As I walk around, the heart of campus is beating with the energy brought on by the start of a new semester. This pulsation seeps into the classrooms where chalk hits blackboards with fresh information. I relish the feeling of excitement and unfamiliarity especially in the uncharted territory of Digital History. To say I am generally inexperienced … Continue reading Something New
The 2015-2016 academic year at Messiah College is well under way. As a student in Dr. David Pettegrew’s Digital History course, we have read the first few chapters of History in the Digital Age. This compilation of texts by various authors focuses on the advancement of technology and academic resources and their shaping of the research process for historians. Yet, … Continue reading Expectations of a New Digital History Student
As a junior history and English major at Messiah College I enrolled in Dr. Pettegrew’s “Digital History” course in order to fulfill a requirement for my public history concentration. I officially decided to add this concentration and a public relations minor, after my recent internship experience. This summer, I had the privilege of participating in the Pennsylvania Historical … Continue reading WordPress, Zotero, and Harrisburg – Oh My!
It's been several months since a general update on our work on the Harrisburg City Beautiful and City Social Projects. The silence of this site is no indicator of the progress we have made in spring and early summer in putting the Harrisburgers of the early 20th century on the map. Here are the major strides we've … Continue reading A Mid-Summer Update: Census Data, Church Membership, and Property Values
This morning I was watching an episode of The West Wing while working on finishing the database for the 1910 Harrisburg Census and it just so happened to be an episode about the Census. I just can't escape it. But a quote from the episode truly resonated with me and how I feel some days while working on … Continue reading Finishing Up 1910
The Digital Harrisburg Working Group has made major strides in the last six weeks in entering, publicizing, and standardizing data related to the City Social Project. We have had major success especially in our ability to visualize data in GIS. At some point soon, we’ll give a general update of all the recent activities related … Continue reading The First Greeks of Harrisburg
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
Joseph Thomas and his wife Marian lived in the 8th Ward of Harrisburg at the time of the 1900 census. Their home (see cyan dot on map below) was smack dab in the middle of where the current Capitol Fountain exists today. Joseph was an undertaker and he and his wife had two boarders, a … Continue reading Beneath the Capitol Fountain
