This article has been intensely collaborative from the outset, both between the authors and among professional staff and research assistants at the University of Virginia and the Virginia Center for Digital History. Kimberly A. Tryka, Associate Director of the Center, applied her valuable expertise in XSL stylesheets and transformations, creating the innovative Reading Record tool as well as helping develop the fundamental structure of the article. Her work on this article has been instrumental and critical to our effort. Benjamin Knowles of Octagon Multimedia Productions gladly gave us his time and graphic design talent and web expertise, working with us to design the interface for this work. Aaron Sheehan-Dean, now at the University of North Florida, worked on the GIS and SPSS data and offered his considerable expertise in Civil War history. Watson Jennison, now at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, energetically investigated the newspapers and compiled content analysis of them. Steve Thompson, now at the University of Texas at Austin, helped develop the original GIS for Augusta County.

Many others have worked on the Valley of the Shadow Project and we thank them all, for without their diligent care this article would not have been possible. We thank Lew Lancaster and the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley, for their early support of our GIS efforts. We also especially thank our colleagues at the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia for their helpful criticism of both our form and analysis in a draft version of this article at a department workshop. Lloyd Benson, John Unsworth, Michael Broome, and Michael Holt carefully read several drafts of this article and offered written comments. We appreciate especially the thoughtful readers of the American Historical Review for their wise and judicious reading of this piece in draft form. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude for Michael Grossberg's careful suggestions and patient support of our work and his leadership in bringing it to publication. We thank all these friends and colleagues for their invaluable help.

This project was funded in part by the