Since posting my midterm reflection, I’ve been continuing to work on the Papers of the War Department and the 9/11 Digital Archive. Anne and I produced Episode #112 of Digital Campus in March, which featured three of the hosts discussing current trends in technology, including the demise of Internet Explorer, the Apple watch, and the new one-port MacBook. On behalf of the DH Fellows, Amanda Regan coordinated Micki Kaufman’s brown bag presentation on her dissertation, Quantifying Kissinger, which I briefly blogged about and live tweeted.
Papers of the War Department (PWD)
For the PWD I’ve been creating user accounts, monitoring the wiki page, and protecting and exporting transcribed documents. I’ve also written several “transcribe this” blogs describing various documents: one discusses the fever in Philadelphia; another mentions the state of affairs in the Ohio country; and my final post will be published next week that concerns the appeal for the creation of a school for Native American children. I’ve also written the community transcription updates for the months of March and April. In addition to blogging, I’ve populated the PWD Twitter with links to documents needing transcription that appeal to a wide audience. Some of these tweets cover such topics as George Washington’s presidential agenda; Washington’s 1792 speech to the Five Nations; a resignation of a brigadier general; a 1795 American expedition into Florida; and death in Early America.
The September 11 Digital Archive
After completing the review of the Sonic Memorial Project Collection, I wrote a blog post for the 9/11 blog that highlighted the various types of items housed within that large collection by going through the history of the physical space the World Trade Towers inhabited. I also reviewed the Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center (MEMEAC) Interview Collection, which is a group of over seventy interviews of Arab-American and/or Muslim Americans that were conducted by the Graduate Center, City University of New York between 2002 and 2003. Currently I am drafting a blog post that describes that collection.
In addition to my work on those projects, I also performed user testing for the newest version of Omeka.net. In addition to my current work on 9/11, I also used Omeka in Public Projects last semester while working on describing the items in the Boston Federal Aviation Administration Filings Collection, so I was already familiar with the user interface, adding content, and describing items. By testing the latest version I learned much more about how the content management system works as well as the purposes for all Omeka plugins, and I was successful in finding a few minor errors. Also: the LC-Suggest plugin is so incredibly helpful and useful!
My work this semester in Public Projects has taught me to engage with wider audiences that are not necessarily scholastic in nature. I’ve been able to choose PWD documents to tweet or blog about, and I chose to review the MEMEAC collection for my final 9/11 blog post. My blogs and tweets are meant evoke public interest in the projects, and as such the subjects of each must be compelling and interesting to scholars and non-scholars alike. In addition to understanding and reaching out to various audiences, I’ve also gained a greater understanding of the two platforms both projects are built on: MediaWiki and Omeka. Before working on the PWD I had never worked with MediaWiki, so I had to acclimate myself to the interface. I also now have a great appreciation for Dublin Core metadata after reviewing various items and collections within 9/11. I have greatly enjoyed my time in the Public Projects division, and am amazed at how much I’ve learned over the past nine months. At the end of August last year, I came in with very limited technical knowledge and was baffled as to what exactly digital history encompasses. Working at the Center as a Fellow has allowed me to broaden my technical horizons, engage with programming languages including Python, have first-hand experiences with the frustrations of American copyright laws, make history accessible to various audiences, and learn the intricacies of Omeka.