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I am Rebecca Scofield, an associate professor of American history and chair of the department of history at the University of Idaho. I grew up in Emmett, Idaho, and have seen firsthand how mythological structures can exclude certain populations from collective identities, even as those people have always existed in western spaces. I have found DH to be a more effective way of telling more complete and inclusive histories of the US West

The Gay Rodeo Oral History Project is a multipronged public history project aimed at collecting, preserving, and curating stories of LGBTQ+ westerners, particularly through a partnership with the International Gay Rodeo Association (IGRA). Our work entails conducting interviews with rodeo association members and then presenting their lived experiences to a wider audience through a curated digital exhibit, The Voices of Gay Rodeo. In addition to our digital project, a team of collaborators and I have developed a verbatim theater piece currently titled That Damn Horse: The Stories of Gay Rodeo. This play draws from dozens of our interviews to weave together a broad conversation about the meaning and experience of gay rodeo. We have held one zoom reading and hope to stage another production after we have revised the script. Over the next year, we will be donating our collection to the Autry Museum of the American West for permanent preservation.

Hello! I’m Margaret Sternbergh, I am an Independent Interpretation Specialist. I work with clients like cultural organizations and museums to develop ways to make that content accessible and interesting to the everyday person or visitor.

At our WHA: Six Shooters presentation, I’ll be sharing a recent project I worked on that used a free, DIY audio tour platform, izi.travel, to transform personal interviews into an accessible location-based audio tour of the 1910 Historic Harris County Courthouse in Houston, Texas.

The project is a great example of how to use free technology to make the stories behind historic sites and locations available to the general public.

You can check out the audio tour here: izi.travel/1910courthouse

Hello! I am Sarah Salter, and I am an Assistant Professor of 19th-Century Multiethnic US literatures at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. This week at the Western History Association Conference, I will be sharing some collaborative work with historical periodicals. For the past few years, I have been working with colleagues across the US on related events, panels, and digitization projects that seek to build conversation across fields and areas in periodical studies. Last spring, the American Antiquarian Society helped us digitize a selection of periodicals from migrant, indigenous, and colonized communities as part of their GIGI digital database. Through the process of curating these examples and contributing them to the wider newspaper database of the AAS, my colleagues and I have begun to explore the practical and theoretical considerations of creating a teaching canon of 19th-Century periodicals. At the conference’s Six-Shooter presentation, I will offer a brief overview of the digitization process and some preliminary suggestions for thinking through a “canon” drawn from, and intended to highlight, a wide diversity of formal, historical, political, and linguistic perspectives. This project asks us to consider the purposes and limitations of the canon’s presumption of commonality.

I’ll be presenting the Digital Stephen F. Austin Papers (http://digitalaustinpapers.org/), an ongoing effort to build a digital scholarly edition of the surviving correspondence of Stephen F. Austin.  During the first half of the nineteenth century, Austin served as the most prominent American land agent working with the government of Mexico to bring colonists from the United States into the Texas borderlands. During those decades, most Americans contemplating a move to Mexico wrote letters to Austin seeking information.  At the same time, Mexican officials with questions or concerns about this migration of Americans into Mexico’s northern frontier also wrote to Austin seeking advice.  As a result, Austin’s voluminous correspondence offers a remarkable window into the ideas and movements of both Mexicans and Americans during the 1820s and 1830s.  Those movements mattered enormously because the American migration into Mexico spearheaded by Austin led, ultimately, to a war between the United States and Mexico in 1846-48 that brought the modern American Southwest into the U.S. and redefined the border between the two countries in ways that continue to reverberate today.  To tell that story, the project has thus far transcribed and digitized more than 2,100 letters written by nearly 700 people living on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, all of which are now available online in the project’s prototype database.

The driving goal of the DAP project, however, is to pair those original sources with innovative analytical research tools that will enable users to discover meaningful patterns scattered across the corpus of historical documents. To that end, the project is incorporating a variety of natural language processing tools and data visualization techniques into the DAP search interface — providing users new ways to discover patterns hidden in the writings of hundreds of men and women living along the shared edges of the United States and Mexico.

Hello all! My name is Jessica Nowlin, I am a GIS specialist at the Center for Archaeological Research and a Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy and Classics at the University of Texas at San Antonio. I will be speaking on the 300th Anniversary Celebration of Béjar: Historical GIS (hGIS) Story Map Projects, which was created as a collaboration between the Bexar County Heritage and Parks Department and the University of Texas at San Antonio. Working jointly with John F. Reynolds (Department of History) and Clinton M. McKenzie (Center for Archaeological Research), we created a series of interactive ESRI Story Maps to tell the history of Bexar County from the earliest evidence of human occupation until the end of Spanish rule in 1821.

In telling this story, we endeavored to produce an inclusive history that took into account men and women of diverse backgrounds and ethnicities. This meant not starting from the arrival of Spanish explorers and missionaries in the early 18th century, but looking at the long span of indigenous settlement in the Bexar County region, exploring their cultural and societal changes over nearly 10,000 years of history. Additionally, when telling the story of Spanish settlement in Bexar County, we wanted to make publicly accessible the numerous archival documents, early maps, and historical archaeological data that could provide a more human connection to the earliest European settlers of San Antonio de Béjar.

In an effort to make these stories visually engaging, we centered each story around material that could be mapped and visualized within an online, interactive GIS map. These stories incorporated a wide variety of archaeological data, primary historical sources, digitized archival records, and 3D artifacts and historical reconstructions. While much of the behind the scenes work done to create these stories can be used as the basis for scholarly publications, the primary goal of this project was to make the prehistory and history of Bexar County widely available to members of the local population, visitors, and anyone interested in the history of this region.

My North American Studies dissertation (currently under peer review by an external committee), Life at Heart Mountain: A Dynamic Network Model of a Japanese American Incarceration Community during World War II, explores the networks of Japanese Americans at the Heart Mountain incarceration (internment) camp in Wyoming. Using “big” data collected by US authorities during the war as well as traditional historical sources, I employ network analysis to study how the camp community was structured, how it evolved, and how some of its members expressed their acceptance of or resistance to incarceration.

In my presentation, I will bring forth some visual depictions of the networks and what they tell us about “loyalty,” “assimilation,” and “resistance.”

Kyler Miller & Les Miller

Hello everyone! I am Les Miller and my classmate who will be joining me in the presentation is Kyler Miller. We are both graduate students in the Historical Resources Management program at Idaho State University. My work right now involves cattle ranching at the Fort Hall Reservation and Kyler’s involves the use of the Star of David as Nazi propaganda during the Holocaust. The Historical Resources Management program at Idaho State University focuses heavily on digital skills.

The aim of our project was to publish a serial podcast that centered on DACA and immigration policy in Southeast Idaho. We interviewed multiple experts on immigration from around the country, activists, immigrant entrepreneurs, and community members to paint a picture of DACA and immigration. We used Adobe Audition to formulate the episodes and a lot of teamwork to finally get it done. Us four graduate students worked our tails off to complete this and we are proud of it.

Greetings, all! In San Antonio I will present on a new system called SourceNotes (https://sourcenotes.miamioh.edu), an online platform that serves two purposes: it helps with the teaching of research to students at all levels, and it facilitates collaboration among scholars working on large research projects. Raphael Folsom and John Stewart (both of the University of Oklahoma) and I (Miami University) have teamed up to create this system based on two earlier projects we had developed simultaneously, each unaware of the other’s work.

We have used SourceNotes for our own research as well as in a number of classes, and though Raph and I do share interests in western/borderlands history, the application of the online platform extends beyond our particular fields of study. At the upcoming conference, we will demonstrate the system by showing how it was used to digitize the research notes of John Mack Faragher’s Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer, which will be available publicly within the next few months.

After seeing the kind of collaboration it fosters, we encourage you to think of the ways that you can work with others teaching and researching in similar fields via SourceNotes, and then to write to request a free account.