Category: WHA

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Adam Arenson: Easy and Hard Methods for Tracking African North Americans in Historical Records

I’m a historian of North America and director of the Urban Studies program at Manhattan College, having previously taught at UTEP. My first two books are on Civil War St. Louis and Mid-Century Modern Los Angeles, as well as co-editing books on frontier cities and the Civil War West. I teach American West, urban history, regions and borderlands history, African American history, and places those fields intersect, especially in the nineteenth century.

I am excited to be attending the WHA in my hometown!

In my Six Shooter presentation, I will describe my ongoing research on African North Americans who crossed the U.S.-Canada border after the Civil War. While I have not found many narrative sources, I have found many data points of African North American migration. This presentation will describe ongoing efforts to visualize and analyze this data using government documents, geo-location scripts, and Tableau visualizations and the role of a New York Genealogical and Biographical Society Labs grant, my colleague Dr. Musa Jafar, and our undergraduate students in this research.

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Jay Taylor: Follow the Money

Hi all. I’ll be presenting on Follow the Money: A Spatial History of In-Lieu Programs for Western Federal Lands. This is a digital project constructed as part of the Spatial History Project at Stanford University’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis. I’ve worked with co-author Erik Steiner and a team of programmers, historians, and geographers to assemble time-series maps of transfer payments from federal land management agencies to counties in the eleven far western states known as the “public lands states.” The data in this program illustrates how federal conservation laws created long fiscal relationships between land management agencies and state and county governments in the American West, and they graphically demonstrate the deep, often invisible, political economy that inheres in the federal domain. The maps also help illustrate the patchy, non-linear history of natural resource industries in the American West since 1906. Finally, the maps expose problems with the simplistic ways that advocates and scholars have represented the federal domain and Progressive conservation since the 1890s.

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Christopher Repka: Utilizing Augmented Reality to Create a Virtual Museum at Mission Concepción in San Antonio, TX

Hello, my name is Chris Repka, and I am in my last year as an undergraduate student of Public History at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas. This past summer, I was a recipient of a research grant from St. Mary’s University’s Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship. For my summer research project, I began the development of an augmented reality application for Android and iPhone for use on San Antonio’s Mission Trail, which was recently designated a World Heritage Site. I began constructing virtual exhibits for users of the application to experience while visiting Mission Concepcion, but the bulk of the work that was completed was developing the framework for exhibit creation.

In this presentation, I will present my augmented reality mobile application as a powerful means of experiencing and discovering the history of a place while present at an historical site. Not intended to replace or contest park interpreters, the application serves as an effective means of engaging visitors with documents, academic studies, and artifacts while remaining engaged with an historic site. In this presentation, I will also discuss long-term development goals for this smartphone application. I hope to have a fully developed beta version of this application available on the iPhone App Store and Google Play for Android devices for use at Mission Concepcion within the next year.

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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.

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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
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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):

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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.

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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.

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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):