SAH Archipedia Seeks Scholar Contributors

SAH Archipedia is an authoritative online encyclopedia of the built world published jointly by the Society of Architectural Historians and the University of Virginia Press. It was launched in 2012 with foundation content from the award-winning Buildings of the United States series and now contains over 17,500 building histories and introductory essays dealing with the architecture of thirty states and the District of Columbia. By summer 2017, thanks to a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support the development of peer-reviewed, born-digital scholarship, SAH Archipedia will contain building histories from all 50 states, as well as histories of two hundred urban settings and landscapes. With continuing NEH support for this digital humanities initiative, we are now seeking scholars to participate in SAH Archipedia 3.0.

For SAH Archipedia 3.0, we invite contributors to utilize this robust digital content and associated metadata to produce scholarship that will interpret the built environment of the United States—buildings, infrastructure, and landscapes—through thematic and place-based essays.

We seek scholars to approach SAH Archipedia thematically, linking new and existing building entries with interpretive essays that can examine a range of architectural issues: typological, stylistic, material, or monographic. Thematic essays and linked building entries could also take some other cultural cross-section through SAH Archipedia, be it social, economic, political, or technological.

We also seek scholars to approach SAH Archipedia geographically and thematically, focusing on SAH Archipedia’s legacy content, derived from the oldest Buildings of the United States volumes, in order to update existing building entries and add new ones. These new interpretive essays will link building entries by making strategic cuts through one of the following states—Alaska, Colorado, Iowa, Louisiana, Nevada, Virginia, Rhode Island, West Virginia—and the District of Columbia. Here, within the boundaries of the given state, the approach might be typological, formal, or more broadly cultural, but it might also zoom in on districts and locales that have changed radically in the past twenty years.

Whether scholars are interested in thematic or place-based projects, all methodological approaches are welcome as long as the interpretive strategies utilize SAH Archipedia’s framework of essays and linked building entries with metadata.

Interested scholars should submit a proposal that includes a 500-word abstract outlining a thematic or place-based project and including a preliminary list of the SAH Archipedia content the project would update or expand. They should also submit a 2-page CV. All proposals will be reviewed by the SAH Archipedia Advisory Committee.

Submit proposals to Gabrielle Esperdy, Editor, SAH Archipedia, at esperdy@njit.edu, and Catherine Boland Erkkila, Project Editor, SAH Archipedia, at cerkkila@sah.org. Deadline for submissions is January 31, 2017. Questions, please do not hesitate to contact Esperdy and Boland Erkkila by email.