The link below takes you to the StoryMap of Edward Hurley’s journey to Louisville, Kentucky in April of 1836. https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/718c20f1a303596cbd056e01c1ddda76/gone-to-louisville-1836/index.html
Gone to Louisville 1836
End of the Semester
How do I feel about the Digital History class at the end? Simultaneously exhausted, relieved, and sad it’s over. Packing 16 weeks of material and absorption into 5 weeks was a challenge, for the teacher as well as the students.
I imagine many of the improvements I would suggest are mostly addressed by just having more time available to try out the software applications, and work on the projects. It would have been nice to have had time in a class working session to practice with WordPress blog posts and media uploads. The projects we did and looked at required some time for reflection. In the five-week format, there just wasn’t much if there was any time for that.
Nonetheless, the class ended with a bang! Our last assignment was to listen to the podcast(s) that interested us from the Tattooed Historian and then write a blog post about our opinion of the efficacy of the digital humanities. I listened to his introductory podcast, and then one he did with Professor Walters, both very informative and worth a listen. See http://thetattooedhistorian.libsyn.com/
Since he lives nearby in Pennsylvania and as a favor to his friend Professor Walters, the Tattooed Historian came down and engaged the class in 2 hours of an interesting dialogue on how one goes about being a cutting-edge digital historian without a Ph.D. Yes. The Tattooed Historian really is tattooed. He has a lot of them, 35 I think, and all of them related to some aspect of his interest in history. One fascinating tidbit was the revelation that he had traveled to St. Louis to find the descendent tattoo shop of the tattoo artist that had tattooed approximately ten thousand soldiers during World War II and then had himself decorated with one of that artist classic designs. The shop still had World War II tattoo patterns even though they didn’t get many requests.
On a side note, I was surprised that many soldiers got tattoos in World war II. During my Vietnam service in the Marine Corps, we were threatened with court-martials if we got a tattoo. So, most didn’t. The Marine Corps logic was that too many tattoo recipients got hepatitis along with the tattoo from the needles and with a resultant weakening in unit end strength.
But I digress. The Tattooed Historian told us that his mission and business model lies in providing an outlet and legitimacy to those who want to pursue history, or research and write history without having to get a Ph.D. or necessarily have history as their primary focus or educational background. He is not suggesting that the History Ph.D. is not of value, just that history can be successfully made without one. And this is where my opinion on the digital humanities comes in. The information revolution, the internet, networked applications, the fall in the cost and the expansion of the availability of digital storage and network access, all have enabled the democratization of history and the broader humanities. Digital archives, laptop and handheld computers, audio, video production, and language translation capabilities have given research and production tools to the masses.
In my own experience, I took a lot of graduate history courses at Catholic University, but I only heard of Christopher Dawson, the first historian who held the Catholic History Chair at Harvard University, and a historian of the western civilization who rivals Toynbee and Quigley, because of Twitter. Another aside, Harvard had to pay to move Dawson’s book and manuscripts collection to Massachusetts from England, Dawson was a Brit, because Dawson’s personal collection of ancient sources was so superior or unique that Harvard’s collection didn’t measure up. Similarly, my American Government Masters was heavy in political philosophy, but again it was Twitter, Facebook, and new translation capabilities that exposed me to the Italian political philosopher, Augusto Del Noce, and the French political philosopher, Simone Weil. Their arguments on the post-World War II course of the humanities make the culture wars of the current day make sense. My own experience has given me an example of the democratization of the humanities and history.
The StoryMap, the Omeka exhibit, the Palladio network analysis that we did as projects in this class were all enabled by the internet, and by my picture taking capability in my cell phone. Many of the images I used or the Palladio dataset I put together were first taken by the camera in my cell phone. I found it interesting that the only items the Tattooed Historian has beyond what I have in digital capability with my laptop and cell phone and installed applications is a small investment in an audio device, microphones, an Adobe audio manager, and a tripod. Technology has enabled the democratization of history, and the humanities we can all access items that were only available to an elite before the internet, and we can all write and publish to a global audience our various histories. The price, though, as with all democratizations will be the need to assess authenticity, a point of the Tattooed Historian, and as one ABD historian once told me, accuracy, the mark of the historian is accuracy.
Second Reams Station: Did the German troops really lose it?
For Thursday, Professor Walters has us using open source network analysis tools and using one, Palladio, a Stanford University product, on a project of ours. The project I’m using is an aspect of the book I’ve been working on and addressing a question therein.
For a good part of my adult life, I’ve been slowly working on a biography and publication of the letters of Captain Edward Patrick Brownson (1843-1864) At 20 years of age, Captain Brownson was mortally wounded while leading a counterattack of the 12th New Jersey at the Second Battle of Ream’s Station, Virginia. That battle was a defeat for the Union and came at the nadir of Union fortunes in the Civil War. Since May 1864, Grant had taken massive casualties in the Overland Campaign and was stalemated outside Petersburg. Sherman had so far failed to take Atlanta. Lincoln planned on not being re-elected.
In reviewing the loss at Reams Station, one is struck by the blame placed in the official reports and unit histories on bounty men and foreign conscripts, mostly Germans for the loss. At the culminating point in the final mass attack by the Confederates, Union units that contained bounty and foreign troops broke which led to 140 killed, 529 wounded, and 2073 captured or missing Union soldiers (See Official Records XLII, Part1, Pg129-133, Table1). When I doing research in the National Archives as part of was studying the battle in a military geography course recently, I came across the Confederate list of Union enlisted prisoners captured at Reams Station. The Confederates recorded name, rank, unit, and significantly for this discussion, the place of birth of the Union enlisted prisoners. The list contains xxx names. So far, I’ve transcribed about 310 of them. Even though not complete, I’ve used the list to see how the place of birth related to the units captured. Does the network analysis support the official reports that the Germans were basically responsible for the loss?
To be able to use the Confederate list of Union prisoners in Palladio, I’ve used the Excel spreadsheet that has the 310 transcribed so far and added to the list the geographic coordinates at the country level of where the prisoner was born, and where the regiment the prisoner was part of was formed. To the record, I added the brigade and division membership of the regiment. The Division and brigade are significant because although the 1st Division troops broke and enabled the Confederates to break into the Union fortification, it was the lackluster performance of 2nd Division troops that is blamed for allowing the Confederate to exploit the breakthrough.
After putting the data into Palladio, I first mapped the prisoners by where they were born. See Figure 1. At 203, there are far more prisoners born in the USA than anywhere else. There are only 25 Germans (25), and the Irish at 49 are the next largest group after those born in the USA. A caveat, this is still a partial data set, and the randomness of it is unknown. It may be a skewed sample and not representative of the full list of prisoners. But if it is at all representative, then it doesn’t begin to support the idea that the loss was due to the Germans. The size of the rest of the Foreign-born soldiers, although interesting as to location, Chile, Russia, etc., is not large enough even in aggregate to impact the course of the battle.
Figure 1: Birthplace of Union Prisoners
Another visualization from Palladio maps the number of captured soldiers by the State Regiment they were from. I added the Regiment’s Brigade and Division assignment. See Figure 2. In Figure 2, the 36th Wisconsin from the 1st Division has the largest number captured by a factor of 2. The next largest in order are all from the 2nd Division, the 164th NY, 8th NY, and 20th MA (the Harvard Regiment. This leads one to ask what was the composition of the Foreign-born by Division.
Figure 3 shows the contribution of the Foreign-born to Division in a network graph. What immediately stands out is the smaller number of 1st Division soldiers captured. The graph also shows that some countries are unique to Division, for example, Chile and Switzerland are only found in the 1st Division while Norway and others are found only in the 2nd Division. The 2nd Division has more Foreign-born than the 1st Division. However, the largest number of Foreign-born, the Irish and the Germans contribute to both Divisions. The birthplace contribution and uniqueness by Division is perhaps more easily seen in a table distribution, which is shown in Table 1 below.
In summary, the preceding visualizations from Palladio assuming the representativeness of the sample shows that the contribution of the Foreign-born to the Union loss at Reams Station in 1864 was not significant. In other words, the Foreign-born were probably used as scapegoats for the failure. An easy explanation. Other factors, heat exhaustion, poor placement of units within an inadequate fortification, a limited number of artillery units along due to muddy roads, and ultimately poor decision-making on the part of the Commanders who got to write the report. This type of analysis can be used to create views that are harder to see when just crunching numbers or reading tables. If one could geocode the placement of the units within the Reams Station fortification, and add that to the existing table a more complete insight could be drawn on the Foreign-born contribution or lack thereof, to the Union debacle at Reams Station.
Working StoryMap and Digital Analysis
The exercise this week is to answer a few questions on the experience of doing the StoryMap project and then comment on the readings about using digital networking techniques.
Doing the Storymap in the time frame with a retreat and Father’s Day in the middle of it made it. An intense experience from a schedule perspective. In other words, I was crunched to get everything done in the StoryMap, and that’s why I am late with getting the Blog in. It came down to time on the StoryMap or the Blog, and the StoryMap won, although I did cut out time to read the articles.
I put together the text portion and the design of what I was going to do from a visual perspective using Scrivener. It was easier to see what I was doing that way. Once I had it about right in Scrivener, I put it in StoryMap and ran it through Grammarly while in StoryMap. My issue with Grammarly interface was sometimes the changes took and sometimes it didn’t. Although it could’ve been me not saving the edited result in StoryMap.
On the visual side, I planned the visuals for each slide and recorded some visual options in Scrivener, Once I had collected a range of visuals, I did a trial and error with them in StoryMap. I attempted to pick the visuals that were most closely aligned to the main point of the slide I was working on. I did try to use both a background and a foreground visual that were related. If I could work photoshop better and had more time, I would put some images together into one composite image to enhance the visual experience, and overcome some of the constraints that StoryMap imposes.
My biggest issue with the StoryMap exercise was staying in the 200-300-word limit. Edward’s text alone on arrival in Louisville started at over 300 words. So, I pretty much violated the 200-300-word guideline.
Overall, I was happy with the project. I didn’t need to spend much time in learning the tool. It’s pretty straight forward. The application has enabled me to undertake and complete a project I wanted to do for my family ever since Edward’s letter surfaced. I still have a few minor edits including the need to get the bibliography correct, and to provide a link to Edward’s original letter and my transcription. But once those are done, the story of Edward’s journey and the ability of anyone to access it will be complete and I can get on to other projects.
The readings this week are on the application of data analysis and visualization techniques to networks in history projects. Graham et al. in The Historian’s Macroscope Big Digital History, give a short history of the evolution of digital technologies to analyze networks and summarize some of their applications. The point they made that really resonated with me was, “Network approaches can be particularly useful at disentangling the balance of power, either in a single period or over time. A network, however, is only as useful as its data are relevant or complete. We need to be extremely careful when analyzing networks not to read power relationships into data that may simply be imbalanced.”
Network visualizations can look make people look more interrelated and intentional than was really the case. People are complicated and the data to adequately describe those complexities is seldom there in real time let alone in archival remnants available to the historian. The digital visualizations can make our analysis using incomplete data look more explanatory and precise than is the case and lead us to draw incorrect conclusions.
Lauren F.Klein addressed the incomplete data problem directly in The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings. She acknowledged that the gaps in the archival record are difficult to address. She reviewed Trouillot’s description that gaps in the archival records can occur in four ways: the making of sources, the making of archives, the making of narratives and the making of history defined as significance. Klein uses the case of James Hemmings, a former slave of Thomas Jefferson to illustrate that gaps concerning James came as much from the making of Jefferson’s archives, and earlier historians making of narratives and significance as from any loss of primary source material.
Klein shows that digital network analysis techniques can be used to show the significance of James role as a cook in the diplomatic household of Jefferson, and his importance to Jefferson. Yet even though the techniques can overcome gaps caused by the was the sources were stored, archived, retold and made significant, the digital methods still can’t help explain why James committed suicide, and never became the cook for Jeffersonian White House.
StoryMap a Journey
Today Professor Walters asked us to review and
comment on these StoryMap examples:
Game of Thrones: Arya’s Journey; Hieronymus Bosch: Garden of Earthly Delights
Before I get into my comments, a quick word on StoryMap. The website is an online capability mostly developed in Java by Northwestern University’s Knight Lab. The Knight Lab is a team of technologists and journalists who support innovation in the news media. For an overview, see https://storymap.knightlab.com/#overview
StoryMap gives one a free capability to make maps of journeys, broadly defined. The web site enables identification of a place and the sequential linking of places. One can input a text description about each location, and provide background and foreground images, or in the foreground case, linked videos. If one can code with Java, then one can add some capabilities and custom views.
On the two Storymaps reviewed, as one of the few people in the Universe who hasn’t followed the Game of Thrones, the StoryMap on Arya’s Journey was all new to me. The good part of the map was that as an outline of the story for the uninitiated, I could follow it. I really liked the attempt to link videos although except for one video, the video links didn’t work for me on panels one and three. Perhaps one needs an HBO account. The content creator of the Arya’s Journey changed the background colors of most the panels to provide a visual that aligned with the tone and content of the text. I got the visual point as an impression, but it made the images less clear, or the background image made the text difficult to read. Nonetheless, a great attempt and the matching of visual to the storyline helped my understanding of the feeling tone of the plot. Arya’s Journey showed me what one could do with videos (make sure the link works) and background and foreground images in combination.
With the Hieronymus Bosch Journey through the Garden of Earthly Delights, I am on the more familiar ground than with the Game of Thrones, but I must admit I never delved into its symbolism the way the content creator of this StoryMap did. The content creator used the Bosch painting as a background map, and then used subsections of the picture as a place. Then the text box was used to explain and interpret Bosch’s allegory. Just awesome! The best item in the journey and one written up by the Guardian (see https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/feb/13/hidden-sheet-music-hieronymus-bosch-triptych-recorded) was the description of Bosch’s painted musical score on the backside of a defendant being judged. Of course, someone on the internet decided to create a choral chant rendition we could hear.(See https://wellmanicuredman.tumblr.com/post/76381088917)
I found the links took some doing to make them work but to listen to 600-year-old music scribed by Bosch was worth it. The chanted lyrics used are modern! The drawback I found was in the way StoryMap presents a map and background image. The image of a Bosch panel was clear on the left-hand portion of the screen and faded to support the text on the right. This StoryMap visual feature made it difficult to find and see all of the image that the content creator referred to in the text. Despite the limitation of the visual, I gained a much better understanding of what Bosch was saying in allegory form by having walked through the StoryMap rendition. I just wish Storymap had a more flexible visual display ability so that more of the image referred to could be easily seen.
Both of these StoryMap Journeys and the innovative attempts of the content creators to use StoryMap to tell a story got me thinking about how to apply some of these techniques to the StoryMap I am working on. What I think I am trying to understand and relate in the story of Edward Hurley’s Journey from Montgomery County Maryland to Louisville, Kentucky in April 1836 is the nature of the United States at that time and the nature of the places. The five visual channels available for that communication are map image, map icon image and placement, text background image, text foreground image, and the text itself.
In April of 1836, the Texas war for independence was happening. The fight at the Alamo just concluded. The long Seminole War was still underway. Andrew Jackson was in the last year of his Presidency. The political parties were gearing up for the election in November. Travel, particularly riverboat travel, was risky. There were 24 states in the Union. Edward’s trip started in Maryland, a slave state on a working plantation with slaves. He journeyed through Pennsylvania, a Free state, though Virginia, a slave state, through Ohio, a Free state, to Kentucky a slave state. He traveled the borderline between slavery and freedom. Abolition had become a powerful movement, and violence was already occurring twenty years before the Civil war began. Each place Edward went through was different with a range of possible themes to emphasize. To bring some of the preceding into Edward’s story, I am going to try using the combination images technique, and links to videos.
Recap & Digital Mapping
To recap, I retired last September from the Army and I am in the transition to my next career as an applied historian. I’ve worked at history part-time during my previous career but I need some serious upskilling. As part of my modernizing, I’ve taken an automated cartography course to make maps, and a military geography course to aid in structuring my book on the Civil war.
Now, I am in a Digital History course at George Mason University (GMU) this summer, to get and become familiar with the tools of digital history: the use of the internet, databases, and software as applied to history. The class is taught by a Ph.D. candidate and digital historian, Stephanie Seal Walters (see her Blog at https://stephanieanneseal.com/ ) which is also why there is this blog.
In a GMU summer session, they compress a semester into 5 weeks. There are two 4 and a half hour classes per week plus all the reading, research, and writing. Sounds tedious. It has been everything but that! Professor Walters has a gift for teaching. Anyone who can not only keep students engaged for 4 and a half hours in the summer but also has them wondering where the time went when class is over has a special gift. This observation is not just mine; I’ve heard from others in the class.
Three weeks in she has had us set up our own history blogs. Set up and use a class collaboration site. Let us leverage her Omeka site where we designed and implemented our own Little Odd History exhibits (I did an exhibit on the 1910 Burke Murder Trial in California). We’ve transcribed early American War department papers from a site that uses crowdsourced transcribers to make progress. (http://wardepartmentpapers.org/s/home/page/home ) Used optical character recognition (OCR) on a newspaper from the 18th century. Toured the GMU Special Collections and Research Center and observed archivists at work and discussed digitization methods and issues. (https://scrc.gmu.edu/ ) We are now on our way to putting together an online Story map. I’m going to show a journey from Germantown, Maryland to Louisville, Kentucky described in an 1836 letter my family found. We’ll end in two weeks with a review of using podcasts as digital tools of the historian.
On the letter for the StoryMap, it’s not totally clear from the letter when Edward left the Clopper farm or when he arrived at Louisville. But from the internal evidence in the letter, it appears he had just arrived, had traveled in pleasant weather to be outside, so I assume that the trip was in April 1836. Edward had been in Louisville for at least a week working. So, it’s probable he got his job Monday following the Thursday he arrived. He had a Stockton and Stokes ticket to Wheeling which would work for an overland mail stage. How he journeyed from Wheeling to Louisville is not stated in the letter, but because he uses the word passage, I assume it was by riverboat. Also, the speed of the journey supports a river travel argument.
In 1836, Edward Hurley (1812-?) was a young man from a Philadelphia family. Little is known about him except that he was born in Philadelphia in 1812 to Thomas Hurley (1758-1817) and Mary Rogers (1768-?). One of his sisters married Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney’s brother Augustus Taney (1787-1823). Edward lived with his older sister Catherine Hurley Taney (1795-1854) for a time after her husband Augustus Taney’s death. They were both guests on the Clopper farm next to her farm near Germantown, Maryland.
A letter from Edward to his sister Catherine was found recently in the papers of one of Catherine Hurly Taney’s descendants. I transcribed the letter and have permission to use it. The letter describes Edward’s journey from the Clopper Farm to Louisville, Kentucky in April 1836 and his initial activities in Louisville. For an online StoryMap, I propose to map his 1836 journey and highlight some of the locations that he went through along the way.
The letter mentions the Clopper Farm, Maryland, Middlebrook Post Office, Maryland, Hagerstown, Maryland, Wheeling, Virginia, Cincinnati, Ohio, and Louisville, Kentucky. I would add the river towns of Marietta, Ohio and Vevay, Indiana.
The narrative for each location of the Story map will describe some aspects of the place in 1836, or as close to 1836 as can be found. Travel is from a slave state through free states and to a slave state, which will be touched on in the narrative.
Probable Timeline
8 April 1836, Friday Left Clopper Farm by horse and went to Middlebrook. From Middlebrook, went to Frederick, and Hagerstown, and on to Wheeling by stage.
9 April 1836, Saturday Arrived in Wheeling
10 April 1836, Sunday Left Wheeling for Louisville by riverboat.
11-13 Aril 1836, Monday-Wednesday, somewhere within these dates, Edward stopped and visited friends in Cincinnati for 6 hours.
14 April 1836, Thursday Arrived in Louisville.
15 April 1836, Friday Catherine Taney wrote and posted a letter to Edward.
17 April 1836, Monday Got a job with Morton and Smith.
23 April 1836, Saturday Received a letter from his sister which took 8 days to reach him and Edward wrote the letter we have and finished by midnight.
And that’s it for the StoryMap portion of this blog post.
Although this post is probably too long, these blog posts of mine have been both assignments and a mechanism Professor Walters uses to get us to think about what we’ve been reading and doing and to get used to sharing it near real-time with the world.
This week as we approach mapping, we’ve read Sarah Bond on using digital mapping to understand the history of racism. Bond notes that although the topic has been covered before with manual maps and analysis, digital mapping helps bring together disparate and scattered archives and make them accessible to a larger public than ever before. Both points make sense. However, the example of the Placing Segregation project and the map illustration provided demonstrate the pitfalls in providing visuals without an explanatory context can democratize misunderstanding and misconception as much as educate. The illustration Bond shows is a map of Washington, DC in 1860 and the implication is that segregation of the races is shown. The visual actually shows a large degree of integration which was the case under slavery. In 1860, most slaves were still on farms and plantations not in the city. The black migration to cities is a phenomenon of the labor dislocations associated with the World Wars of the 20th century. The blacks in Washington, DC in 1860 were either a small number of free blacks who were usually integrated with the community, albeit its poorer parts as the map shows, or were house slaves who were residents with their white owners. The point is that racial segregation in cities was much less in 1860 than it became later, and that point is not only missed but the opposite is implied. Leaving the larger readership with a false impression of the history of segregation in the United States. Like many things the utility of technology like digital mapping is a function of how it is applied.
Digital mapping as an interactive computational model used for scholarly inquiry of ancient Roman transportation networks and the cost of transportation given seasonal impacts is the subject of the article on ORBIS by Elijah Meeks and Karl Grossner. ORBIS is a web application that models the transportation network of the ancient Roman world and gives a scholar the ability to query the model and determine the cost of goods flows from any point to another point in the network. The model can be seen holistically or from a particular point of origin. The tool provides an excellent and democratized method for analysis. Again, the risk is the misapplication of historical context. The view and analysis given by the model today is something that was beyond the capability of any of the decision-makers in the ancient Roman world. Ancient Roman understanding of the transportation network and costs would have been far less sophisticated. Roman decision making was less optimized than the decision making that can be done today with the interactive digital model.
The article by Richard White is a geographic information system (GIS) overview interspersed with historiography that left me just sad. In this article, we have a Stanford historian who has just discovered historical geography as if it never existed in the scholarly canon and renames it spatial history. I guess in Stanford they don’t pay attention to publications from Yale: see D. W. Meinig’s stellar historical geography, The Shaping of America: A geographical perspective on 500 years of history. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_W._Meinig ) Granted, digital techniques can be used to further the excellent work Meinig and other historical geographers started, but the digital techniques do not make their work irrelevant or the discipline of historical geography non-existent.
Finally, and more encouraging was Lincoln Mullen’s tutorial on producing thematic maps and using CartoDB as a method for producing them. Most historians will use thematic maps as they are trying to describe the variation of a place over time. All in all, I appreciate the expanded reach and capabilities that digital mapping brings. Given my undergraduate degree in geography and my constant interest in history, I would not think of conducting historical research in other than a geographic context. For me, it always about both space and time.
Transcribing an Army letter from 1800
Trying to decipher and transcribe old letters is something I’ve been doing for a couple of decades. I wish I could say it gets easier. For me, it hasn’t much. Partly because I was transcribing in spurts. Heavy into transcription for a month, and then not touching for three to six months. The transcription skill is similar to learning and using a foreign language; consistent use is better.
I was initially working only with letters from the Civil war era and the script wasn’t quite as removed from the cursive I was taught. Then I started working with older letters from the early 19th, or late 18th century and deciphering got harder. The S that looked like an f was more in use and spelling was less standard.
In the process of working with old letters, I did learn about name abbreviations like Saml for Samuel and Jno for John. Other abbreviations I ran into related to dates. Ult. for the Latin ultimo meaning the month preceding the current month. Inst.for the Latin phrase instante mense, meaning in this month.
For this week’s class exercise in transcription using the early papers of the American War Department, I picked a letter that related to procurement from the Springfield Armory in 1800. I picked that letter because I have a background in Army acquisition and I wanted to if there were similarities between 1800 and the last 20 years. There were. The letter refers to quarter end for fiscal measurement, and the author signs the letter “most respectfully”. In the Army today we report money quarterly, and every other time period, and we sign off with “very respectfully” or “respectfully”. Interesting to see the 200 years of continuity come through the difficulty in deciphering writing style.
Nonetheless, early 18th and 19th-century cursive is difficult to read. What has helped me are guides like Kip Sperry’s “Reading Early American Handwriting”, or the guide Cheek Genealogy left here: http://www.moonzstuff.com/articles/oldhandwriting.html
For some scribbles, however, I am unable to decipher them. If it just looks like a wavy line unless there is some clear flow in the sentence there is not much to be done. Luckily, the 1800 Springfield letter didn’t have too many of those. But where it’s better than a scrawl but still somewhat garbled then multiple interpretations can come into play.
I interpret the xxxxxx Ely in the Springfield letter as Hudson Ely. I could see where someone else could interpret it as Thomas Ely. I am not sure if my read of the name Hudson is correct. If a transcription is crowdsourced as many are today to save money, then the crowdsourced transcription needs review.
On another note, we got a tour and an interactive discussion with the archivists at the George Mason University Special Collections Research Center (SCRC). One of the archivist’s was scanning C-SPAN administrative records. It was instructive to see the lighting used to eliminate shadows and hear why the different digital file formats are used. It caused me to relook TIFF and JPEG definitions, and re-think whether for some of my historical mapping projects downloading the TIFF file would be better despite the much large file size.
Building an Omeka site
Once my wife and I stumbled onto her great-aunt’s part in the Willard Burke murder trial, I got interested in researching the trial and the participants. Thanks to some Sonoma County, California blogs, I quickly learned about the trial and the key players. Dr. Burke was the father of Lu Etta Smith’s child. The doctor owned a gold mine in Butte County that had just struck a rich vein. He attempted to murder Lu Etta to get rid of a claimant on his new found riches. Dr. Burke was convicted, sentenced to 10 years in San Quentin, and lost his appeal. His original defense attorney, Hiram Johnson, was elected Governor of California. In 1916, at the beginning of his last term as Governor, Johnson pardoned Dr. Burke. Relieving Dr. Burke of 7 years of the prison sentence and restoring his livelihood as a Doctor.
Which led me to the question, why did Governor Johnson pardon Dr. Burke? The blogs which were built primarily from newspaper articles from the time were either silent or speculative on the topic of the pardon. To possibly find an answer, I needed to see the pardon file if it existed, and any correspondence Governor Johnson may have left on the subject. I learned that the California State arch
Once my wife and I stumbled onto her great-aunt’s part in the Willard Burke murder trial, I got interested in researching the trial and the participants. Thanks to some Sonoma County, California blogs, I quickly learned about the trial and the key players. Dr. Burke was the father of Lu Etta Smith’s child. The doctor owned a gold mine in Butte County that had just struck a rich vein. He attempted to murder Lu Etta to get rid of a claimant on his new found riches. Dr. Burke was convicted, sentenced to 10 years in San Quentin, and lost his appeal. His original defense attorney, Hiram Johnson, was elected Governor of California. In 1916, at the beginning of his last term as Governor, Johnson pardoned Dr. Burke. Relieving Dr. Burke of 7 years of the prison sentence and restoring his livelihood as a Doctor.
Which led me to the question, why did Governor Johnson pardon Dr. Burke? The blogs which were built primarily from newspaper articles from the time were either silent or speculative on the topic of the pardon. To possibly find an answer, I needed to see the pardon file if it existed, and any correspondence Governor Johnson may have left on the subject. I learned that the California State archives had a pardon file, and the University of Berkeley had Governor Johnson’s personal papers. Luckily, I was going to California and had the time for some research.
The results of my research in Berkeley and in Sacramento are what I now am including in the Omeka site. The site when public will share with the world material that has been in the archives for over 100 years and will set straight some distortions that have crept into the historical record concerning the Burke trial and its aftermath. One clear distortion was the amount of prison time that Dr. Burke served (3 years) and how much he had been relieved of (7 years).
The difficulties I experienced in putting the Omeka exhibit together were (1) having more data than was reasonable to display, (2) copyright restrictions, (3) selecting the focus for the 4000 word article, (4) appropriately referring to the items in the exhibit in the accompanying text, and (5) some difficulty getting the illustration function to display properly for text boxes near the bottom of the page.
From a couple of bursts of research, I have about 50 newspaper articles and over a hundred pages of Burke trial material. Deciding which items were the most appropriate to display was difficult. I evolved criteria of topic relevance followed by uniqueness; meaning was this the first time an item would make it up on the web. I had to forgo using some of the items due to copyright restrictions. The Bancroft Library of UC Berkeley forbids reproduction of the items in the Hiram W. Johnson papers. Of all of the items, what came from archival research was usually material that hadn’t been online yet. Beyond relevance and uniqueness, the other criteria I used was online legibility. Did the item display well?
Displaying well is can also be a function of text alignment to the figure or illustration. In a word processor, one can pretty much get text aligned with an illustration so that it displays well and flows with the text. Not as easily done in Omeka.
What I really liked about Omeka, though, was the ability to place annotation boxes on either text or a picture. The capability really enables one to interpret cursive, or a hard to read copy. Hopefully, a future release will enable one to provide article text with the illustration function. I experienced some difficulty in getting annotation boxes to display correctly if there was a lot of text and the box was near the bottom of the illustration. However, breaking up the annotation box into smaller boxes proved a reasonable workaround. All in all, I found Omeka to be an excellent mechanism for displaying archival material.
