Developing Civil War Washington

Authors

Katherine L. Walter, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Elizabeth M. Lorang, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Stacy Rickel, University of Nebraska - LincolnFollow
Karin Dalziel, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow

ORCID IDs

Elizabeth M. Lorang

Stacy Rickel

Document Type

Article

Date of this Version

2015

Citation

Published (as Chapter 2) in Civil War Washington: History, Place, and Digital Scholarship, ed. Susan C. Lawrence (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), pp. 13–33.

Comments

Copyright © 2015 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska.

Abstract

The Civil War Washington project team at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln includes scholars, librarians, technologists, and students, both undergraduate and graduate. Individuals are affiliated with the English and History Departments, the University Libraries, the School of Geography, and the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. Our successes as a team can be attributed to many things, including sound project management and the fact that our participants have been committed to achieving set goals. Most important, the interdisciplinary nature of the team has been highly advantageous in the research itself and in creating the composite web site.

The project was started with seed monies from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries, which provided a Council of Library and Information Resources Postdoctoral Fellow in Scholarly Communication to serve as the first project manager, the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research provided early grant funding, and the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities funded the GIS staff. With this initial funding package, a prototype of the web site was built, and a grant proposal was submitted to the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Research for a Collaborative Research grant. The resulting NEH award was received in 2010. Throughout, servers, equipment, software, space, and administrative support have been provided by the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities.

The present chapter reflects upon the team and its resources, some of the challenges of archival research, and decisions made regarding the metadata for text and images, fields and functionality of the relational database, and site functionality and design.