In early January, students in Harrisburg University’s Applied Geographic Information Systems (GIS) class were notified of the course requirement for a semester long applied GIS project. This course builds on the freshman year Introduction to GIS class and encourages students to explore unique and practical ways to apply GIS technology. Students at this level in … Continue reading Digitizing Harrisburg circa 1901
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
With the work of our City Social projects finally finished, our focus now centers on our City Beautiful projects. This past week we spent a significant amount of time at the Dauphin County Historical Society (DCHS) and the Pennsylvania State Archives doing research on our respective topics. We have learned many things that are really interesting. Did … Continue reading Making Discoveries
One of my favorite parts of Messiah College’s Digital Harrisburg efforts has been the opportunity to explore local archives and delve headfirst into primary source research. As my fellow classmate Rachel pointed out in another Messiah College student-run blog, it truly is an unparalleled experience to have the original copy of a primary source sitting … Continue reading Lessons from the Archives
This past week, I have spent several hours at the Dauphin County Historical Society researching Vance McCormick. At the start of this research project, I did not know much about McCormick. From our class reading of City Contented, City Discontented, I knew McCormick was the Mayor of Harrisburg from 1902-1905, and one of the influential members of the … Continue reading From Mayor to Chair
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
As our Digital History class has been finishing the last portion of our City Social Project, we have been simultaneously working on the City Beautiful Project. The City Beautiful Project involves research at two different archives in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: the State Archives and the Dauphin County Historical Archives. Within each of our respective groups, we will research … Continue reading The Playground of History–The Archives
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
For those that have been keeping up with our posts, you probably have noticed that we have finished entering census data. It has been an extremely tiring and exhaustive process for each of us in the class to digitize at least twenty sheets of census records. As we came to an end, there was a … Continue reading What Can We Extrapolate?
Digital Harrisburg 