The team of students and faculty at Messiah College's branch of the Digital Harrisburg Initiative have been hard at work for the past few months on a variety of different projects. Our on-going involvement in the Look Up, Look Out campaign and Commonwealth Monument project allows many different students to lend their voices to important … Continue reading New History: Updates on Digital Harrisburg
Over these past couple of weeks, I have learned a great deal about the City Beautiful Movement as well as what it means to be a digital historian. Digital technologies have developed so quickly over the past couple of decades. In the edited collection, History in the Digital Age, many chapters underscore how technology is used … Continue reading Reflecting on Digital History and Mary Sachs Research
As the culmination of the Digital Harrisburg Class, we, as students, were asked to put together a final project to demonstrate both the digital skills and the knowledge of Harrisburg we had gained through the class. In my case, I followed the early trail of the rather compelling and successful mayor and reformer Vance C. … Continue reading The Month in Reflection
So many people have asked me why in the world I chose to study history. Usually I just take it in stride, tell them that everyone is different, and move on. It wasn't until I spent a month doing intense research, getting very little sleep, trying to understand the changes that occurred in turn of … Continue reading Looking Back on Digital History
Understanding the City Beautiful movement involves understanding change. The actual definition of change from Merriam Webster is “to make different in some particular.” This definition does not encompass the whole reality of change. To change from one thing to another always involves losing something. Sometimes this is losing something bad and gaining something good, but … Continue reading Using Digital Tools to Track Change
Recently, our class has been looking at census data dealing with information from 1900 to 1930. Our census data includes information about each person who lived in Harrisburg during those thirty years. From records, we can learn the first name, last name, address, gender, race, age, birth year, literacy, birthplace, occupation, immigration status, etc. for … Continue reading What Difference Thirty Years Can Make: Harrisburg’s Transformation from 1900 to 1930
As a first time visitor to an archive, I really did not know what to expect. I thought that it would be similar to a library but much bigger. Images of clustered shelves with dusty papers came to mind. Of the two archives that we visited, the Pennsylvania State Archives could not have been further … Continue reading Searching for floods in the Archives
Harrisburg has been the state capital of Pennsylvania since 1812, but has had its fair share of ups and downs in city appeal. Nearing the end of the 19th century, the town was at a crossroads. After a brief period of industrial boom in the steel business, it had lost its luster and looked nothing … Continue reading Digitizing City Beautiful: Remaking Harrisburg and its History
The primary sources about Harrisburg and the City Beautiful movement are mostly physical copies in archives. Since we are learning about City Beautiful in the context of digital history, our first project focuses on digitizing a selection of these items relating to each of our specific themes. That’s why we spent almost seven hours on … Continue reading Digitization in the Real World
Hello, I’m Reid Myers. That's me, to the left. I am a sophomore history major with a concentration in administrative studies. This January at Messiah College, myself and nine other history students have the chance to take the Digital History course offered by the history department. We have three weeks to do so. It’s a … Continue reading Digital History January Session: Reid Myers
Digital Harrisburg 