arQ-iv Theses The app Watch Your journey Why trust it Who we are Follow the build

geo·memory

noun · /ˈdʒiː.oʊˌmɛm.ər.i/

1.History surfaced at the place where it happened. A fact that bores people in a book can stop them on the street.

arQ-iv puts geomemory in your pocket.

A 1936 film of the street you are standing on. A 162-year-old dispatch about the place you visited last week. A century-old letter, speech, or sermon that intersects with what you already care about. Every record opens the primary source — rendered verbatim, cited, and linked to the institution that holds it.

Watch the trailer

The argument

Theses on arQ-iv

I

Rich, digitized, public-domain records slumber in fragmented archives.

II

Archives require querying — and most people never query an archive. The threshold is too high, the reward too buried.

III

The attention economy perfected infrastructure that delivers petabytes of novel content — automated queries powering personalized feeds, hacking the jouissance of discovery.

IV

People spend hours hunting for meaningful information on their phones, inundated by posts with an informational half-life measured in hours.

V

The historical record does not decay, nor require perpetual production of novel content to be salient.

VI

The salience of a record is not an immutable property but a dynamic function of the reader, their location, and the time.

VII

History is especially meaningful surfaced at the place where it happened. We call that geomemory.

VIII

To serve the archive to the people, we must automate the query and harness other tools of the attention economy.

IX

A discovery in one place makes another legible weeks and miles away — the automated query compounds across a personal journey.

X

Trust is verbatim: a record is rendered exactly, cited, and linked to the institution that holds it — or not at all.

XI

Archivists have preserved the past and historians interpreted it; arQ-iv returns the past to the people.

The app

You don’t have to search.

arQ-iv automates the query. Three surfaces carry the record to you — each one a delivery mechanism, not a destination.

App experience · 01

This Day in History

Open arQ-iv cold and the first thing you see is a carousel of records tied to today’s date — deliberately eclectic, monumental next to mundane. A daily ritual of curated serendipity, drawn entirely from primary sources.

What you open, dwell on, and save becomes a signal: not just subjects, but eras, regions, and the form of the artifact itself. The feed learns while you browse.

One morning’s actual range →

01660Diary

Samuel Pepys confides his everyday anxieties to his diary — the domestic rhythms of seventeenth-century London.

366 years ago today The Diary of Samuel Pepys
01776Dispatch

The opening moves of a secret American mission to France — intelligence on French military preparations, trade coordinated to back a brewing revolution.

250 years ago today Founders Online
01804Journal

William Clark crawls off a Missouri River island mud-caked from head to toe — and laughs at himself in his journal.

222 years ago today Lewis & Clark journals
01863Dispatch

From Vicksburg, Grant demands to know whether hanging captured Black Union soldiers — rather than treating them as prisoners of war — is Confederate policy.

163 years ago today War of the Rebellion
01899Menu

Aboard a Hamburg-American liner mid-Atlantic: carp in red wine and roast duckling for the evening crossing.

127 years ago today Historic menus
01913Speech

Woodrow Wilson addresses a joint session of Congress — the legislative catalyst for the Federal Reserve.

113 years ago today Presidential speeches
App experience · 02

The Map Scrubber

arQ-iv pins your location and lets you scrub through time. Your position stays fixed while the streets, shorelines, and field boundaries redraw around you, era by era — every layer a real georeferenced sheet, from a 1597 hemisphere map to the Civil-War defenses of Washington to a Sanborn fire-insurance survey that names the frame dwelling that stood on your parking spot.

A georeferenced map is a primary source in its own right: a snapshot of the ground, and of what its makers knew. Where a landscape was erased — Freedman’s Village, Queen City — the map restores the vanished geography, and arQ-iv ties the records that explain it to those coordinates.

Drag the slider. You don’t just read about change — you watch it. →

YOU · POSITION FIXED
● 01597 A hemisphere map — this ground is blank space at the edge of the known.
015970186101907today
App experience · 03

The Video & Image Reel

For a single landmark we comb the public-domain film archives — newsreels, travelogues, government footage, amateur home movies — identify the location frame by frame, and stitch every clip and surviving photograph into one reel you can scroll, oldest to newest. An homage to the infinite scroll, every second of it sourced, with a payload that never expires.

It is also primary evidence. The scholar’s material is often in the margins — the signage and dress the camera caught by accident, the home movie that saved an ordinary block no record thought worth describing. What a map shows as a footprint, film restores as life. Where a place is gone, the reel is the last ground on which it still moves.

01903Studio portrait
01922Newsreel
01936Street scene
01950Travelogue
01961Home movie · color

Delivery

Pushed, not published — and earned, not spammed.

The whole archive is open to browse from anywhere — the feed, the map, the reels. Proximity only shapes what arQ-iv brings to you unasked, and when:

400 m

A quiet orientation

Something happened near here. One line, one direction. Nothing demands your attention.

150 m

The story opens

Who, when, and what remains. Enough to decide whether to walk the last block.

0 m

Front of the feed

Standing where it happened, that place’s record leads — the documents, the photographs, the voices of the ground you’re on.

earned by place and interest● opt-in, always● quiet hours 21:00–08:00● everything browsable from anywhere

Watch

See the record move.

Four films cut entirely from the public-domain record — made with the same pipeline the app runs on.

Through Time1 MIN 00  ·  01597 → 02026
One coordinate, four centuries of maps. Scans: David Rumsey Map Collection · David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries · music: World At Your Call · Prelinger Archives · public domain
Through Time: München0 MIN 50  ·  01613 → 02026
The same coordinate, sixteen sheets, three centuries. Scans: David Rumsey Map Collection · David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries · Bayerische Staatsbibliothek · music: Kapelle Jais, 1920 · public domain
The World at Your Call2 MIN 18  ·  01950
Footage: World At Your Call · Jam Handy Organization · 01950 · Prelinger Archives · public domain
Reagan at the Lincoln Memorial4 MIN 08  ·  01950 → 01981
Library of Congress · National Archives · Prelinger Archives · public domain

Salience is a function — journey is a key

The same dispatch is noise in a search index and revelation on the corner it describes.

Salience depends on who is reading, where they are, and when. arQ-iv computes that function continuously — and it compounds. One journey, three cards:

Today

Section 27, Arlington National Cemetery

38° 53.0′ N · 77° 04.3′ W

A quiet path. Your phone surfaces a 19th-century photograph of this exact hillside and a short, sourced note: the graves around you belong to people who lived in Freedman’s Village, a federal settlement of the formerly enslaved a few hundred yards south. You read for ninety seconds, save the card, and move on.

+ One week

A parking lot, Pentagon City

38° 51.7′ N · 77° 03.5′ W

The card tells you this asphalt sits on top of Queen City — a Black neighborhood founded in 1892 by families who had passed through Freedman’s Village, condemned in 1942 for road access to the new Pentagon, its residents evicted and most never returned. There is no plaque. Just the parking lot — and, beneath the card, the period photographs, a 1930 street map showing the AME Zion church, and the original condemnation notice.

+ Six weeks

Virginia State Capitol, Richmond

37° 32.3′ N · 77° 26.0′ W

That evening, arQ-iv surfaces John B. Syphax — born enslaved on the Lee estate, later a member of the House of Delegates — who served in the building you stood in and fought the federal eviction of the community you visited last month. That card exists only for you, because of where you’ve been.

The path became the query. The archive yielded a connection no finding aid could index in advance.

Why trust it

Trust is verbatim — or not at all.

Every card opens the actual primary source: rendered faithfully in the app, cited, and linked back to the institution that holds it. Nothing is paraphrased into authority it hasn’t earned — the document is always there to inspect.

1.1 M
Records in the graph, growing weekly
720,000
National Archives record descriptions
184,000
Founders Online documents
179,000
War of the Rebellion records

Rights resolved at acquisition

Every source enters the graph with its provenance and rights posture settled — public domain, openly licensed, or barred from publication. Never reconstructed later.

Two gates, not one

Writing to the graph and publishing to readers are separate gates. Nothing unverified or rights-unclear can reach a reader. What isn’t cleared is held link-only.

Character-exact, continuously

Every quoted passage is re-derived, character for character, from its source store before the day it appears goes live. Anything that drifts is suppressed.

Keyed to the source

Records carry the holding institution’s own persistent identifiers — NARA catalogue ids, Founders Online permalinks, archival ARKs. Media streams from the archive itself.

The corpus is append-only: we add and never overwrite, so it compounds rather than decays. The standard is simple — arQ-iv’s output should be defensible, on its own terms, to an outside historian.

The Arlington pilot

Launching in our own backyard.

Arlington, Virginia — a county we have spent three years canvassing and excavating, one event, record, and inscription at a time. Small enough to curate by hand; dense enough to show the whole idea: Civil War, Black heritage, federal expansion, and hidden institutional histories layered on top of one another.

Much of that depth comes from foundational archival ledgers — the Library of Virginia’s Virginia Untold corpus, county slavery indexes, the 1865–66 Gladwin Book of Records: wills, deeds, manumissions, hard-fought freedom suits. arQ-iv treats the ground itself as the index to those records.

The history we surface does not belong to us. We partner directly with local institutions and descendant communities; stories that touch living memory are reviewed with those communities before publication; and where the record is contested or incomplete, we say so plainly.

Visual reels already live beyond the pilot: Washington ● London ● Paris ● Berlin ● Amsterdam

Privacy by design

arQ-iv needs precise, real-time location to surface the right card — but it does not keep it. Your coordinates do their immediate work and are discarded within 72 hours.

What persists is different in kind: a coarse, editable list of the historic places your phone has intersected over a month — no specific days, routes, or frequencies. Edit it, hide it, or wipe it at any time.

Ad-free. Your data is never sold. Personalization runs on explicit engagement, never on inferred characteristics.

Precision in. Meaning out. Nothing else.

Who is behind it

Founded by two nerds with an obsession for provenance.

Josef “Joey” Ansorge

Chief Editorial Officer

Yale Law graduate and litigator. PhD from Cambridge on the history of information technology; author of Identify & Sort: How Digital Power Changed World Politics.

Jomaire Crawford

Chief Outreach Officer

Yale Law graduate and former litigator; a history and humanities devotee since adolescence, raised by the metropolis of New York. Leads editorial governance, partnerships, and the standards that make the corpus institutionally trusted.

Between municipal-archive dives: three kids and a beloved dog named Biscotti.