Author: rebeccawingo

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WHA 2022 Digital Scholarship Lineup

We are so excited to bring you this year’s best and brightest Western Digital Historians! Here is the lineup for this year (in alphabetical order):

  • Julia Brown-Bernstein, California State University San Marcos
  • Kathryn B. Carpenter, Princeton University
  • Donna Rae Devlin, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
  • Veronica Nohemi Duran, Texas A&M University-Commerce
  • Gabrielle Guillerm, Red Cloud Indian School
  • Caitlyn Jones, University of Houston
  • Rachel D. Kline, U.S. Forest Service
  • Julia Lewandoski, California State University San Marcos
  • Elías David Navarro, University of Houston
  • Leighton Quarles, USDA Forest Service
  • Rebecca Scofield, University of Idaho

We are meeting on Thursday, October 13, 2022 from 10:15am – 11:45am in the Blanco Room on the Hill Country Level. Our panelists will be sharing their abstracts and links to their projects on this blog over the next couple weeks. Check back often!

Following the Digital Scholarship Lightning Round, we are introducing a new type of panel called the Digital History Corral in which members of the Digital Scholarship Committee offer one-on-one advice for tweaking existing projects or getting your project off the ground. The Corral will meet on Thursday, October 13, 2022 from 1:30pm – 3:00pm in the Pecan Room on the Hill Country Level.

Please contact Rebecca Wingo (chair) at rebecca.wingo [at] gmail [dot] com if you have any questions!

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Introductions – Rebecca S. Wingo

I’m pleased to be a new contributor on the blog and a panelist at this year’s Six-Shooters Lightning Round.  (The main reasons I signed up for this session is because the title makes me think of Yosemite Sam.)

I am currently a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and will graduate in May 2015 with two graduate certificates in Digital Humanities and Great Plains Studies.  My dissertation, “Restructuring the Reservation: Housing, Hygiene, and Domesticity on the Crow Reservation, 1880-1934,” examines house-building policy as an imposition of a larger project of cultural imperialism by enforcing Christian concepts of domesticity, gender, and hygiene on indigenous communities.  The project introduces a unique set of photographs emerging from the Crow Reservation to examine signs of Native interruption to federal assimilationist policy.

More specific to the Six-Shooters Lightning Round, I have been working with a research team at the Center for Great Plains Studies to reassess the Homestead Act of 1862 based on the now-digitized NARA records for the State of Nebraska.  We are preparing a manuscript (publisher TBA) for completion in 2015.  The presentation, “Can I Get a Witness?: Network Analysis of Homesteaders in Nebraska,” examines a network forged legally between witnesses under the Homestead Act.  Essentially, the Land Office required each homesteader to list four witnesses in a Proof of Posting which ran for five weeks in a local newspaper.  While only two witnesses were required to testify at the Land Office, mapping all four connections reveals community formation, local leadership, and settlement patterns of neighborhoods in the rural plains.  I created a digital companion to our manuscript, and while it is waiting for final review and a permanent home, you’re welcome to view its nascent form here.

I look forward to my six-minutes and six-slides of fame this coming Thursday!