Category: Research Resources

Digital Humanities Project Crowdsources a Civil War Chaplains Diary

Civil War Chaplain's Diary
Civil War Chaplain’s Diary

I have had an interesting experience working on a digital humanities initiative, a crowdsourcing project with the University of Delaware Museum Studies Program and History Media Center.  It involves a Civil War chaplain’s diary that has been gathering dust for 150-years and was periodically brought out for some research.

The University digitized the diary and students, faculty and staff are pouring over fading pages from another age, scrutinizing those aging entries line by line.  With students working from many remote locations since the scans are on the Net they review the hand written words and transcribe the entries.  The emerging scholars then submit their contributions which are reviewed and put up on line.  Eventually, the entire diary will be available for anyone to access and read and that will broaden engagement, investigation, and research with this valuable source.

It’s a collaboration with the University of Delaware that I hope to strengthen because it makes largely unused cultural heritage resources available to a wider audience.  The University’s focus is in the area of the digital humanities, which allows us to take largely un-accessed collections and get the material out to a broader audience for study. It is also a preservation method in that it reduces the handling and makes interpretation much easier.

It has been fascinating to watch this new media project unfold.

Crowedsourcing the Civil War chaplain’s diary.

Presentation on Research and Writing About History

On the day the Digital Public Library of America opened its virtual doors to the public, I was in Havre de Grace to do a talk with author Heidi Glatfelter on “Researching and Writing about the War of 1812.”   We took a team approach to the program as I focused on new methods of doing digital research, while Heidi discussed how she accumulated information to produce her just released title, “Havre de Grace in the War of 1812:  Fire on the Chesapeake.”   We both drew on our experience in working as consultants on the 1812 Bicentennial celebration that is taking place this spring in the beautiful community at the top of the Chesapeake.  Heidi was the grant administrator and I served as a consulting public historian. 

Online research has made a broader universe of information easily available to anyone studying the past.  So for this community-oriented audience I talked about some of the basic virtual repositories such as the Internet Archive, the American Memory and Chronicling America collections at the Library of Congress, and Project Gutenberg.  As old maps are of interest, we took some time to examine some of the portals for cartography such as Old Maps Online.  Of course, in the age when we all Google our information, we took a little deeper look at some of the tools in that massive index, such as Google scholar and newspaper archive.   These were free resources, but we also talked about the commercial content providers.

Once Heidi finished talking about how she accumulated her body of data and developed the narrative for the enjoyable and informative work, we turned to the audience for questions.  They were interested in discussing how to use the online tools and other topics such as derivative digital copyrights.

Here is a link to online research resources you may find helpful.

The Digital Public Library of America
The Digital Public Library of America

 

Old Digitized Somerset County Newspapers a Great Help to Genealogists and Historians

The Crisfield Times from Dec, 12, 1941 is an example of a page from the digital collection at the Somerset County Library
The Crisfield Times from Dec, 12, 1941 is an example of a page from the digital collection at the Somerset County Library

The Somerset County Library system has digitized its collection of research materials in order to make the resources more broadly and easily available to researchers.  The just released e-products include newspapers from Princess Anne and Crisfield, and records from the county court system.  The old, original microfilm was professionally scanned and software was used to allow for easy text-based searching of the collections.  This valuable addition of records for researchers joins a growing body of material from the Lower Shore.  Here is a list of some of the records groups that are now available online at the Somerset County Library.  Chick here to go the library search page.

The Crisfield Post, 1935, 1936, and 1955 – 1959

The Crisfield Times, 1907 – 1984

Maryland and Herald, 1912 – 1984

Somerset Herald 1987 – 2004

Village Herald 1827 – 1840

Administrative Accounts of Somerset County , 1685 – 1772

Judicial Records 1701 – 1792

Nabb Research Center Digitizes Old Newspapers from Lower Delaware & the Eastern Shore of Maryland

Marylander and Herald, January 4, 1916, Princess Anne, from the Nabb Center digital collection
Marylander and Herald, January 4, 1916, Princess Anne, from the Nabb Center digital collection

It was only some 15 to 20 years ago that researchers were getting excited about being able to access the decennial census data on the World Wide Web.  This digital information was going to make Investigations of the past so much easier as the e-schedules would be text searchable and the entire universe of census products would be available.

Now that we are in the second decade of the 21st century, lots of added helpful data is often just a few keystrokes away, as the universe of online information expands rapidly.  The document array is exploding exponentially now as for-profit online publishers and open source providers rush to make valuable research content available to a broader user base.

I learned of another valuable online collection of newspapers at the Edward H. Nabb Research Center for Delmarva History and Culture at the Salisbury University, while doing a talk in Delmar.  This excellent special collections archives has created a strong group of online historical Delmarva newspapers. It consists of regional weeklies, spanning the years 1745 through 1922.

In the online records group you will find 17 different newspaper serials from Lower Delaware and the mid and Lower Shores of Maryland.   Titles include publications from Salisbury, Easton, Berlin, Snow Hill and elsewhere.  The products are text searchable, and the queries yield PDFs of the pages.

This was made possible, in part, by a grant from the Community Foundation of the Eastern Shore.  Howard, the president of the Delmar Historical and Art Society tipped me off about this great virtual research warehouse of serials as we talked about such matters.  Thanks Howard and Thanks Nabb.

A Salisbury newspaper from the Nabb Center, Salisbury Advertiser, June 5, 1896
A Salisbury newspaper from the Nabb Center, Salisbury Advertiser, June 5, 1896