Blogging lessons learned

As I'm working more on my actual project and less on the planning aspect of it, I find that I'm learning some of the lessons of blogging, which may also be applied to maintaining a website. It isn't easy, and requires diligence, persistence, and time!

In order to keep things fresh, and keep visitors returning to your site, it needs to be dynamic, and that means being disciplined, perhaps more so than I have been able to be. The takeaway from that is that there needs to be someone responsible for maintaining currency on a website, and to update any associated blogs. It can't be left to whim!

The good news that I have to report is that most the J. Henry Jenks letters are now available through the UNH Library's Digital Collections website here:

John Henry Jenks Papers

Here's what the main page looks like right now:

Timemapper

And yet another tool for time mapping, using Google sheets to add geographic coordinates and image locations. This looks simpler than Story Maps, but the spreadsheet method can be applied to both. Here's a peek at what this might look like when linking the transcribed Jenks letters:

I like the timeline across the bottom, and there is more cleanup of data to do, but this is a nice, quick way to offer a mapping visual.

Storymaps

We had a great and timely discussion in class today about Esri Story Maps, which I explored a bit with the Jenks letters. I feel ready to head back into battle, no pun intended, and try to fix the sad looking map I created. Better yet, I hope to create, or at least explain how I would create a great looking story map, using Shane Bradt's video instructions. Shane works for Cooperative Extension, and gave us some great information about how these maps can be used.

Back at it ...

I had a break this weekend as I travelled to western Massachusetts to visit with friends, but just before I left, I began exploring next semester's class options. It will be my final class, and it looks like I may be taking Professor Harris' Civil War Era class, which will offer me another view of how the transcription part of the class fits into the digital history teaching component. Although I enjoy reading about the Civil War, I tend to be more interested in more recent American history, but I think this will be a good way to get another perspective on how digital history components can be woven into a class as a component.

Creating Metadata for Transcribed Letters

Using standardized vocabularies and formats is what makes metadata most useful. Here at UNH, we are using DublinCore and Library of Congress subject headings as our standards. As I create the metadata for each letter, I am thinking about how the 14th Regiment moved around quite a bit, and it would be great to link the location each letter was written, with geographical links as well as information about that location during the war.

Work and School Intersect

Today I attended a presentation from a team of representatives from Ebsco. Ebsco provides the library with a lot of our databases and electronic materials, as well as providing what is called a discovery service, the front end of what many patrons see in our library.

The most interesting part of the presentation was their section on data and text mining, focusing on how their services offered means for researchers to access data sets for language research. I did not realize that their databases provided that option, and I hope to learn more about it.

Playing with Tools: Word Maps

I had fun playing around in Voyant today, checking various word mapping options. I actually enjoyed using the newer beta version and compared some of the letters of John Henry Jenks with those of William Combs, another solder in the same regiment, whose letters have been digitized and made available by the University of Notre Dame. I played with different options using just the Jenks collection, and noted that the more letters includes, the better and more interesting the results. There's lots more here with which it would be fun to experiment!

Here are some of my results when mapping the entire Jenks collection: