Projects

“Hello Coed!” A 1950s History of Gettysburg College Women – Keira Koch ’19

After studying the challenges of being a woman on a college campus during World War II, Digital Scholarship Summer Fellow Keira Koch decided to expand her research to post-war life. Her project “Hello Coed!” aggregates information from various scrapbooks, oral histories, college publications, and photographs from Gettysburg College’s Special Collections and College Archives to provide a snapshot of college life for women at Gettysburg College during the 1950s. To build the narrative, Koch uses Scalar, StoryMapJS, and multimedia to bring the experience of college women to life. In the next phases of the project, more narratives and voices will be added, and it will be expanded through researching Gettysburg College women in different time periods until there is a complete history of women at the college.

Your Friend and Classmate: Following the West Point Class of June 1861 Through the American Civil War – Julia Wall ’19

June 24th, 1861, 34 young men graduated from the United States Military Academy a year early to answer the need for more officers in the United States Army. Four had already dropped out of their class before graduation to join the Confederacy, and three more resigned to join the rebelling forces. Of these 38 men, only 28 would live to see the end of the war. Digital Scholarship Summer Fellow Julia Wall’s project “Your Friend and Classmate” tells the story of these cadets, collectively and individually, based on a yearbook that belonged to William H. Harris, one of the June 1861 cadets. In that yearbook, Harris annotated the pictures of his classmates with what the cadets did in the war, keeping up with those that he could. Using the yearbook and Harris’ annotations, Wall created a Scalar site incorporating StoryMapJS and TimelineJS to track the activities of each cadet.

This is Why We Fight: Student Activism at Gettysburg College – Lauren White ’18

“This is Why We Fight” is an interactive timeline of student-led social justice movements at Gettysburg College. For each event on the timeline, there is a summary of the events and an explanation its significance, both locally and nationally. Digital Scholarship Summer Fellow Lauren White’s interest in this project was sparked by the amount of campus activism Gettysburg and other campuses witnessed in the 2015-2016 school year regarding racism on college campuses and the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Using Scalar and TimelineJS, this project documents an integral part of college history, and also attests to the merit of those students who fight for their own rights or support those with less privilege than themselves. The timeline will continue to expand, using crowdsourcing to collect stories of Gettysburg students and alumni.