Exploring the history, society, and culture of Pennsylvania's capital city
While this website has generated only a few posts over the last year, our team has been hard at work in developing datasets and researching the history and culture of Harrisburg. Beginning next week, I will be teaching a three-week intensive course in Digital History, which will focus on Harrisburg. As our 9 students explore … Continue reading Digital Harrisburg Initiative: A New Year Update
It has been a long time since our last update on the work of the Digital Harrisburg Initiative, so long that visitors may have concluded this is a dead project. Our work in fact has continued on a number of fronts and has continued to expand in ways we could not have anticipated when we initiated these projects in … Continue reading Digital Harrisburg: Winter 2017 Update
The rapid pace of a new semester at Messiah College and the good things happening with the Digital Harrisburg Initiative have left not a single moment to write an update about our collective work in the Digital Harrisburg Initiative. At mid-semester, I've finally got a moment to give readers a sense of the growing energy of the new initiative. 1. Digital History Course Student … Continue reading Digital Harrisburg Project: A Fall Update
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
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
It is hard to believe that the school year is over. Most of us are one step closer to our bachelor’s degrees; some are obtaining them in a week. It was a wonderful experience being a part of Messiah College’s first digital history course. Not only did we make discoveries about the city of Harrisburg … Continue reading Looking Back
Taking the new Digital History course at Messiah College has been an interesting ride. The course had many ups and downs, which can be expected for a brand new course. Both we, the students in the class, and Dr. Pettegrew were trailblazers for a course devoted to learning the new side of history, the digital … Continue reading Becoming Trailblazers
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
