Collecting and Searching AND the Conservative Mennos
My current idea for a digital history project is to digitize the monthly publication of the Conservative Mennonite Conference - the Brotherhood Beacon. Yes, a bit random, but I grew up among the Conservative Mennos and I think they have some interesting elements in how they live life. Someday I’d love to examine how they perceive foreign policy. Maybe this will even become a component of a dissertation in the far off future. Maybe you won’t be surprised that the Brotherhood Beacon isn’t digitized and available for online searching, they are related to the Amish after all. But that is my goal, and to be honest it’s getting a little out of hand as I’m currently in the process of writing a grant proposal to the conference to cover some of the costs of digitization and it is most definitely my first time attempting grant writing.
Anyway, it is easily conceivable that this project could be expanded in the future to connect to our conversation last week about collection of personal histories. In fact, I think the digitized version of the Beacon could server as a kind of hook to get Conservative Mennonites onto the website and then there could be a place for them to share their own stories. If I was to expand my project in this direction I think I would formulate a two-prong attempt to get Conservative Mennos to tell their stories. First, I would probably attempt to direct it (using a questionnaire of sorts) towards research on perceptions of Latin America and U.S. foreign policy or possibly towards conceptions of gender within the Conservative Mennonite Conference. I would love to incorporate each of these elements into a potential dissertation. I think I would also leave a space for Conservative Menno visitors to discuss any topic they wanted and allow that to direct my research if it would play out in interesting ways.