Historian and National Book Award nominee Edward L. Ayers says that the book that most influenced him was William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! In the novel, the past was "pieces and mumbles, and competing versions." The past was not dead, nor "not even past," Faulkner would write later. Edward Ayers has made it digital, existing in a world of bytes and cyberspace and caught in a silicon web. "These very cool machines make history seem hotter," Ayers says.

Sitting at the right (or perhaps wrong, depending on your view) end of a committee meeting, Ayers was given the go ahead by an information technology group at the University of Virginia to create a collaborative effort with IBM to look at what the humanist could do with enough rope and lots of information technology resources. With, as Ayers says, the "entire record of the human experience to deal with in a new way, there was bound to be something interesting."

From that grew the Valley of the Shadow digital archive. "I had the name right off the bat, before I'd even chosen the specific counties, Ayres recalls. It's from the 23rd Psalm, obviously, but I was struck by the contrast by how beautiful the word valley sounds (and how beautiful the Shenandoah Valley actually is) with the death that had swept through it in the Civil War years--the shadow."

The archive takes two counties, two communities, one Confederate, one Union, in the Shenandoah Valley and amasses every census record and every scrap of paper combed from Augusta and Franklin counties from the eve of the Civil War to its end. The result is approximately 3 gigabytes of history resurrecting lives that had been buried in archives, folded away in letters, but now made to live again on the World Wide Web. Already 2 million people have logged onto the site; only 9 million people were alive at the time of the Civil War in the South, and 3.5 million of those were slaves. The Valley project contains handwritten letters of soldiers and slaves that seem to reach into the present with their personal accounts of life in slavery and in war. The site also offers computer-simulated battles that trace the movement of troops in the area over the course of a number of battles.

The power of this technology is creating a new historical paradigm. The South has always been a place that viewed the present and future through a prism of the past and history. And now the role of history and historians is changing. Historian Charles Wilson, director of Center for the Study of Southern Culture, is part of a task force created by SOLINET, the Southeastern Libraries Network, to plan a digitized archive of Southern history and culture. Wilson said he was surprised to find how few resources on the South and Southern culture there were on the Web.

The SOLINET planning project brings together archivist, scholars, and technical experts to figure out a coherent way to make previously hard-to-locate primary sources such as letters available on the Web. The group is focusing on digitizing resources around the framework of the seminal work on Southern history that C. Vann Woodward did on the post-Civil War and early 20th-century South.

Ayers, nominated for the National Book Award for his study The Promise of the New South, says some people have wondered if he is trying to make the historian obsolete. By making the historical record accessible to anyone, anywhere, and bringing it out from behind the beige boxes, the glassed-in cases of the traditional archive, some complain that anyone will be able to write history. In fact, Ayers will write a "book" version of the Valley of the Shadow next year from the same materials found on the Web. Anyone with a modem and computer will have access to exactly the same materials as he does. Others can write their own history of the Shenandoah. Ayers only hopes that his 20 years of study, devotion, and professional skills makes his the better version.

Computers have been a part of deciphering history since the 1970s. Ayers used them in The Promise of the New South to crunch some 20 million lives into numbers and spit them out as data, maps, and graphs. But the Web and its technology makes it possible to give voice to those lives as individuals rather than data. And "rather than going over the words of Jefferson Davis for a million times," Ayers says, "let's see what everyone else has to say."

The Internet or World Wide Web has been heralded as an inherently democratic force. It is accelerating the democratization of history by letting ordinary voices be heard through the digitization of the historical record. There are mountains of materials scattered in just about every library and courthouse in the South, stuffed in Bibles, and lying around in attics. Records that once would have been kept in their solitary place can now, with the same effort of making a photocopy, be scanned digitally and with a few clicks of a mouse become accessible to anyone at the speed of light.

Wilson embraces the new trends made possible by technology and recalls that one of the books that most influenced him in graduate school was Everyman His Own Historian, by Carl Becker. The historian's role used to be to interpret all these records and lives, to "determine when they would speak, and how much," Wilson notes. The historian has been the keeper of the story. Through a vision of the past most often conceived in a solitary study, the historian was the high priest of the past. And only those fragments and quotes that the historian wanted us to see were a part of the histories written.

But that was before digital technology and before the Web, when often the historical record--the diaries, letters, and materials of the past--was seen only by that solitary scholar with the keys, literally, to the library. The historical record now is full of those voices from the past who will not become just a forgotten note card in a scholar's desk.

At the same time, today's technology, with its disconnected networks and ability to make place seem irrelevant in how we work or live, could be "wiping out a place we care about," Ayres observes. "I prefer to think that it's going to let us be more self-aware. That it doesn't displace the kind of human relationship that the Valley project chronicled in the past. That we don't wipe away those kinds of human connections in the future."

Faulkner knew, Ayers says, about the power of the older and fragmentary documentation of the past and how the past in not just a solitary thing kept in a library. And it's not hard to see that Faulkner used his Remington manual typewriter to write novels that were an early version of hypertext and looking into what he called his "postage stamp" of the world.

With what he calls "the most powerful historical change in our time," Edward Ayers has created his own postage stamp of the world on the Web. Join the new historians and check it out (http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/vshadow2/).

Marie Antoon