Author: dougseefeldt

Associate Professor of History, Director, Digital History PhD Program, Clemson University
Posted on

2017 WHA Six-Shooters Session

The 2017 Six-Shooters digital history lightning round session, sponsored by the WHA Technology Committee, featured nine presenters sharing their research, teaching, and public projects at the WHA conference in San Diego, CA (photos by Doug Seefeldt, session chair):

  • Adam Arenson, Manhattan College
  • Jared Eberle, Oklahoma State University
  • Jason Heppler, University of Nebraska at Omaha
  • Jessica Kim, California State University, Northridge
  • Chris Repka, St. Mary’s University
  • Douglas Seefeldt, Ball State University
  • Jay Taylor, Simon Fraser University
  • Bryan Winston, St. Louis University
  • Linnea Zeiner, San Diego State University
Posted on

Doug Seefeldt: “The Last of the Mohicans Realized in London”: Visualizing the Wild West in Britain, 1887-88

In 1887, William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody embarked for England on his first international tour. During the original London run of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West–coinciding with the celebration of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee–the Wild West routinely played to more than twenty thousand people in fourteen performances a week. It was the subject of nonstop coverage in the London press and enthralled the country’s political and cultural elites. Over two million visitors witnessed the spectacle, and millions more read about it.

This digital research project uses topic modeling and text analysis tools to analyze popular representations of the American West published in London prior to the arrival of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in 1887. It visualizes how these widely-read texts shaped and reflected conceptions of the American West among the British reading public and compares these visualizations to textual analyses of promotional material generated by Cody’s marketing team as well to commentary on the performances in British periodicals and newspapers.

Preliminary findings suggest that while Cody was depicted as the “Last of the Mohicans” in the Illustrated Penny Press upon his arrival in England–a representation that conflated early and late-nineteenth-century American frontier experiences–he departed having conveyed to his imperial-era British audience a new sense of the American West as the locus of a distinctive crucible of civilization-building in an increasingly globalized age.

Posted on

Lineup for 2017 Six-Shooters Session

Here is an alphabetical list of the presenters that we have confirmed for the Technology Committee-sponsored session, “Six-Shooters: A Digital Frontiers Lightning Round”:

  • Adam Arenson, Manhattan College
  • Jared Eberle, Oklahoma State University
  • Jason Heppler, University of Nebraska at Omaha
  • Jessica Kim, California State University, Northridge
  • Chris Repka, St. Mary’s University
  • Douglas Seefeldt, Ball State University
  • Jay Taylor, Simon Fraser University
  • Bryan Winston, St. Louis University
  • Linnea Zeiner, San Diego State University

The session will be chaired by Douglas Seefeldt, Ball State University, and is scheduled for Thursday, November 2nd from 1:30-3:00 PM in the Monte Carlo room of the Hilton San Diego Resort & Spa, San Diego, California. Each presenter has six minutes and six slides (“Six-Shooters,” get it?) for their presentation. All presenters will entertain questions from the audience at the conclusion of all of the presentations. We encourage what may seem like “basic” questions as well as “shop talk” from those in attendance.

Please check this website in the days leading up to the conference for posts by each presenter introducing themselves and providing brief descriptions of the work they plan to present.

Posted on

2016 WHA Six-Shooters Session

The 2016 Six-Shooters digital history lightning round session, sponsored by the WHA Technology Committee, featured seven presenters sharing their research, teaching, and public projects at the WHA conference in St. Paul, MN (photos by Doug Seefeldt, session chair):

  • Sarah Clayton, University of Oklahoma Libraries
  • Julie Davis, University of Minnesota
  • Mikal Eckstrom, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
  • Jeff Malcomson, Montana Historical Society
  • Rob Voss, Northwest Missouri State University
  • Chris Wells, Macalester College
  • Lindsey Passenger Wieck, University of Notre Dame
Posted on

Lineup for WHA 2016 Six-Shooters Session

Here is a list of the presenters that we have confirmed for the Technology Committee sponsored session, “Six-Shooters: A Digital Frontiers Lightning Round”:

  • Sarah Clayton, University of Oklahoma Libraries
  • Julie Davis, University of Minnesota
  • Mikal Eckstrom, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
  • Jeff Malcomson, Montana Historical Society
  • Rob Voss, Northwest Missouri State University
  • Chris Wells, Macalester College
  • Lindsey Passenger Wieck, University of Notre Dame

The session will be chaired by Douglas Seefeldt, Ball State University, and is scheduled for Sunday, October 23rd from 8:30-10:00 AM in Governors III of the InterContinental Saint Paul Riverfront, St. Paul, Minnesota. Please check this website in the days leading up to the conference for introductions by each presenter and brief descriptions of the work they plan to present.

Posted on

A View into the 2015 Six-Shooters Digital History Session

The lineup for the 2015 Six-Shooters digital history lightning round session, sponsored by the WHA Technology Committee, featured six presenters sharing their research, teaching, and public projects (photos by Doug Seefeldt, session chair):

Posted on

Virtual Buffalo Bill’s Wild West

My colleague James Connolly and I, working with staff from the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, and artists and designers from Ball State’s Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts (IDIA), have crafted a computer-generated world that authentically simulates the Wild West show dramatizing frontier life. Virtual Buffalo Bill’s Wild West is a multiplayer virtual world that simulates Buffalo Bill Wild West Show circa 1899. The project serves as a prototype for developing and testing various designs and configurations that integrate a 3D environment and a web-based digital archive. This digital history project is built in Unity 3D using custom software created by IDIA Lab. The archive employs the Collective Access content management system, using VRA Core standards.

This collection contains source materials for the three-dimensional recreation of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World, a traveling exhibition that toured North America and Europe between 1883 and 1908. This enormously popular show presented to its audiences a recreation of life in the Old West, complete with spectacular displays of riding and shooting, as well as performances by “rough riders” from around the world. In addition to materials used as the basis for the design of the virtual world, this archive contains primary sources that provide historical context for understanding the Wild West show, its role in creating popular images of the Old West, the social history of the era.

Posted on

Lineup for WHA 2015 Six-Shooters Session

Here are the presenters that we have confirmed for the Technology Committee sponsored session Six-Shooters: A Digital Frontiers Lightning Round Session:

  • Cameron Blevins, Rutgers University
  • Leisl Carr-Childers, University of Northern Iowa
  • Jason Heppler, Stanford University
  • Robert Jordan, Colorado State University
  • Verónica Reyes-Escudero, University of Arizona
  • Douglas Seefeldt, Ball State University

The session will be chaired by Douglas Seefeldt, Ball State University and is scheduled for Friday, October 23 from 2:30-4:00 PM in Parlor C of the Hilton Portland & Executive Towers, Portland, Oregon. Please check this site in the days leading up to the conference for introductions by each presenter and brief descriptions of the work they plan to present.

Posted on

A View into the 2014 WHA Six-Shooters digital history session

This year’s Six-Shooters digital history lightning round session, sponsored by the WHA Technology Committee, featured nine presenters sharing their research, teaching, and public projects (photos by Doug Seefeldt, session chair):

Posted on

Lineup for WHA 2014 Six-Shooters Session

This year’s Six-Shooters session is scheduled for Thursday, October 16, 2014 from 2:30-5:00 PM in Salon 1-2 in the Newport Beach Marriott Hotel and Spa, Newport Beach, CA. It offers a unique opportunity for WHA members interested in the ways digital technologies are being used in the classroom, in public history, and in research, to discover and discuss these new ideas in an “unconference” manner.

This session, sponsored by the WHA Technology Committee, chaired by Douglas Seefeldt, utilizes a lightning round format that limits each presentation to six minutes and six slides. The session will feature the following presenters and topics. Please join us for stimulating presentations, lively conversations, and valuable networking!

  • Jacob K. Friefeld,U. Nebraska-Lincoln, “The History Harvest Project” The History Harvest is a collaborative, community based digital history project and learning initiative that aims to democratize and open history. The project utilizes digital technologies to share the experiences and artifacts of people and local historical institutions. At each harvest, conducted by undergraduate students, community members are invited to share their letters, photographs, objects, and stories, and participate in a conversation about the significance and meaning of their materials. Each artifact is digitally captured and then shared in a web-based archive for general educational use and study. Overall, the History Harvest project aims to raise visibility and public conversation about history and its meaning, as well as provide a new foundation of publicly available material for historical study, K-12 instruction, and life-long learning. I will discuss the History Harvest as a concept, and explain its philosophical grounding. Then, I will briefly outline the harvest process and flexibility of the project, and conclude with a discussion of the History Harvest Archive and the future vision for the project. This short presentation is an invitation to join this growing project in increasing the availability of artifacts that help us to understand our shared history.
  • Erik Johnson, George Mason U., “Discover Historic Places Digital Project” The National Park Service, in collaboration with State Historic Preservation Officers, Tribal Historic Preservation Officers, and other local governments, administers a remarkable historic preservation program called the National Register of Historic Places. With advancements in web publishing and social media platforms, there is an opportunity to publicize the country’s historic resources to a wider audience and, in doing so, boosting historic preservation and the communities that are served by the National Register. Discover Historic Places (DHP) is a digital project that aims to work with the public to achieve a better understanding of its history by publishing National Register documentation in a highly accessible format. DHP is built using Omeka and uses the city of Philadelphia as a model for the project. The website organizes around historic themes within the city with the hope that thematic categories, along with map visualization, improve the accessibility of National Register resources for all users.
  • Robert Jordan, Colorado State U., “The Lory Student Center Project”In the midst of year-long renovations of Colorado State University’s (CSU) Lory Student Center (LSC) from the fall of 2013-2014, the history department, the Public Lands History Center (PLHC), university administrators, archivists and librarians from the Fort Collins and CSU archives, and undergraduate and graduate students worked collaboratively to produce digital, historical content to be showcased as part of the grand opening of the new student center. This digital content created by the university’s own students provides a link for past, present, and future Rams to their university, creating a sense of pride in the accomplishments of previous generations. The content is composed of twelve physical markers linked to digital, web-based “brand stories.” Working together, students in one undergraduate and one graduate history course (HIST580A1 and HIST480A5) produced narrative content for each of the twelve brand markers, as well as visual digital components for use by the LSC on a website or mobile application. Over the course of a single semester, students utilized a wide range of primary and secondary source materials and digital tools to create a dynamic, digital, public history project, learning new skills and gaining invaluable practical experience.
  • Paula Petrik, George Mason U., “Is 3-D Reconstruction Worth It?” In other words, what can we learn as historians from the laborious task of recreating a historical landscape in three dimensions, given that 3-D digital work is labor-intensive and time-consuming? Using Helena, Montana’s Wood Street neighborhood as a case study, this very short presentation illustrates what spatial analysis can contribute to historical analysis. Recreating the neighborhood adds an extra dimension to the history of “capitalists with rooms.” Not only did the Wood Street “soiled doves” create a micro-economy in their area but they also controlled its space both through the buildings’ design and location.
  • Jana Remy, Chapman U., “Digital Humanities at Chapman University” Jana will speak about two new Digital Humanities courses offered to graduate students at Chapman University, “An Introduction to DH” and “Humanities Computing.” In addition, she will share insights about serving in an “alt-ac” administrative position on her campus (as the Associate Director of Digital Scholarship), and her role in DH-related research initiatives.
  • Rebecca S. Wingo, U. Nebraska-Lincoln, “Can I Get a Witness?: Network Analysis of Homesteaders in Nebraska” In 2014, Fold3.com, a subsidiary of Ancestry.com, finished digitizing over 75,000 records of successful homestead claims for the state of Nebraska. In 2009, Richard Edwards called for a reassessment of homesteading in “Changing Perceptions of Homesteading as a Policy of Public Domain Disposal,” arguing that scholars need to approach homesteading through data analysis rather than anecdotal evidence (however compelling it tends to be). Using the newly digitized records, I sampled ten townships over two counties to thoroughly examine and document every homestead claimant, creating the most complete data set of homesteaders to date. I then used Gephi to map the social connections of homesteaders based on the witnesses they listed in their Proof of Posting. Network analysis of homesteaders indicates the prevalence of fraud (spoiler alert: it’s not as much as previous scholars have led us to believe) and traces community formation. Geolocation of the homesteaders further reveals patterns in witnessing that demonstrate the function of neighbors and neighborhoods in the rural west. Ultimately, this project merges qualitative methodologies with close-readings of the documents to produce ground-breaking research on homesteading in Nebraska.

Do you use digital tools in your research, teaching, or public history profession? If so, and you are planning to attend the 2014 Western History Association conference and are willing to share your thoughts and experiences at this session, please contact Doug Seefeldt: wdseefeldt[AT]bsu[DOT]edu and we’ll try to add you to the slate!