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
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
Many years ago, we would have never put the two words "Digital" and "History" together because they seem to have two completely different meanings. "Digital" refers to computing technology, while "History" refers to the study of the past. Now, in the digital age, as a result of all of the technological advances, historians are almost pushed to study … Continue reading The Study of History in the Digital Age
These past three weeks, our class has been entering into the heart of our digital history projects. For the “City Social Project”, as noted by previous posts, our class is digitizing US census data of various wards in Harrisburg. We are digitizing these records, which can be found on Ancestry.com, to showcase the people of Harrisburg … Continue reading Paving a Path for Recognition
As you must have gathered from exploring this site, students at Messiah College are working on projects that involve bringing historical information about Harrisburg, PA and the City Beautiful Movement into the Digital Age. But with all the information about census data, archiving and digitization, it’s easy for details about what is occurring within the … Continue reading So What Exactly are We Doing?
Warren Manning is not a very familiar name to everyone, let alone those that are reading our engagements in Digital History or those who aren't knowledgeable of the "City Beautiful Movement" in Harrisburg. Although that may be true, to those that are writing the history of this city, he matters quite a bit. Warren Manning, a student … Continue reading Warren Manning
This past weekend a group of Digital History students drove down to Daulphin County Historical Society to take a peak inside the archives. We took time out of our Sunday to begin research for our digital exhibits on the City Beautiful Movement in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Upon arriving, we noticed the connection Harrisburg still has to … Continue reading Visiting the Archives
Our most recent obstacle, as we continue with our research of Harrisburg’s City Beautiful Project is designing a website to display our work. Since many of us are novices when it comes to creating any website, let alone an omeka.net site, we need to start with the basics. Even understanding basic terminology was a challenge; … Continue reading Bringing the Past into the Present
Digital Harrisburg 