About VantagePoint

VantagePoint is the work of Scott Place, an independent historian, engineer and corpus architect based in Beaufort, North Carolina.

The project began with a problem familiar to anyone who has worked in Revolutionary-era sources: the traditions are well told and thinly documented. A story repeated in a dozen respectable books can turn out, when the citations are followed backward, to rest on a single nineteenth-century assertion that the next writer took on trust. Following those chains by hand means finding the volumes first, and the finding is most of the work. A corpus of period text puts the candidates in front of you in an afternoon; reading them at the page is what turns a candidate into a finding, and that still takes as long as it takes. What changes is that multiple works spanning a century and a half can be held open at once, in one register, with every claim carrying its tier and every correction recorded. The method is applied to a book in progress, The Forge, and to episode studies in the Revolutionary period. It is available to institutions as corpus construction, as commissioned research, and — increasingly the part that matters most — as training in the curation discipline itself.

That is the whole of the idea. Not a tool that answers historical questions, but an evidence based disciplined approach that a historian can answer them, show the work cover more ground and save time.

Edward Moseley, A New and Correct Map of the Province of North Carolina, 1733. Library of Congress. Public domain: published before 1930.