Welcome....
A quick intro:

This is intended as a venue for historical scholarship about places in the Philadelphia area, in a venue that is collaborative, immediate, and rich, easily accommodating texts, images, and other media.  It would ideally involve a small community of participants, where an initial post would become fodder for a conjunction of evidence contributed by others. 

It may look like a blog, but the idea is to move toward something less singly authored, combining the credited contributions of many, or at least several, and to develop things responsively, in real time, but building things up as a resource (which means figuring out how to make this persistent or archivlble, but more on that later). Recent work together has demonstrated that there is a potential in our collective interests and energies that is circulating ephemerally mainly in our mutual emails and conversations, for perhaps eventual surfacing through publications that could be years down the road, if they ever find a print home.  This new venue might allow us to put that valuable work somewhere that is not only visible, but encourages more collaboration, leveraging our mutual complementarity in terms of research interests and skills.  A key scruple might be the transparent connection of evidence, clearly cited and often brought in or linked, where permissions allow -- to show vs. simply cite.