Digital Frontiers: A WHA Digital History Blog

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.

Hello all! My name is Lauren Turek and I am an assistant professor of history at Trinity University, where I teach courses in modern American history, U.S. foreign relations, and public history. My undergraduate public history class offers students an introduction to the field, including readings that highlight major debates about issues such as shared authority or how to share controversial histories with the public, as well as a practical overview of the wide range of work that public historians do in various settings and institutions. The final project for the course, which students work on throughout the semester, is a collaborative digital exhibit of materials from the Trinity University Coates Library Special Collections and Archives. Creating a digital exhibit allows students in the class to put what they have learned about creating usable, engaging histories into practice, while also gaining key skills in exhibit design, website building, and oral and visual communications. My WHA talk will address the most recent exhibit that my students designed.

During the Spring 2018 semester, my class of 15 students used Omeka to devise and develop an online exhibit of materials from the Claude and ZerNona Black Papers. Reverend Claude Black and his wife ZerNona were leaders in the civil rights movement in San Antonio as well as in the Baptist church and larger community. The Trinity University Coates Library acquired the collection, which documents decades of the Claude and ZerNona Black’s activism and family life, in 2011.

After the students received an introduction to the collection and class time to explore the materials they would be using for the project, we came up with a set of key themes that the exhibit would cover. Based on these themes, I divided the class into five teams of three and worked with them as they developed the key takeaways and texts for their sections of the exhibit. Each team selected relevant documents, photographs, and objects from the archive to include in their section. At the end of the semester, we held a public exhibit opening at the Trinity University Coates Library where the teams presented on their parts of the exhibit, explaining how they had applied the lessons of the course to their exhibit design process. Special Collections integrated the exhibit that the students built into the library website to provide visitors and researchers with information about the collection as well as a rich introduction to Claude and ZerNona Black. Visitors can access the exhibit via this link.

In my talk at the WHA, I will discuss the exhibit as well as how I structured this assignment and how the students responded to it. I will also reflect on lessons that I learned for the future in terms of refining this assignment and guiding students through the process of creating exhibits for the Special Collections library.

My name is Brenden W. Rensink and I am excited to be participating on the 2018 Western History Association Digital Sixshooter panel in San Antonio! Allow me a moment to introduce myself and the topic that I will be discussing next week.

I am the Assistant Director of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies and an Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. To the present, I have studied and published primarily in the North American West subfields of borderlands and Indigenous studies. In June I published a comparative Native Borderlands monograph, Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands (Texas A&M Press, 2018). More germane to our Digital Sixshooters panel, in my position at the BYU Redd Center I am pivoting towards public history in many of my new endeavors, including the Intermountain Histories digital public history project and the Writing Westward Podcast.

For our panel, I focus on the Intermountain Histories project. The project curates microhistories for the public to navigate and access on a map-driven website and free mobile app. It is built on the Curatescape platform. Content is produced via collaboration between myself (as Project Manager and General Editor) and professors and their students at universities around the Intermountain West region. In my brief comments I will discuss how I have structured it as a digital project with two primary goals: 1. Serve the public by providing an easy-to-use digital history resource. 2. Serve professors and students as a pedagogical tool. I am increasingly convinced that the latter is the more powerful of the projects two goals/outcomes. It is also the less obvious of the two. I believe it is a project that could be modeled by others for use in the classroom and beyond.

I look forward to seeing everyone there!