01776Letter
Writing from Bordeaux, Silas Deane reports French naval preparations and commercial negotiations before leaving for Paris.
23 June 1776Naval Documents of the American Revolution →iOS · In development
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.
Historical photographs, documents, and maps, connected to the places they describe.
Pilot: Washington, Arlington & historic Alexandria. See the coverage.
Sign up for private beta invitations from arQ-iv. How we use your email. Request removal at any time.
See a real record →From a place to the primary source
One photograph.
A record you can follow.
This is arQ-iv’s photograph viewer in a development build, showing a historical stereograph of Arlington Cemetery.
The place leads to the photograph; the photograph leads back to the institution that holds it. You can inspect the same catalog record yourself.
- Place
- Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia
- Title
- Arlington Cemetery
- Date in the catalog
- Between 1864 and 1901
- Holding institution
- Library of Congress
- Catalog identifier
- 2018652265
The catalog supplies a date range, not an exact year. The development screen preserves that uncertainty.
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.
We are developing how the feed responds to your interests. The signals it uses, and your controls over those signals, are still being designed.
Three historical records to explore →
01804Journal
William Clark describes crawling out of mud beside the Missouri River, then scraping off the mud and washing his clothes.
24 June 1804Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition →01913Speech
Woodrow Wilson urges Congress to reform the nation’s banking and currency system.
23 June 1913The American Presidency Project →
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.
And beneath the paper, the buildings themselves: 180,000 dated structures across the original ten-mile square, each one entering the map in the year it was built. Scrub to 01885 and the city is three thousand rooftops; press play and watch Old Town’s 01700s brick fill in, the streetcar suburbs arrive, the postwar boom pour across the county — while buildings the city erased stand again for exactly the years they stood. The assessment roll, the fire-insurance survey, and the demolition record, made one visible field: when everything around you was built, at a glance.
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. →
Interactive illustration · generated map layers, not archival scans.
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.
Animated illustration · placeholder frames, not archival photographs.
01903Studio portrait
01922Newsreel
01936Street scene
01950Travelogue
01961Home movie · color
The pilot — the original ten-mile square
Launching in our own backyard.
Everything within the original forty boundary stones of the District of Columbia — Washington, Arlington, and the part of Alexandria the 1791–92 survey enclosed. One historical object, three jurisdictions: the ten-mile square Benjamin Banneker helped fix, drawn, un-drawn by the 1846 retrocession, and still legible in the forty sandstone posts that ring it. We have spent three years canvassing and excavating this ground, 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. In the app, the frame is literal: outside the stones, the map is black.
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.
The visual reel collection also includes: London ● Paris ● Berlin ● Amsterdam
Privacy goals, as we build
arQ-iv is in development. Our goal is to use precise location to surface relevant records, then discard those coordinates within 72 hours. This is a development target, not a guarantee about the current build.
We are working toward a coarse, editable place history retained for one month, with controls to hide or delete it. Location processing, retention, and deletion behavior are still being developed.
Our design goals are an ad-free experience, no sale of personal data, and personalization people can understand and control. These goals guide development; they are not a description of completed privacy protections.
Website privacy notice · Privacy questions
Privacy is part of the work.
Delivery
Pushed, not published — and earned, not spammed.
The planned experience lets you browse the archive from anywhere — the feed, the map, the reels. Proximity would shape what arQ-iv brings to you, 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.
Five films — the eleven theses set in motion, and four cut entirely from the public-domain record, made with the same pipeline the app runs on.
Sound captions are available in the player. Narrated films include automatic English captions with editorial corrections. Report a caption correction.
Theses on arQ-iv1 MIN 11 · I → XI
The concept paper’s eleven theses, set in motion — from the slumbering archive to geomemory in your pocket.
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
Read Reagan’s February 12, 1981 remarks
Library of Congress · National Archives · Prelinger Archives · public domainSalience 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. The journey below illustrates the experience we are developing: one journey, three possible connections.
Today
Section 27, Arlington National Cemetery
38° 53.0′ N · 77° 04.3′ WA 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′ WThe 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′ WThat 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 argument
Theses on arQ-iv
I
Rich, digitized, public-domain records slumber in fragmented archives.
II
Archives require querying — but 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 meaning 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 possible weeks and miles away — the query compounds across a personal journey.
X
People trust what they can verify — a record shown verbatim, and linked to the original and institution that holds it.
XI
Archivists preserved the past and historians interpreted it; arQ-iv returns the past to the people.
Who is behind it
A project by REPERTORIUM LLC.
For support, privacy questions, and source corrections: editor@arq-iv.com.