Monthly Archives: April 2015

Lafayette participates in Keystone DH Transcribathon

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As part of the Keystone Digital Humanities consortium, Skillman Library’s Digital Scholarship Services participated in a virtual transcribathon along with nine other colleges and universities from the area including Muhlenberg, Lehigh, Bucknell, and University of Pennsylvania. With a great turnout of 10 contributors over the course of the event including five undergraduates and several librarians, the team was able to transcribe 125 new records, all while building a community of DH practitioners on campus and connecting with our colleagues across the state.

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Transcribathon participants working on ELC pages

Our group chose to transcribe ledger records from our Easton Library Company project. On hand for the event were Professor Chris Phillips, the primary researcher on the ELC project, Diane Shaw from Lafayette’s Special Collections, and a number of undergraduate students interested in working on digital humanities projects. The ledgers contain the loan records from the Easton Library in the early 1800s. The goal of transcribing these ledgers is to gain insight into the reading practices of 19th century readers and to learn more about Easton’s local history. (To learn more about the project read our previous post on the ELC.)

As the students would find out, transcribing the pages involved not simply transferring the handwritten records into type, but also required lessons in 19th century librarian short hand, research into complex book titles, and a bit of forensic investigation. After the first few successful entries, it was easy to get lost in the world of early Easton, finding names of residents that now appear on street signs and building, and discovering long forgotten novels. Correctly deciphering an entry started to bring out the competitive spirit in the participants and by the end of the night everyone had fun engaging in some biblio detective work.

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Example of a ledger page from 1823

The event lasted three hours with similar transcription efforts happening simultaneously across all of the the participating campuses connected via Google Hangout. The Keystone DH group designed this initiative based on a transcribathon event at the Folger Shakespeare Library in December. The Folger event lasted for 12 hours with 35 participants transcribing and encoding manuscript pages for inclusion in the Early Modern Manuscripts Online project. This event, though shorter in duration, was an experiment in fostering a broader community and connecting like-minded scholars and researchers all of whom are working on long term digital humanities projects.

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Sample ledger facsimile, relational data table, and network graph visualization.

The data collected at the event will be added to the ELC’s quickly expanding relational database and the Transcribathon also gave us the opportunity to test a new data entry interface that Digital Scholarship Services has created. Working closely with the students engaged on the project, DSS developers James Griffin and Thom Goodnow have built forms designed to the specific needs of the ELC and the feedback from the Transcribathon will be used to refine these tools even further.  Once complete, this project will allow users to investigate and visualize this data on their own and discover new relationships between readers, lenders, and the community. For us the feedback, as well as the data recorded, are invaluable in advancing the project and we look forward to more opportunities to collaborate with the Keystone community in the future.

For more information on starting a digital project with DSS or applying for an internship opportunity contact us at digital@lafayette.edu , or call (610) 330-5796.

 

Professor Andrea Smith and DSS capture Easton history in community “scan-a-thon”

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Easton residents joined students from Professor Andrea Smith’s Social Memory class to contribute to the ongoing digital public history project “Lebanese Town.” Together with DSS’s Visual Resources Curator Paul Miller, Smith and her students collected and scanned photographs, post cards, and memorabilia from the Easton community. The project aims to reconstruct Easton’s Lebanese neighborhood that was lost to urban renewal in the 1960s. The materials collected today will be added to the growing archive that seeks to preserve the memory of this eclectic, diverse neighborhood.

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Professor Smith and students from her Social Memory class set up their materials.

Professor Smith has been working on this project in her classes since 2008 and with her students she has compiled the stories into a book that the contributors help to edit and add to over time. The project has now grown into a digital project where these stories, images and photographs will be included on an interactive map. To learn more about the larger project see our previous post about our latest digital humanities projects.

This week’s event was the second “scan-a-thon” Professor Smith has held to help collect local materials. Over the years she has amassed a mailing list of residents who once lived in Lebanese Town who now often attend events not only to bring additional materials for the collection but to reminisce about their time together in the neighborhood.

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Students record a contributor’s story and catalog her photos for Paul Miller to digitize.

These meetings give the students a unique view into Easton’s past as they get to hear stories of the town as it was decades ago. The contributors tell them how amazing the bread was at Leone’s Bakery, and recount old world remedies like curing whooping cough with kerosene or a headache with potato slices. Moreover, they remember Lebanese Town fondly as a close-knit community of friends and neighbors. As the residents talk, the networks and fibers of the community begin to emerge. With so many stories already collected, this term’s students are able to start pulling these threads together writing chapters that focus on shared experiences that can now be told from multiple perspectives. The latest version of the book will be presented to the contributors at a special event at the Sigal Museum on May 7th.

As this growing archive is made digitally accessible, this local history will reach a new audience of both contemporary Easton residents and the Lafayette community of students. Once launched, users will be able to add their own items to the map creating a rich exhibit for the entire Easton community.

For more information on starting a digital project with DSS or applying for an internship opportunity contact us at digital@lafayette.edu, or call (610) 330-5796.