Also known as: How on earth did people write encyclopedias before the Internet?

I’ve been a regular editor on Wikipedia for a while now, with a pretty narrow focus on the University of Virginia and related topics. In the process, I’ve found a list of sources that have made the topic much easier, and might be helpful for other fans of the history of the University:

• Philip Alexander Bruce’s five volume History of the University of Virginia, covering the period 1819—1919;
• Virginius Dabney’s Mr. Jefferson’s University, bringing the history up through 1974;
• The full text archives at the University of Virginia Special Collections, including the minutes of the Board of Visitors;
• For occasional kicks and giggles, the Cavalier Daily archives from the late 1960s through the early 1970s.
• Finally, for obits and other context, the New York Times archives (with other papers thrown in occasionally).

Note that the sources are hosted by the UVA Library, Google Books, and the Internet Archive. Without the efforts of text initiatives like these I don’t think that what is being done on Wikipedia would be possible. I don’t think that I imagined, when I was an intern applying SGML markup to out-of-copyright texts in the University’s Electronic Text Center (since incorporated into the library’s Scholars Lab), that the work would lead here.

If I don’t want to get morbid and maudlin, I suppose I should stop reading the “In Memoriam” section of the UVA Alumni Magazine. But then I would never know when I was impoverished by the death of a friend or acquaintance.

Today I learned that Nora McGillivray was killed, or killed herself, last September; Nora being Nora, her death was as full of mystery as her life. The painful details are in the link, as are the beginnings of the mystery.

Nora was in my last poetry class, a language poetry class with Tan Lin. She was a careful, quiet writer whom I remember for her grace and her economy of language. I would never have guessed that she was ten years older than I, and I don’t know how many people in the class did either.

It hurts when someone whose words are so much stronger than yours disappears, hurts to think that someone might have lost a battle with depression (though the details are murky and unclear).

I close with an excerpt from her obituary, which is already behind the paywall at the Daily Progress (shame!):

Nora departed on a warm Indian summer night. The details are sketchy and appropriately cryptic, and, while she would have loved being the star of her own cinema verité masterpiece, rest assured, Buckingham County, that Nora is Watching the Detectives...

She was impossible to forget. You had only to meet Nora once to have her indelibly inked upon your subconscious. You might not always have considered this a good thing. She was the kind of dame a tortured young musician would write an opus about, and more than one of them did....

Interesting choice of campaign destination for Hillary Clinton on Monday: she spent an hour with Larry Sabato’s PLAP 101 class at the University of Virginia (via the Tin Man). It appears, from last night’s election returns, that it didn’t help, since Obama swept Virginia (and Maryland, and DC) by a healthy margin.

What surprises me a little is the tone of the uncredited article in UVA Today, always the glossiest and least relevant of the on-Grounds publications. It reads like a campaign press release, gushing over how “poised and candid” she sounded.

I have to say I’m not surprised at all by the fact that the University Singers, rather than the Glee Club, got the nod to do the musical accompaniment, though. I can’t imagine a scenario in which this particular candidate would be OK with a men’s chorus accompanying her.

Oh, and the Barack Obama “Sweep” poster is courtesy the Do It Yourself Barack Obama Poster Site, which is based on this fantastic series of posters by Shepard “Andre the Giant has a Posse” Fairey.

Funny what you find when you dig through University archives. I was going through some old Virginia Glee Club photos tonight when I decided it would be a good idea to actually read the lists of names at the bottom. Some familiar names popped out (Ernest Mead, Harry Rogers Pratt), and then one (in an 1893 photo) that sounded familiar but I couldn’t place it. E.A. Craighill…

Then it hit me. Here’s the guy credited with writing the lyrics to “The Good Old Song” between 1893 and 1895—in an 1893 Glee Club photo! The guy who wrote the freakin’ “Good Old Song” was in Club!!!!

Well, I was having trouble filling out the Notable Alumni section of the Glee Club article after Woodrow Wilson… now I’ve found Notable Alum #2.

While doing some Wikipedia related research last night, I stumbled across something interesting. The record album Songs of the University of Virginia, which I’ve long thought was recorded in 1947 based on photographic evidence from the University archives, was apparently not released until 1951. How do I know this? From a 1951 Washington Post article, of all places.

If it seems funny that a Paper of Record would cover goings-on at the University, consider that the WaPo didn’t get that reputation until the time of Woodward and Bernstein. Prior to that, it was viewed as a sleepy society paper, and apparently not above covering the doings down Route 29.

Also interesting in the article was the following: confirmation of the 1871 founding date (the record was said to honor the eightieth anniversary of the founding of the Glee Club); identification of the Beta Chi chapter of Kappa Kappa Psi (the “national honorary band fraternity”) as the sponsor—an organization that, as far as I can tell, isn’t on Grounds any more; and identification of Thomas Jefferson Smith III of McRae, Georgia, as the co-chairman of the project (with Jack Hardy) and president of the Glee Club at that time. Plus, apparently, the Music Department was resident in Minor Hall then, rather than Old Cabell.

But the main point of the article for me was its claim regarding the aim of the project, which I reproduce here in its entirety:

Many songs which should be a part of University heritage have been lost, some because they were set to popular tunes of the times and died out when the tunes were forgotten, some because a college generation is a brief time in the life of the school. Words to these songs can be found in university publications, but no one sings them because the tunes have been lost.

The famous “wah-who-wah” [sic] of the University’s alma mater is an example of these lost songs. Once it was sung; then all the band music for it was lost. Now no one knows the music, and it has become a yell, used chiefly at football games.

So “Songs of the University of Virginia” will preserve songs which otherwise might be lost in future years. The album will help alumni of present and future to recreate the days of “purple shadows” on the lawn.

The irony, of course, is that the album itself faded almost completely into obscurity too. Note the part about wa-hoo-wa—they are referring to the song about which the “Good Old Song” was written (no, the “Good Old Song” is not self-referential!), which is lost.