After what felt like a very long spring, summer and fall seemed to fly by! Despite the fast passage of time, the CDRH team has quite a bit of news to share with you about our activities of the past few months.
Personnel Changes
After 40 years at the university, Kay Walter is retiring from her position as Co-Director of the CDRH. Kay has shaped the course of the CDRH throughout her time as Director, and her wisdom and energy will be missed. We wish her all the best, and are excited to hear about her continuing ventures. She’ll be dedicating her spare time (does she ever truly have spare time?) to serving on the Board of Directors for NeighborWorks and developing Hawley Hamlet, an urban agricultural gardening cooperative that she co-founded.
Andy Jewell, editor of the Cather Archive, will be filling in for Kay as an interim co-director of the CDRH. He joins Carrie Heitman, who is also interim co-director during Ken price’s sabbatical. We are wondering how long it will take before Andy tries to switch the “C” in CDRH to stand for Cather!
Additionally, the CDRH is going to get a new programmer soon! We are currently reviewing applications for a 2 year junior programmer position. It seems likely that we will have a new coworker soon to help us work on the CDRH API and grant projects.
Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the U.S. government sent tens of thousands of Indian children to boarding schools in the hopes of assimilating children and breaking their ties to families and tribes. More than 300 schools were established, including one in Genoa, Neb., that grew to a 640-acre campus that enrolled thousands of children from more than 40 Indian nations during its 50 years of operation.
The Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project is a new effort to tell the story of these children through record digitization, oral histories, community narratives, and artifacts. The project is a collaboration between the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; the Genoa U.S. Indian School Foundation; Community Advisors from the Omaha, Pawnee, Ponca, Santee Sioux, and Winnebago tribes of Nebraska; and descendants of those who attended Genoa. It aims to bring greater awareness of the schools and their legacies at the same time as it hopes to return the histories of Indian children from government repositories back to their families and tribes. So far, project members have digitized, described, and published about 4,000 pages of documents.
Karin worked closely with Ho-Chunk artist Henry Payer to bring his design vision to the web. Henry provided the colorful collages, gave advice about their use on the website and colors, and created a beautiful logo. Thanks also to Katie Neiland for her work on the logo and promotion. Greg Tunink has been working on setting up the Mukurtu framework that runs the site so it is easy to maintain, as well as making changes as needed.
Butler Family Tree and Story
Kaci spent the past 9 months working on the monumental task of creating the Butler family tree for the O Say Can You See project. The Maryland Butler family is composed of 200 people, enslaved and free, with information drawing from over 90 freedom suits. The family tree is now so long, it didn’t even fit into one screenshot!
Additionally, O Say Can You See has added a new story, ” “She’s been her own mistress…”: The Long History of Charlotte Dupee v. Henry Clay, 1790-1840” written by William Kelly about Charlotte Dupee and her freedom suit filed against Henry Clay.
Maps!
The last few months have been a big time for projects with maps. We worked with Isabel Velázquez to create maps for her Cartas a la Familia website, trying to visualize the changing language of correspondence between family members in Mexico and the USA during the 20th century. The maps are not yet ready for production, but soon website visitors will be able to view correspondence by decade, location, and language.
We’re also currently working on maps for the Ardhi Initiative, Ng’ang’a Muchiri’s project researching historic treaties between Europeans and Africans. We were able to reuse several georeferenced maps created for Jeannette Eileen Jones’s To Enter Africa from America project. The Ardhi maps are only in their early stages, but we are excited to see how they develop as Muchiri adds more documents and research to the collection.
Campus Archaeology Project
We started working in earnest on Effie Athanassopoulos’s Campus Archaeology project this summer. Initially, Karin put in a lot of time researching metadata schemas to fit the project’s existing fields and future requirements, while Greg installed Omeka S as a likely new home for the archaeological materials and created a demo page for three.js to load 3D models saved in a new format designed for serving them efficiently on the web, glTF. A tricky aspect of this that stumped Greg for a while was how models loaded from this format needed to be lit with a specific kind of light source before their surfaces showed. After a minor modification to the theme, we were able to get our 3D image viewer proof-of-concept working!
When we started, some materials were already entered in Omeka Classic, while others were stored in a Heurist database. Once Omeka S was selected, Jessica migrated the Omeka Classic database entries over. Karin and Effie created resource templates and made a plan with the undergraduate researchers to clean up the data. Meanwhile, Jessica exported the Heurist entries and manipulated the data to line up with the new resource templates in Omeka S.
CDRH Servers and Campus ITS Collaboration
Greg, Karin, Brian, and a number of Libraries IT staff have been working closely with project manager Shelley Witte from UNL’s Information Technology Services (ITS) thinking about the future of data storage and server management across the Libraries. At the moment, Greg manages CDRH’s development/staging and production servers’ software and maintenance, but relies on the Libraries IT team to assist with server questions and support the hardware and regular backups. Greg has been compiling comprehensive resource usage information to evaluate CDRH’s server landscape and inform whether the CDRH could leverage ITS hosting options to improve its server infrastructure and/or free up some time or resources. The conversations and information gathered have been very helpful in selecting a far more informed configuration for new server purchases to replace aging servers and consolidate hardware. We’ve gotten to know more people in ITS who we’ll collaborate with more in the future as well.
Community Engagement Committee
The CDRH Community Engagement Committee has been working on a few things this summer as well. They facilitated the CDRH’s involvement in the Hostile Terrain 94 art exhibition, with ultimately around 14 CDRH staff, students, and friends filling out 200 toe tags representing lives lost while crossing the Mexico-US border. Several of us visited the exhibition while it was at the International Quilt Museum, but were unable to find our tags — a sobering reminder of how many thousands of lives the tags represent.
The Community Engagement Committee has also held two DH Afternoons events this semester. The first event was a casual, distanced conversation on the lawn of Love Library to help people connect during a time that has been marked by isolation and remote work. The second event was held over Zoom, and we heard from Veronica N. Duran and Rob Shepard. Veronica presented on the project, Nuestras Historias, and how she is building a digital archive of historical materials and interviews related to the Mexican American Student Association (MASA) at UNL. Many of her plans have been put on hold during the pandemic, such as creating connections with alumni of MASA at a reunion planned for this year, but she has been able to continue searching for newspaper records to understand MASA’s goals and activities since they were formed. Rob spoke about his work to combine census and directory records to map early 19th century cities, to create resources for those without GIS skills to explore the information online. Rob points out that, though mapping can be a very data-driven occupation, time and time again he has found himself paying attention to the human experiences they reveal, from calculating likely walking routes people might have taken from home to work, to studying how neighbors interacted with each other, to thinking about who may have been left out of directories and census records. A big thank you to Veronica and Rob for sharing their time and expertise with us!
Newspapers Alert!
Andy Pederson has been hard at work on newspapers this summer, adding more to Nebraska Newspapers! Here’s a list of the new issues to check out:
- The Commoner: Spring 1923
- Danskeren: 1910 – 1916
- The Falls City Tribute: 1908 – 1911
- The McCook Tribute: 1893 – 1894
- Nebraska Staats-Anzeiger und Herold: 1908 – 1918
- The Omaha Guide: 1932 – 1958
- The Omaha Morning Bee: 1922 – 1924
- The Weekly Review: Spring 1933
Work on the Open Online Newspapers Initiative (Open ONI) has continued as well. Jeremy, a collaborator at the University of Oregon, spent time replacing an unsupported Python library in favor of a more up-to-date one so that we can be assured the software that powers the newspaper searching has a long, happy lifespan. Additionally, Greg has been adding a number of settings and deployment improvements. He got a little help in October when Hacktoberfest contributors began arriving! Hacktoberfest is a program which encourages software developers to contribute to open source projects, and several new people jumped in to help with small Open ONI bugs and documentation. We hope that they’ll stick around even though October, the month of Hacktoberest, is now over!
More News and Updates
The Complete Letters of Willa Cather reached a big milestone recently — 2,000 letters are now online! Emily doesn’t know when the next big release will be, but we know that the Cather team is not resting on its laurels. They are already working on creating transcriptions and annotations for the next batch.
Kevin and the Charles Chesnutt team have been busily encoding documents and preparing the website. Karin wrote some tricky XSLT in order to map some of the complex encoding that the team have been using to record Chesnutt’s trickier editorial marks.
Jessica put on her teaching hat this semester to help with several weeks of Adrian Wisnicki’s Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities course. Her role in the class was to present the students with some real world concepts, sharing her own experiences developing DH projects and introducing them to some tools. Hopefully, the students know a bit more about metadata, visual / spatial narratives, and long-term project maintenance than they did in August!
Additionally, the Cornhusker Marching Band History project has its first student, who has spent the semester scouring old NU student newspapers looking for news of the marching band. With any luck, the first hundred or so articles of the index she is creating will be available and searchable on the website by the end of the semester!
Corn Cob Man Sightings
Either Greg is a talented image editor, or the old NU mascot Corn Cob Man was in way more photographs than the Archives realized! He has been turning up a lot this Halloween season….
