How the Atlas researches and writes

Sources

Every essay rests on documented archival sources. The Atlas prefers primary sources: oral histories, tax photographs, redline maps, agency records, newspaper archives, aerial photography, and the records of community organizations. The Atlas treats secondary scholarship as a guide to the archive rather than as a substitute for it.

Each place folder carries its own sources.bib in BibTeX format. Inline footnotes in each essay reference a key in that file. The build warns if a footnote points to a key the bibliography does not carry. The final sources section at the foot of every essay lists the full citation, a URL when available, and a one-sentence note about why the source matters.

Where sources disagree, the essay says so. Where the archival record is thin, the essay names the gap rather than papering over it. The Lincoln, Nebraska essays lean on oral history and newspaper archives because the scholarly record is slim. The New York City essays lean on the Moses-era record because the record is dense.

Maps

Every map carries a written narrative equivalent that every reader sees in the page, whether or not JavaScript runs. The map itself layers historical aerial photography from USGS EarthExplorer over a Protomaps basemap. The aerials live as raster PMTiles on Cloudflare R2. The pipeline appears in full in the aerial pipeline runbook.

Editorial standard

Every essay, every caption, and every UI string follows a strict editorial standard. Active voice. No em dashes. No sentence-initial qualifiers. No single quotation marks outside nested quotations. No nouns used as verbs. The full list appears in the editorial rules document.

A custom editorial-review agent audits every prose change before merge. The agent reads the MDX files and reports every rule violation with a proposed rewrite. The author accepts or declines each fix. The agent never edits files directly; authorial judgment remains final.

Figures and attribution

Every image carries an alt attribute, a credit line, a license, and a year. The build fails if any figure lacks an alt. Figures point to their bibliography entries through a bibKey that links back to the sources section. When a work is in the public domain, the figure says so. When a work is licensed, the license appears next to the credit.

Corrections

Corrections arrive through the public GitHub repository. The Atlas welcomes them from any reader, but it particularly welcomes them from scholars, archivists, and community organizers whose collections the essays draw on. Submit an issue or a pull request at github.com/pedropipehitter/urban-renewal-atlas.