Category: Project Charter

Project Title: Where do we fit in? Gettysburg College in the modern and postmodern.

 

Project Owner: Augusta Pendergast

 

Project Summary

This project is about looking at Gettysburg College student publications over the last century and attempting to understand how these works fit into the larger context of the modern and postmodern eras. It includes historical analysis as well as literary analysis while all the while coming from a philosophical perspective. It will also attempt to answer the question of where we stand now, whether we are still situated in the postmodern period or whether we have moved on to something new by looking at contemporary student works.

 

Research Questions:

• How do Gettysburg College students fit into the larger periods of cultural history known as the modern and postmodern periods?
• What trends are there in current student work and how do these relate to the postmodern period?

 

Scope: It will be an interactive website with explanations of terms as well as contextualizing those terms in the broader American history by using a timeline. It will have also analysis and annotations of student works from publications like the Mercury and the Gettysburgian as well as shorter run, student created platforms. Lastly, it will have a list of the philosophers that are significant to the modern and postmodern periods and their main ideas that relate to this topic.

 

Deliverables

• Books about the postmodern period that also discuss the modern period
• Book with philosophers and their specific ideas
• Books about the history of the college to situate some of the student works
• Student writings from the Mercury and Gettysburgian
• Student publications not necessarily created by the college itself
• Student made pamphlets
• WordPress website builder to create the cite
• Timeline JS to make the timeline of all the philosophers, student publications, and the significant historical events related to the periods.
• Storymaps JS to annotate images and potential student texts
• Soundcite to add audio

 

 

Timeline

Week 2: Project charter due Friday morning

• First Draft of Philosopher Bios – beginning of week
• First Draft of term definitions – middle of week
• Look at Gettysburg history – end of week
• Spend time in Special Collections figuring out student works – end of week

 

Week 3: wireframe due on Friday

• Read student works and analyze – all week
• Create timeline on paper of the events, student works, and philosophers
  • If you have time begin to make it on Timeline JS

 

Week 4:

• Wrap up research
• Make sure everything is organized well in order to put it online
• Begin playing with website seriously to understand how everything works easier to make week 5 easier.

 

Week 5: Visualization Due Friday

• Begin to take written notes and content and put it in online format – all week
• Write an about the project page – end of week

 

Week 6: Project Draft due Friday

• Continue to create website. Focus on visuals and embedding all the proper elements
• Finish writing any pages such as the where are we now page if that’s not done
• Get all bibliographical information in order

 

Week 7: Final Project due Friday

• Work throughout the week to fix anything that needs fixing
• Finalize everything, make sure everything works well
• Test the website out on multiple users

 

Week 8: Presentation week!

• Practice the presentation
• Write out notes of what you will say
• Practice in front of people and get them to ask tough questions
• Make sure everything is lovely

 

End of Life/Future Plans

I would like this project to be largely complete by the end of eight weeks but I would like to be able to have the option to go in and keep adding if that’s something that I feel it needs. Because there are so many student works, it would be easy to just keep going and going and analyzing each one. If possible, it would be interesting to find a way for other students to add to this cite if they are interested themselves in reading and analyzing the student works because I known I won’t be able to do it all on my own. It can live on the Gettysburg website and I will send the link out to professors and teachers who I know

• Project Name
  • The Great Task Remaining Before Us: Why Gettysburg Performs
• Project Owner
  • Gauri Mangala
• Project Summary
  • My project centers around the town of Gettysburg’s involvement in performance as a means of storytelling. Starting from the Gettysburg Address, Gettysburg has remained strong in its cultural roots as a historic landmark.
    • My research question: How has Lincoln’s call to action to remember what happened on the battlefield affected the way the people of Gettysburg remember history and tell stories?
    • In 8 weeks, I hope to have a specific understanding of the development of performance in Gettysburg College and a general understanding of the development of performance in the town of Gettysburg.
    • I believe my audience will most likely be people involved with the town of Gettysburg, either as residents, or regular tourists.
• Deliverables
  • Photos/Videos/Audios of performances
  • Oral Histories
  • College History Books
  • Video interviews
  • Theory books on performance and the Gettysburg Address
  • TimelineJS
  • StoryMapJS
  • WordPress? Omeka? Who knows?
• Timeline
  • Week 1:  preliminary college research
  • Week 2: plan interviews, finish basic college research, choose digital tools
  • Week 3: preliminary town research, adapt college research into embedded tools
  • Week 4: finish basic college research, finish digitization
  • Week 5: finish interviews (except for special circumstances), create all pages and embed college research
  • Week 6: adapt town research and publish to website, edit film
  • Week 7: KEEP BLANK FOR PANIC ROOM
  • Week 8: practice practice practice, and edit website
• End of Life/Future Plans
  • As I am only going into my sophomore year of college, my ultimate goal would be to continue this research. The more that I do this, I realize that maybe that will transfer itself into getting involved in Special Collections and continuing to archive performance materials and move them to my website, but in one way or another I want to continue this for as long as I am involved with Gettysburg.

Project Name: TBD, Gettysburg College Oral Histories, 1978

By Emma Lewis

This project utilizes audio from Oral Histories conducted by 1978 Gettysburg College class to provide interpretation for users. The interviews are concerned with the college in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, and interview people who attended, taught, worked, or were otherwise connected with the college at the time.

This project seeks to provide its audience with context surrounding the ideas talked about in the interviews and inform them about the tradition of Oral History at Gettysburg College. It will have a few broad topics, such as the Great Depression, college traditions, and women on campus, but will use smaller and more personal stories to connect these broad ideas to the audience.

It will consist of videos using the audio and media from the time to create interpretation, as well as textual interpretation for context. It will also provide links for further reading about certain topics, class reading used by the students in 1978, and other Oral Histories conducted at Gettysburg College.

The main purpose of this project is to connect the words of the Oral Histories to pictures, films, and other media in order to provide visual context to aid in a general audience’s understanding of the Oral Histories.

Deliverables:

This project will need fairly few deliverables. The main thing I need to produce is video interpretation utilizing audio clips. I will gather media to use in videos and write scripts. I will also need to ensure that each interview has a transcript for use on the site.

I will use Scalar as my platform, so I will need to ensure that my pathways and connections make sense. This can be done in my wire frame, which will be completed by next week.

Timeline:

Week 1- June 4-8: Sort through the oral histories, find common topics.

Week 2- June 11-15: Read research books and refine topics.

Week 3- June 18-22: Choose topics and audio clips. Learn video editing tools and gather media. Finish wire frame.

Week 4- June 25-29: Write scripts and connect media to audio clips.

Week 5- July 2-6: Build media for the site.

Week 6- July 9-10: Finalize choices, finish building what is immediately necessary.

Week 7- July 16-20: Get it on the site. Check for issues.

Week 8- July 23-27: Refine the project, prepare for presentations.

Future Plans:

This project or a form of it can have a long life. More interpretation can be done with the interviews from the 1978 class. I am only using 10 interviews for the purposes of this summer, as I cannot analyze and interpret everything in 8 weeks. The idea can also be adapted to other Oral Histories on campus. There are many sources to draw from, new stories to be told, and other archived media to use as context. This style of project can augment existing Oral Histories. If I have the opportunity to continue work, I will gladly do so. This project has been exciting thus far.

Project Name: Gettysburg College: A Diversity Story

Project Owner: Ivana Lopez Espinosa

Project Summary:

The project will be a multi-page website with description pages and four embedded timelines. The overview timeline consists of ‘firsts at Gettysburg College’ that can direct the user to one of the other timelines or more information on the person, event, or document. The other three timelines will contain firsts and other information specifically related to the diversity/ inclusion of students, faculty, and administration. Criteria for diversity include, but are not limited to, gender, sexualities, race, nationality, and religion different from the traditional college campus member – a white, heterosexual Lutheran man.

Research Question:

Over the years, Gettysburg College has focused on creating a diverse and inclusive environment by focusing on, but not limited to, student/faculty/administration retention rates, increasing cultural spaces, and supporting underrepresented students on campus. Gettysburg College has seen a small increase of diversity on campus in the last four years. Since the establishment of the institution, what have been significant events that contribute to the diversification and how have students/ faculty/ administration worked on maintaining, as well as increase, diversity at the college?

Scope of Project:

In the following seven weeks, I hope to have four cohesive timelines highlighting the diversity with the student body, faculty, and administration. My main objective is to create a website using the four websites with interactive timelines and pages relating to events or people I have the most information on. The timeline will link to other student works, Special Collections and College Archives, and external sites that contain information I want to display. I have a document with the location of files, pictures, and information I will reference to as the days progress. If time permits, I would be interested in creating a map with student demographics over time and cost of attending at the time.

Audience: Gettysburg College campus community (Current/ Prospective Students, Alumni, Faculty, Staff)

Deliverables:

Website, Home Page, timeline (student, faculty, administration, timeline embedded pages, mapping (time permitting), description pages (events, alumni, faculty, administration), images, documents, About page, Timeline JS skills (or other timeline tool), Omeka (for documents and images)

Timeline:

• • Week 2:
    • Create a document with all the information I have collected
    • Filter information and create timeline skeleton
    • Look at Overview timeline and edit
    • Start wireframe (paper → powerpoint)
    • Project charter (6/15)
    • Reflective essay (6/16)

• • Week 3:
    • Create documents of events/ people with the most information
    • Look at collected information and assign tags
    • Create a digital list of sources for images, documents, files, boxes
    • Bucknell (6/19)
    • Wireframe (6/22)
    • Reflective Essay (6/23)

• • Week 4:
    • Solidify featured information on timelines
    • Scan images and documents, start metadata (?)
    • Have 2.5 timelines completed
    • Have functional website outline
    • Create website home page, outlines of timeline pages, bio example, event description example, and document example
    • Mid-point assessment (individual 6/28, group 6/29)
    • Reflective essay (6/30)

• • Week 5:
    • Have at least 2.5 timeline feature pages complete
    • Review mock pages with librarian partners
    • Check tags
    • Have 74% of media collected
    • Visualization (7/6)
    • Reflective Essay (7/7)

• • Week 6:
    • Finish the rest of media uploading
    • Review timelines with librarian partners – send out for feedback
    • Bryn Mawr (7/12-13)
    • Project draft (7/12)
    • Reflective essay (7/14)

• • Week 7:
    • Check images, links, timelines, pages
    • Final edits
    • Create talking notes
    • Outline of presentation – what is the order of pages I wish to show
    • Project (7/20)
    • Reflective essay (7/21)

• • Week 8:
    • Practice presentation
      • Monday:
        • Morning run through
        • Around 11a
        • Around 3p

• • • • Tuesday:
        • Morning run through (use feedback to update presentation outline)
        • Around 2p

• • • • Wednesday:
        • Morning run through
        • Around 11a
        • Around 3p

• • • Presentation (7/26)
    • Final group assessment (7/27)

End of Life/Future Plans:

I wish to keep the project alive for the next person interested in the topic to add more information. I do not know if I will have time to maintain the document, but I want to make the information and process accessible for others to use.

Project Examples:

• MIT Diversity Timeline Project (http://diversity.mit.edu/diversity-timelines/)
• Brown U. Timeline of Diversity and Inclusion Efforts (https://www.brown.edu/about/administration/institutional-diversity/pathways/timeline)
• The University of Chicago Historical Timeline (https://diversity.uchicago.edu/history/historical-timeline/)
• Colorado College Diversity at CC (https://www.coloradocollege.edu/basics/welcome/diversity/timeline/)
• U. Penn Diveristy Timeline (https://diversity.upenn.edu/diversity-at-penn/timeline/174)

Project Name: American Gothic Literature for Students

Project Owner: Madison Cramer

Project Summary: I intend to create an interactive, multi-page website for high school students to use during their study of American Gothic literature. Students will be able to learn about the Gothic genre with an emphasis on mid- to late-nineteenth-century authors. The website will incorporate not only canonical authors, but also lesser-known authors of a variety of identities in order to better understand a more wholistic perspective of American Gothic literature.

Deliverables: My project will consist of a number of inter-linked pages, so I need to create brief but informative pages about specific authors and works, which will include links to other useful sources as well as full texts of relevant works. In addition I will create a home page, a page about the project and methodology, a bibliography, an index of authors and works, a page about characteristics of Gothic literature, and a variety of pages about recurring themes. I may also include a timeline (or several timelines) documenting the publication of certain influential works. Where helpful, I hope to include images and sound files that help contextualize authors and works within their historical and literary tradition.

Timeline: By the end of week one, I read secondary sources about Gothic as a genre and specifically how American Gothic evolved from its European predecessors. I also read The Castle of Otranto (the first Gothic novel) to identify the character, setting, and plot devices that would become tropes for the genre. By the end of week two, I will have created two pages about canonical authors and annotated at least three of their works with Gothic elements. By the end of week three I will have completed a wireframe of the interconnection among pages and the layout of those pages. I will also have a site with a landing page and a digital version of the pages I created to that point. In terms of my research, I will have created two pages about female authors and annotated their works. Since non-canonical authors will have works that are more difficult to access, I am not establishing a goal number of works to have annotated, but rather will choose a sample relative to the number of their works that are available. By the end of week four I will have created pages for an Asian-American author and a Latinx author, which I will upload to the site. In this week I will also create work pages for works I have annotated in the previous weeks. By the end of week five I will have created pages for two African-American authors, which I will upload to the site. I will also create and upload theme pages that indicate themes evident across all or many identities. During this week I will also upload a timeline either as its own page or as part of another page. By the end of week six I will have added links out to author biographies, full texts, and other relevant sources. I will also create an author index and upload any pages not included in the previous weeks. By the end of week seven I will trouble-shoot links within the site to make sure it is easy to navigate across pages. By the end of week eight I will be able to give a clear presentation about my project in its present state.

End of Life/Future Plans: I hope to continue adding to this website through my semester student teaching (Fall, 2018). Following my graduation, I would like to move the project to another server so I can continue to add authors, research, and resources.