Ancient Web: Douglas Linder's Lake Superior Page Made a Lake Into a Web Library

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Lake Superior already has a grand name. Douglas O. Linder apparently decided the lake also needed a generous collection of hyperlinks and a case for why it deserves the title.

Visit the archived Lake Superior guide.

Hosted under the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law's older web pages, Linder's Lake Superior: A Comprehensive Internet Guide to the Greatest Lake begins with a personal essay rather than a bland database entry. The institution marks this section as archival and no longer updated.

That warning matters. The page is evidence of a particular form of personal scholarship on the Web, not a source to treat as freshly revised environmental data.

Numbers, geology, and admiration

The introduction takes the reader from the lake's surface area to its cold water, rocky shores, changing sky, and formidable winter weather. Linder describes Superior as something that can feel like an ocean, and considers why people who live alongside it develop such a strong attachment to the place.

His accompanying Lake Superior facts page moves rapidly through statistics, ecology, and geology. It lists the lake's surface area, its many tributaries, underwater visibility, islands, deep-water formations, lake-effect snow, and the way its massive body of water moderates nearby seasons.

The fact sheet does not confine itself to tourist trivia. It brings up the ancient continental rift below the lake, the relatively recent retreat of glaciers, orchid species in the basin, migratory birds at Duluth's Hawk Ridge, and the legacy of mining on the shore.

Some figures and superlatives are clearly products of an older snapshot and deserve verification before reuse. Their presence is still historically revealing. Instead of outsourcing an explainer to a platform, a professor assembled a navigable collection that could interest a prospective visitor, a student, or somebody who simply loved the lake.

Linder is also known for his Famous Trials project, which dates its beginning to 1995. This lake guide sits nearby in that older academic web environment, though the visible page does not establish an exact launch year for the Superior section.

The result is a personal argument presented in the language of reference material: here is the lake, here are the facts, and here is why they should make you curious.

Explore the original archived page and its fact sheet.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.