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
From City Social to City Beautiful
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
What Can We Extrapolate?
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?
Practical Applications of Census Data
We have spent many weeks working on digitizing census data, tediously comparing spreadsheets and meticulously analyzing the entries. But the question remains as to what can be done with this data? What is the point of digitizing this information? Digitizing this census data opens doors to obtaining many different types of information. As you know, … Continue reading Practical Applications of Census Data
The Allure of the Eighth Ward
Transcribing thousands of census records for Messiah College’s Digital History class can be tedious at times, and I often found myself in the habit of thinking of Harrisburg’s citizens in 1900 in terms of wards and districts rather than as families and individuals. It is all too easy to merely skim the information and forget … Continue reading The Allure of the Eighth Ward
Excelling in Census Data
These past few weeks we have been hard at work taking census data from 1900 Harrisburg and putting it into Microsoft excel. This work was done with help from Ancestry, Dr. Pettegrew, patience, attention to detail, and numerous cups of coffee. Below, you will see one of the many sheets from the 1900 census. I … Continue reading Excelling in Census Data
Digital Harrisburg Initiatives: An Update
There has been a flurry of student and faculty activity in the last month about our Digital Harrisburg projects. You’ve heard now from most of the students in the Digital History course about their experiences so far with the City Social and City Beautiful projects. Expect additional observations, comments, and curiosities from students in the … Continue reading Digital Harrisburg Initiatives: An Update
Digital Harrisburg 