In 1991, the University of Virginia's campus-wide Information Technology Committee generated the idea of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, a place where technologists and humanists would collaborate on cutting-edge research projects. The International Business Machines Company generously donated equipment and technical support. John Unsworth was named director in 1993.
Chosen as one of the two "prototype fellows" for the Institute in its initial year of 1992-3, Edward Ayers of Virginia's History Department received the half-time support of systems analyst Ross Wayland, an RS6000 workstation, and the financial support necessary for the digitization of the newspaper and census images, performed by Accessible Archives of Philadelphia.
In the fall of 1993 Thornton Staples, an experienced systems analyst, was recruited from Academic Computing to serve as associate director of the Institute. He has been a consultant on this project from the beginning and helped design much of the current project.
Anne Rubin, a doctoral student in history at Virginia and now research coordinator on the project, worked over the summer of 1993 marking up newspaper images in SGML. Other graduate students who assisted in entering data, renaming files, and editing material in the early stages included Scot French and Edna Johnston.
In the summer of 1994, the Woodrow Wilson Birthplace received a grant from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities to install a sample of the project in Staunton. The staff of the Birthplace, led by its director, Susan Klaffky, and its research director at the time, Susan Simmons, conducted extensive outreach programs to bring the Augusta County community into the project. The project received generous support from the Valentine Museum, which helped accelerate the research in the late summer and early fall of 1994. Pat Hobbs of the Wilson Birthplace worked with the Historic Staunton Foundation and the Augusta County Historical Society to provide valuable primary resources.
A number of researchers from the University of Virginia's graduate history program contributed to the project in preparation for the opening of the Woodrow Wilson Birthplace exhibit. They include, in alphabetical order:
Technical staff from the Institute who have contributed include: