around the parts of the site, as well as a visual reference to what components are completed.

On the right is a two-part form. The features tab shows the elements that lie within the existing level. The top level presents a list of sites, within this are presented buildings, or other site features, then features (post holes, cellars etc.) , excavation units, and finally artifacts. Selecting an element populates the text boxes in the bottom section for the specified item.

The resources tab gives a list of all related external material. This includes primary and secondary sources, broken down by type. Selecting an element brings up more information in a pop-up box. This includes a location field, showing the html link for on-line resources. For other resources this will show the physical location of the resource.

Currently these resources include web pages, ASCII delimited text, PDF documents, and images. The location for the off-line documents references the collections of the APVA at Jamestown Island.

Resource Animation

This section contains a visualization of the resource. At its simplest level (including presentation of artifacts) it will show a single image. For other resources, it will show an animation of the construction of the structure over time or other temporal/spatial constructs. Elements within the animation are selectable and populate the bottom detail section.

The initial animation presents a map of the different seventeenth-century Chesapeake sites showing their appearance and disappearance over the course of the century.

Detail Section

The final, bottom section, provides textual information on the selected item. It is populated from the features tab, or from clicking on an item within the resource animation.

Other Module Components

The module includes a loading animation to ease use on the Internet. Since most of the resources are loaded as required it remains fairly small (1.6 meg), though as more animations are added it will grow in size.

A help button on the screen brings up a panel describing the basic navigation.

Future Work

The addition of other sites would come from the creation of new associated XML files. Updating the overview XML file would mean these sites would be immediately available in the module. This could be done without further work on the Flash interface though, unless a simple image was supplied, each resource would need an additional resource animation.

To properly manage the addition of multiple sites it would be desirable and more flexible if the associated XML files were generated dynamically directly, rather than crated statically. This could be achieved by moving the source files into a database. The current structure would remain the same, except that the XML files would be dynamically created from a call from the Flash module to the database. The promise of examining multiple contexts could then be supported by thematic queries, and it would be possible to more easily pursue cross-site analysis. Artifacts or features could be examined over time, within geographically similar regions, or within thematic groupings. It would also be possible to expand the scope of the module to other New World settlements. Along with this change would be the addition of tools within the module, allowing for saving private sets of information for individual users and queries across sites.

Reconstruction of Structure 144, The Jamestown Statehouse

The digital reconstruction of the Jamestown Statehouse, structure 144, was developed under the close guidance of the Jamestown Rediscovery Team using Bentley Systems commercially licensed Microstation Architecture Triforma software and under contract to the architectural firm of Johnson, Craven and Gibson. The initial reconstruction was based upon a published Report to APVA , Jamestown Rediscovery, titled “Description and Analysis of Structure 144” developed by, Cary Carson, Willie Graham, Carl Lounsbury, and Martha McCartney, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Research Division, 20 August 2002. This report developed a reconstruction from the physical evidence on site and seventh and early eighteenth century brick construction in England.

The report noted that a “ Rediscovery team in 2000 and 2001 provided some new evidence that clarified the history of the development of Structure 144, but did not go far enough to substantiate or disprove” a prevailing theory, such as first developed in 1903 by Colonel Samuel Yonge with specific emphasis on House five. The new report concluded that there are several areas (particularly in Houses 3 and 4) that have not been touched by previous excavations, which may promise to answer some questions. The report asserted that the current speculation would need to be further tested against future evaluations and evidence.

A reconstructed version of the model developed in the report was first put forward by Johnson, Craven and Gibson which provided a stronger development of architectural detail. This effort was led by Earl Mark, Associate Professor at the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia in association with Duncan Morton, R.A. of Johnson, Craven and Gibson. The Jamestown Rediscovery Team led by Archeologist Bill Kelso reviewed this reconstruction and made key suggestions regarding the color of doors and windows, the possible composition and change over time of roofing materials, the size and detailing of windows, the likely arrangement of gables, and the sequence of houses one through five. Apart from the English precedents cited in the “Description and Analysis of Structure 144” report the Jamestown Rediscovery Team asserted the particular relevance of Bacon’s Castle, an AVPA property, which offered some local precedent for a potential model of interior spaces, window details, and masonry.

A visit by the Curator of the City Museum for London helped to critique the first reconstruction presented as a five staged development after the reconstruction report, but with a greater speculation on architectural details. Further discussions with the Jamestown Rediscovery Team led to the formulation of a completely revised five staged model, more in keeping with ideas about the water table, the change in roofing materials that is presumed to have occurred over time, the likely disposition of gables, and a prospectively more plausible size and arrangement of windows. The model is developed to the extent allowed by inference from existing information, but is completely undeveloped with respect to interior spaces. It provides a visual “straw man” against which further speculations can be developed. It reflects the character of materials found on site. Its connection to the processes of archeological discovery is a form of argument making. The firm of Johnson, Craven and Gibson, very familiar with architectural detailing of classical buildings in Virginia, lent its expertise not to a validation of archeological findings, but rather to provide a consistent architectural reasoning against assertions made by the Jamestown Rediscovery Staff.

The current three-dimensional digital model is developed in five stages following the timeline suggested in the Reconstruction of Structure 144 report, but modified according to the speculations of the Jamestown Rediscovery Staff. The model depicts some aspects of window details, roofing materials, wood finish, and also various seasonal lighting conditions. A collage of the model on the site of the excavated foundations is also developed as a part of this speculation. One aspect of the model which might call for greater scrutiny is the color of the trim, less likely to be a “white” paint as suggested by the model, and most probably an off-white gray, red or cream color. The brick was also probably painted red. However, this is merely a point of speculation based on local architectural precedent, and is not necessarily supported by a specific evidence trail.

Future work on the model might provide greater development of interior details and structure. A depiction of site conditions especially as related to speculation about the James River shoreline would add to the contextual understanding. A more completely rendered series of studies of surrounding structures and site uses may help to test and further the current speculation. This work may be viewed in Powerpoint:

statehouse.ppt

Dr. Julie Solometo put together one model on the Indians of Paspahegh, the first contact group to meet the English in 1607. Her report is in Appendix 9. The results of this work can be viewed at http://www.virtualjamestown.org/paspahegh/paspaheghHome.html

5.5 Governance, Copyright, and Intellectual Property
Complex issues of governance, copyright, and intellectual property confronted the project and Carole Schmidt, the project consultant on these matters. Currently, University of Virginia and Virginia Tech legal counsels are exploring a Memorandum of Agreement aimed at facilitating speedier approvals of noncommercial, educational, research, cultural or charitable uses of the Virtual Jamestown material through the Principal Investigator and the Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia. Additional materials are being developed to assist contributors to the Jamestown and the Atlantic World site to understand rights regarding presentations, distribution, and permissions for use of jointly-created project deliverables.

Ms. Schmidt also produced an outstanding midstream “Data Audit” for the project with a set of recommendations (see Appendix 4). Some of these recommendations we have followed while others are still being considered.

Market niche, target audience, and sustainable funding built upon a business model composed the essence of the recommendations. The market niche and target audiences for Jamestown and the Atlantic World are the community of scholars, teachers, and students of higher education. The Jamestown and the Atlantic World web site, devised for the purpose of coordinating and presenting the outcomes of the project will morph into a web site that serves that market with the digital publication of the latest research. In addition, the new site will also continue to develop the Jamestown landscape as a joint endeavor of historians, architects, GIS and relational database specialists, using new tools and visualization techniques.

We have viewed sustainability as comprising related issues of intellectual impact/longevity and library preservation, more than simply a financial issue. A dialogue has been opened with the University of Virginia’s Alderman Library initiative “Sustaining Digital Scholarship” on whether to bring Virtual Jamestown into the library as a repository project. Since the site continues to develop, it will be another year or more before it is ready as a repository. Meanwhile, Jamestown and the Atlantic World will develop as a site for scholars engaged in the latest endeavors to publish their research as “new model scholarship,” and to disseminate it among scholars and teachers in higher education.

5.6 New Funding

During the period of the planning grant, the project generated $100,000 in new money. A private donor gave $50,000 for two initiatives: 1. an oral history project on Virginia Indians and Jamestown 2007; 2. a new “wing” on the Jamestown site on first African Virginians. Both of these initiatives are underway. In addition, Verizon Communications gave $50,000, which I have asked to be spent in the following ways: 1. $10,000 for redesign of Virtual Jamestown and the development of additional content for K-12; 2. $20,000 to support the annual conference in January 2007 of the Society for Historical Archaeologists and the inclusion of historians in the conference; 3. $20,000 to be used for applying advanced technology to develop further the int