About a year ago, a number of faculty and students from several courses at Messiah College and Harrisburg University partnered to launch a new initiative to digitize Harrisburg’s history. It’s incredible how our original vision of the Digital Harrisburg Initiative (DHI) has grown over the last year as we’ve found new partners and begun to … Continue reading Digital Harrisburg Initiative: A Mid-February Update
The Digital Harrisburg working group is pleased to announce a beta version of an interactive map of Harrisburg in 1900/1901 hosted at ArcGIS Online. This map and the data it contains was developed as a collaboration between faculty and students at Messiah College and Harrisburg University of Science and Technology. The Historical Society of Dauphin … Continue reading Explore Harrisburg in 1900: An Interactive Map of Buildings and Population
It’s been an eventful month for our work on the Digital Harrisburg Initiative. About time to round up some of the latest updates: 1. Presentations Since our last update, faculty and students from Messiah College, Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, and Harrisburg Area Community College presented on research related to Harrisburg’s City Beautiful movement. … Continue reading The Harrisburg City Beautiful Project: A Mid-December Update
A small team of faculty and students is putting together a presentation and paper for Saturday’s digital conference at Bucknell University. The presentation is titled “Harrisburg’s City Beautiful Movement: Mapping the Growth and Transformation of the Pennsylvania State Capital” and details the collaboration between GIS and History faculty and students from Harrisburg University and Messiah … Continue reading Connecting the Dots
After the flurry of activity on this site last winter and spring, it may have come as a surprise that activity at this site would drop so abruptly in May. Behind the scenes, however, the Digital Harrisburg initiative has continued to develop and expand over the last sixth months in new and exciting ways. I’ve … Continue reading Digital Harrisburg Reboot
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
Digital Harrisburg 