Along the Chester Way: Visualizing History with Story Maps

Image Credit: Dan Gleiter My name is Joshua Flores. I am a senior-level digital media major with a concentration in interactive design studying at Messiah University. This semester I enrolled in the Humanities Project course and became involved with the Commonwealth Monument Project Heritage tours which includes the T. Morris Chester & the Chester Way … Continue reading Along the Chester Way: Visualizing History with Story Maps

Digitizing Washingtonia: Telling the Story of the “American” Colony in Greece

Image Credit: Aidan Hubley For May Term 2023, I joined a team of professors and students from Messiah University and Harrisburg University of Science and Technology and traveled to Greece. While we were there, we expected to gain exposure to a few archaeology skills, such as drone surveying, photogrammetry, and artifact illustration. Our focus was … Continue reading Digitizing Washingtonia: Telling the Story of the “American” Colony in Greece

Digital History: Learning to Gather, Preserve, and Present J. Horace McFarland and the Harrisburg Park Commission

By; Sam Erikson According to historians Daniel Cohn and Roy Rosenzweig, digital history is the process of “gathering, preserving, and presenting the past on the web.” It sounds simple, yet complex. However, if you utilize the historical tools and platforms that work for you, the possibilities for conducting digital historical work are endless.  Going into … Continue reading Digital History: Learning to Gather, Preserve, and Present J. Horace McFarland and the Harrisburg Park Commission

Retelling the Story of Harrisburg’s Historic African American Community: My Final Reflections

- Kelan Amme, Lenwood Sloan (who plays Martin J. Delaney), and Lewis Butts (who plays Jacob T. Compton) discuss project details. Image by Kelan Amme. For part one of this story, click here. For part two of this story, click here. When I first began brainstorming how the Chester Way walking tour, my idea of … Continue reading Retelling the Story of Harrisburg’s Historic African American Community: My Final Reflections

Retelling the story of Harrisburg’s Historic African American Community

By Kelan Amme This fall, I will be helping to create a video/audio tour of African American History in the city of Harrisburg. In partnership with the Center for Public Humanities at Messiah University, the T. Morris Chester Welcome Center (at the McCormick Public Library), and Mr. Lenwood Sloan of the International Institute for Peace … Continue reading Retelling the story of Harrisburg’s Historic African American Community

Reenergizing the Digital Harrisburg Initiative: A 2022 Update

by David Pettegrew It was, strangely enough, March 11, 2020, the day everything changed, when I posted the last annual update about the work of the Digital Harrisburg Initiative. Little could I have imagined then how profoundly a pandemic would disrupt and change us over the next two and a half years. But here we … Continue reading Reenergizing the Digital Harrisburg Initiative: A 2022 Update

Closing Out an Eventful Year

The year has finally come to a close, and I have learned a tremendous amount. When I first began this year, I was but a lowly English major searching for something to diversify my degree a little bit. I stumbled upon Digital Humanities and this led me to several new experiences involving the use of … Continue reading Closing Out an Eventful Year

My Digital Semester

Map of Harrisburg boundaries in the early 1900s showing the State Capitol grounds (green) and the Capitol Park Extension that replaced the Old Eighth Ward (dark orange) When I started taking digital history at the beginning of this semester, none of us could have predicted just how much digital learning would impact our semesters. When … Continue reading My Digital Semester

Mapping Harrisburg’s Population from the Old Eighth

From the 1900s to 1930s, Harrisburg underwent many transformations that affected its residents.  The City Beautiful Movement was sweeping across the U.S. and was helped along in Harrisburg by the old capitol burning down and a push to move the state capital back to Philadelphia (Williams, 1). The destruction of the old eighth ward and … Continue reading Mapping Harrisburg’s Population from the Old Eighth