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.
