No end of interest
Encyclopedia of Arkansas surpasses 3,000 entries, still going.
A minor milestone in the history of the state’s historiography came and went last month, and few outside of Arkansas’ very active history listserve paid any attention. The 6-year-old Encyclopedia of Arkansas posted its 3,000th entry. Three thousand! Wow. In an Arkansas Democrat-Gazette story that ran at the encyclopedia’s introduction in 2006, Tom DeBlack, president of the Arkansas Historical Association in 2006, called the encyclopedia — and not his own association or the Arkansas Historical Quarterly it puts out — “perhaps the single greatest accomplishment in the history of Arkansas history.”
But in that same profile, historian Tom Dillard said it would hit 4,000 entries — by 2010.
Six years ago Senior Editor Nathania Sawyer said it’s reasonable to think that the finished resource would top out at 3,000 entries.
The original grant proposal by the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation furnished the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies with $1.28 million to get the site up and running and funded through 2010, when estimated traffic would peak at 50,000 hits a month. In 2011, the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture attracted roughly 3 million hits a month.
(To be clear, the number of actual people visiting the website is a fraction of this. Any searchable website is continually “hit” by other computers sifting through pages and images on the Internet for usable search terms and images. Still, the traffic on the encyclopedia has far surpassed its earliest projections.)
“Our initial thought was we were going to exceed our larger topics, but the things we thought we’d be able to stop at spawned new things,” Sawyer says.
“The phenomenon we’ve discovered is, there is no end of interest in this.” WHERE IT ENDS, NIUE-BODY KNOWS The compendium has developed like a hive, hundreds of bright bees filling in hundreds of little holes in the state’s history, and our honey travels far and wide — Arkansas, sure, America, but then, Australia, The Netherlands, Sweden.
One bee is Katherine Teske. She was 14 when her entry on Alexander went online. Another, Dixie Covington Howard,
contributed an entry on Camark pottery in February, then passed away quietly in August at the age of 100.
This summer, the tiny island of Niue in the South Pacific became the 214th country from which the encyclopedia logged a visit. That fact may be less surprising when you discover the South Pacific island has had free national WiFi for nearly a decade now.
As for what this Niuean was looking for, we don’t know. Boo Boo the Chicken? The Pythian Bathhouse? The Gowrow? ALMS FOR THE POOR OF HISTORY
The prolife ration of note worthy people, places, and events in Arkansas has indirectly turned the spotlight back on our own academic penury.
That is, we’re poor of history.
In fact, writing our state’s history has become a cause celebre. Armchair historians from around the world clamor to contribute a footnote.
“Yes, I agree that, as a Dutchman, I am an unlikely candidate to write an article for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture,” Dik de Heer said in an e-mail he typed from Leiden, The Netherlands. “I was as surprised as you when I was approached by Guy Lancaster, the encyclopedia’s editor, to write about Arkie Shibley.”
Lancaster sought out de Heer after he wrote an entry on musician Jesse Lee “Arkie” Shibley for the online forum BlackCat Rockabilly.
“Mr. Lancaster even offered me a fee of $25, which I kindly declined.” Did you get that? Arkansas is a place so starved for history we gladly barter away the price of a steak dinner for a few scraps of edumacation.
Brother, could you spare an entry on Christadelphians?
TRUTHINESS The criticism often leveled against online encyclopedias is that they just can’t be trusted. Peer-written-and-reviewed compendia simply aren’t factchecked with the same institutional rigor that The New Yorker or the phone book is.
Do the curators of the encyclopedia excise fiction where they find it? No, they cultivate tall tales. Then pay the same rate for them.
Consider the state Supreme Court decision in J.R. Poisson v. Etienne d’Avril.
Writing for the majority, the ageless Justice George Rose Smith (grandson of Rose Law Firm founder Uriah Rose), on April 1, 1968, held that a littlecited state statute — the “Omnibus Repealer” — abrogates all statutory law in Arkansas, though not common law.
Of course, no state law abrogates all other state laws. That would be legally (brilliant?) untenable.
Poisson d’Avril is French for “April Fish.”
It is true that Smith was a justice and that he did “file” the opinion. It’s also true he penned a later April Fool’s opinion, this one in the ’ 80s, that made its way into case law and eventually was cited by a gullible Delaware judge in a real opinion. Objection! For the record, staff historian Mike Polston says “we get calls from people that compare us to Wikipedia,” but unlike truly crowd-sourced — wiki — encyclopedias, the small staff at the Encyclopedia of Arkansas assiduously fact-checks its entries against the extant record — county historical quarterlies, Arkansas Democrat and Gazette newspapers, public records — before putting articles before the public. GULLIBLE WILL TRAVEL The website’s raison d’etre — unsettled by our French? They settled us first — is to peddle knowledge, information, context. Still, the journey’s not without its detours.
“A lot of people e-mail me with pictures of pottery,” Lancaster says.
A picture of a “really atrocious head-pot that’s something an eighth-grader may have made” will pop up in his inbox, followed by “Did I buy an actual headpot at an antique store? This could be worth a lot of money. Please give me good news.” Ugh! As a rule, historians don’t truck with good news. That’s why a search of the Library of Congress catalog doesn’t turn up The World at Peace.
Another funny thing that happens is that readers will click the Contact Us link at the bottom of an entry and address the subject of the entry.
As in, “‘Dear Miss Angelou, I just loved I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,’” Lancaster says.
One response to an entry on Jones Trucking Lines “garnered us a call from someone who wanted us to make sure that when their stuff was delivered, it was delivered to a certain dock,” Sawyer recalls.
“We have an entry on baitfish, you know, because that’s a big one,” Lancaster says. “I had some guy call me on the phone wanting to know how he could order some minnows and have them shipped up to Wisconsin.”
The two editors regularly delight at the many sites that link to the EOA. The Southeast Sasquatch Association links to the encyclopedia’s entry on the Fouke Monster, while the Keltic Klan Kirk in Malvern had at one time linked to James Loewen’s entry on sundown towns.
“It was, you know, saying, ‘We need sundown towns,’ and ‘America needs sundown towns,’ but presenting our information [on sundown towns] doesn’t necessarily give a positive spin on it,” Lancaster says.
“Someone e-mailed us about the 1919 Elaine Massacre, and the Gazette headline [from the time] reads ‘Vicious Blacks Were Planning Great Uprising.’ This person wrote, ‘That wasn’t an insurrection. They were being persecuted down there!’”
If there’s a moral to it all, it’s this.
“We don’t want to be the encyclopedia of dead white governors,” Sawyer says. “We want it to be the encyclopedia of everything good, bad, right and wrong about the state.”
WHAT INTERESTS US The two most popular encyclopedia search terms are those related to the Central High School desegregation crisis — specifically, “Central High School” and “Little Rock Nine” — and “wet and dry counties.”
Clearly, “people are interested in civil rights history,” Lancaster says, “and whether or not they can get booze in a particular place.” GIVING A PLACE A PAST Going to school in Bauxite, Sawyer (nee Smyth) often marveled at how this “big, filled-in mine” ever was a place.
“A history teacher [there] would take her classes on a walking tour of Bauxite past ... and the kids would pipe up, ‘Oh yeah, my grandfather talked about going to the movie theater there,’ [where now] there’s a grass plot where the movie theater was.
“It helped people really sort of be connected to their community, and have some sense of what happened there, and that it wasn’t just a dead spot in the middle of the state.”
A place without a story isn’t ever fully imagined, Lancaster says, just as a story without place may only aspire to allegory, fable.
“Our media editor, a world traveler in his own right, was bragging a while back about visiting Ferndale. Ferndale — a crossroads with a gas station and a hair salon.
“But it excited him because we have an entry on the subject, and so he knew the story about it before visiting. That is, he was visiting it outside the perspective of just the present, but also visiting the past because he had that knowledge in his head when he went there.
“Those who talk about boosting the state’s economy, about attracting or keeping a pool of talented people in Arkansas, would do well to keep in mind how much knowing a place’s history makes people invested in that place.”