Jack Dougherty, a professor of educational studies at Trinity College in Hartford, has been working for the past couple of years on some fascinating collaborative writing projects. One is Writing History in the Digital Age, an open-review publication that reflects on the ways new writing technologies might change, or not, the most basic practice of historical research–writing. The other involves magic. That is, MAGIC, the Map and Geographic Information Center at UConn‘s library. Called On The Line: How Schooling, Housing, and Civil Rights Shaped Hartford and Its Suburbs, the project features, in addition to many other forms of scholarship, these crazy linked maps that juxtapose aerial photographs of Hartford’s historical development with contemporary Google Earth images. (Stay tuned this spring for a forthcoming guest post on this work!)

Dougherty realized that many people might…

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