Author: Alexd81303

This week we worked on mapping our items in Omeka that we observed in special collections from the Joyce Murrow and Beryl Foster scrapbooks. Mapping was a little interesting because not all the items had specific addresses that it would have written down on them. There was some investigating that had to be done to find the locations of these items. Most of mine were very similar as they were musical programs and all could be traced back to Philips Memorial Auditorium. Most of my items had this location and a couple of those items were like extensions of each other. One was a grocery store that no longer exists on Linden St. which was interesting to see how the location has changed since then as there is no longer a grocery store. One of the items was tricky as it was a paper cut out from a birthday party. This one was extremely hard to come up with a location for it. After we were finished mapping our items we were able to pull a map up of all the marked locations of all the items everyone did. Most of the items were marked on West Chester campus but there were some outliers. There was a couple marked in New York City which I thought was interesting. The most interesting location marked was 2 marked in Tennessee. This was interesting as there wasn’t any items marked that far from West Chester, but these ones were clear outliers.

This week we met in the special collections room on the sixth floor of the library to add scrap book pages to Omeka. We looked at material used by former students that went to West Chester University way back in the 1940’s. My folder contained two items both owned by the same person. The first page had a Tennis clinic schedule on it that was used by a student back in 1949. The page contained dates, times, and locations of different tennis matches that were taking place. The second page was a foldable piece paper that was titled the “All Star Program”. The page contained performances and times that they would be performed with the names of the performers as well. I used these scrapbook pages and scanned them and entered them into Omeka. I then had to fill out the description of each item. They were boxes that needed to be filled stating the author, owner, date, format, etc. of the scrapbook items. Everyone submitted them and are in a virtual collection on Omeka.

This week we discussed and looked through letters that were written by Willa Cather. We looked through them on a search tool that allowed us to filter to certain letters that she has written over the years. The tool allowed us to filter out dates. We discussed that this could be useful as we can use our knowledge on historical events to look through certain time periods and see if she mentions them in any way. This could be used to see Cather’s perspective on a certain historical event. There was also a word search bar that would allow users to search for specific words in her letters. There was also a letter ID search bar that allowed for even more specific searches. In class we used the date search bar to filter between the years that World War II happened. This gave us every letter that Cather wrote during World War II. If we were to look through each letter we would hope to find her mentioning World War II as that is what we were searching for. To be even more specific we searched the word “war” to see if she mentioned any wars around the time World War II was happening. The letters also showed who she wrote to as well. So we can see exactly who Willa Cather was writing to. There was also a locations filter that had all the letters in categories based on location. These locations were all cities and she had locations in both the U.S. and Canada. This could also help with finding even more specific events that happened over time. We would be able to see her experiences in other places around the world as well and maybe even historical events that were happening in certain places.

There was a lot of new things that I learned in week 1 of Digital Humanities. The biggest thing I learned was the what Digital Humanities mean. I learned the basics of what it means but what caught my attention was the varying defintions from person to person. There is no real definition of Digital Humanties rather different interpretations of it. We learned how stuff is stored in zeroes and ones. I learned this in a previous class when discussing binary codes and how they are stored in zeroes or ones.