Digital History in a Pandemic In the blink of an eye, the end of my senior year is on the horizon. I can say that without a doubt this semester did not turn out how I expected it to. On March 12, my digital history class and I were sitting in the archives beginning our … Continue reading Digital History in a Pandemic
I never thought the Census was confusing, until I had to complete the census on my own this year. College students are supposed to fill out the census with where they reside during the school year- but then COVID-19 displaced thousands of college students altering where they live. Personally, I then went to a friend’s … Continue reading Dealing with Data
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 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
It’s been an eventful month for our work on the Digital Harrisburg Initiative. About time to round up some of the latest updates: 1. Presentations Since our last update, faculty and students from Messiah College, Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, and Harrisburg Area Community College presented on research related to Harrisburg’s City Beautiful movement. … Continue reading The Harrisburg City Beautiful Project: A Mid-December Update
A small team of faculty and students is putting together a presentation and paper for Saturday’s digital conference at Bucknell University. The presentation is titled “Harrisburg’s City Beautiful Movement: Mapping the Growth and Transformation of the Pennsylvania State Capital” and details the collaboration between GIS and History faculty and students from Harrisburg University and Messiah … Continue reading Connecting the Dots
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
I never wanted to take this class. I stood outside, as my last class ended at the end of the fall semester, talking to my fellow History majors in regards to this course. I squished and squirmed about the possibility that I could learn anything from taking a course titled "Digital History." "What kind of … Continue reading Digital History, an experiment.
Digital History is opening my eyes to the different avenues that students can use to understand history. As an aspiring Social Studies teacher, this course has given me a new way to make history more enjoyable for both middle and high school students. Two weeks ago, some fellow students and I gave presentations about other digital … Continue reading Local History Taught Through Digital Harrisburg
One of the exciting outcomes of the class project to key US census records is an enormous database of names, occupations, and demographic attributes for Harrisburg in 1900. As I discussed in a previous post, we keyed 28,397 individuals – about 57% of the total population of the city – into a Microsoft Access table. … Continue reading City Social: The Population of Harrisburg, 1900
Digital Harrisburg 