It is 10:21 AM, and Messiah College’s first Digital History class is now officially ending. During our final meeting time this morning, students have been busily working in groups on final projects. We’re releasing our content to the world now and concluding this first chapter of directing our energies toward a Digital Harrisburg. Here is … Continue reading Harrisburg the Beautiful
One of the exciting outcomes of the class project to key US census records is an enormous database of names, occupations, and demographic attributes for Harrisburg in 1900. As I discussed in a previous post, we keyed 28,397 individuals – about 57% of the total population of the city – into a Microsoft Access table. … Continue reading City Social: The Population of Harrisburg, 1900
Yesterday morning, the Dean of the School of Humanities and a small contingent from the history department made a presentation to administrators at our school, Messiah College, about Digital Humanities and new initiatives in Digital Harrisburg. It was exciting. Our dean, Peter Powers, gave an overview of new movements, activities, courses, and assignments afoot on … Continue reading Digital Humanities, Information Fluency, and the Digital Harrisburg Project
This morning, I gave students in my Digital History class a very brief overview of Geographic Information Systems. While Digital History students have been working on keying US census data, GIS students at Harrisburg University and Messiah College have been busy finding different ways to relate our data to digitized maps (see Step 4 of … Continue reading City Digital: The View from 7,000 Feet
As students have noted recently (here, here, and here), everyone feels a sense of accomplishment and relief in bringing to completion the “City Social” U.S. Census data project for the digital history class. What students have been able to accomplish in the last six weeks is truly remarkable both on an historical and logistical level. … Continue reading Harrisburg on the Map: An Update on the US Census Project
In our Digital History class, we devoted many hours to our City Social project. Certainly all students and faculty have spent many hours with the data. Whether its been plugging in thousands of segments of information, checking for mistakes on both the original census and the new data for our spreadsheets, peer reviewing fellow students' data, … Continue reading A Glimpse at a Past People
As many students have already posted, our Digital History class is currently working on two different projects related to the history of Harrisburg and its past residents, which are “City Social” and “City Beautiful”. Each of these projects is our way of getting to know more about this city and its history. The first project … Continue reading From City Social to City Beautiful
There has been a flurry of student and faculty activity in the last month about our Digital Harrisburg projects. You’ve heard now from most of the students in the Digital History course about their experiences so far with the City Social and City Beautiful projects. Expect additional observations, comments, and curiosities from students in the … Continue reading Digital Harrisburg Initiatives: An Update
There is a new buzz about our campus about the digital humanities, digital history, and the prospects of creating a digital project, or series of projects, related to the people, culture, and history of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s state capital. The Department of History at Messiah College has created this site to publicize our new initiatives in … Continue reading New Initiatives in Digital Harrisburg
Digital Harrisburg 