DIY History began as an online experiment in Spring 2011 with the Civil War Diaries and Letters Transcription Project, and quickly became a trove of local, national, and international artifacts made available and searchable online. As we celebrate 100,000 pages transcribed, let’s look back on some of DIY History’s history!
After its initial success and increasing public interest, DIY History grew to include collections of WWI & WWII Letters and Diaries, Early Iowa Lives, Social Justice, Keith-Albee Managers’ Reports, Hevelin Fanzines, and many more with the continued goal of making historic materials more accessible. Through “crowdsourcing,” or engaging volunteers to contribute transcription, tags, and comments, these mass quantities of digitized artifacts became searchable, allowing researchers to quickly seek out specific information, and general users to browse and enjoy the materials more easily.
In case you’re wondering what that 100,000th page transcribed was, you can find it right here! The image is part of the larger Jackson Hyde Photograph Collection. Hyde was born in 1915 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and would later enter into military service in 1942. Over time he was trained as a radio operator in the 210th Armored Infantry Battalion, 10th Armored (Tiger) Division, U.S. Army. In 1944 he was sent overseas to fight in World War II and was killed in action the following year. Following his death, Hyde was awarded the Bronze Star for his heroic service and the Purple Heart for the wounds resulting in his death. His life’s photographs have been preserved in our digital library and transcribed for future researchers in DIY History.
DIY History’s continued success is due, in no small part, to the public; the volunteers who contribute their time to transcribe documents have made DIY History what it is today. So, thank you to all who “Do It Yourself” in helping us reach this incredible milestone!
Mac Gill plans to continue work on her online pedagogy tool and reference guide for The Tale of Genji. This work will include adding visualizations to the resource and experimenting with different technology to see what fits best for visualizing words and concepts.
Sam Kahrar is an MFA student studying Film & Video Production in the Department of Cinematic Arts. As a Studio Fellow, she plans to immerse herself in project-specific research on honeymoons and, more broadly, representations of travel and romance in films of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Drawing upon media from the Libraries’ collections, she plans to create a repository that illustrates how the film and tourism industries fostered a national collective yearning for exploration, which for women of the era was often only imaginable in the context of the honeymoon.
During this fellowship, Ashley Loup plans to create a project that will engage Art History, Geography, and American Studies with a database of sporting statues found in public places like stadiums, college campuses, and communities. Another goal she has for the summer is to gain more expertise in mapping programs.
Ramin Roshandel, a PhD candidate in the School of Music plans to use his time this summer researching the structural purpose and function of ornamentation that is at the core of Iranian classical music. With this data he will create a composition written for a medium-sized ensemble made up of mixed Western instruments that will utilize Iranian microtones/modes found in his research.
Laurel Sanders is pursuing a PhD in History, focusing on the history of public health. Her project will use public health nurses’ statistical reports from Native American reservations in the 1930s. By using digital methods to study these statistics, she wants to find patterns that illuminate Native communities’ and patients’ health concerns, as well as the choices they made dealing with federal healthcare providers, in the early twentieth century.
This summer, Andrea Scardina plans to map Christian, Jewish, Arab, and Roman sources to reveal the commonalities and discrepancies among the cultural conversations on the Holy Land in the Late Antique and early Byzantine eras. She hopes that the experience will leave her with more expertise in mapping platforms.
For her project, Qianyi Shi plans to examine how online voluntary associations create within- and between-group social networks that facilitate political engagement and mobilization of individuals in major political events, such as the presidential and midterm elections. With this data she will create statistical analyses and visualizations using Python and R.
For this fellowship, Soumya Venkitakrishnan seeks to document the experiences of individuals with loss with respect to the use of over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aids versus traditional audiologist-fit hearing aids through a digital interface. Her project will consist of videos on this research, along with opinions from individuals who have used these products.
