As a public history student at University of Maryland Baltimore County, I was part of the discussions that led to the creation of the Preserve the Baltimore Uprising 2015 Archive Project. Over the last two years, I have been interested in the ways public history projects–particularly community archives of contemporary events–are created by way of digital tools. As such, I was eager to begin my rotation in the Public Projects division.

The division works to develop digital tools, collections, and exhibits that facilitate public participation in history. Popular tools for online exhibitions and community transcription such as Omeka and Scripto are developed and maintained in the division. Several digital community archive projects are also housed in the division, such as the September 11 Digital Archive, a Digital Memory Bank commemorating Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and the Bracero History Archive.

My first task was familiarizing myself with GitHub, a version control repository used primarily for code. Next, I worked through Omeka S as its version 1.0 release drew near. To clarify, Omeka S is different from Omeka Classic: it has a different code base, and gives individuals and organizations the ability to create multiple sites from a single install with shared resources; these resources can be shared as linked open data. I reviewed  documentation (which also introduced me to Markdown via MkDocs), and tested the tool by completing a variety of tasks.

The remaining time in Public Projects was focused on working on Mapping Early American Elections, a project which produces interactive maps and visualizations of elections from 1787 to 1825. I reviewed the election maps, visualizations, and election data from New Nation Votes to draft explanatory paragraphs for state elections for the first three Congresses (1788-1792). My historical research is firmly situated in the late nineteenth century, yet I thoroughly enjoyed examining eighteenth century elections, tracking electoral trends. The last day of my rotation, I was able to utilize GitHub and Markdown to pull my paragraphs into the dev site.

While my introductory rotation is over, I am looking forward to returning to the division next semester and further developing my skills as a digital public historian.