Week 1: Riley

“To be without history is to be trapped in a present where oppressive social relations appear natural and inevitable. Knowledge of history is knowledge that things have changed and do change.”

• Gerda Lerner

Hello! Just a brief re-cap of some of what I shared in class about myself: My name is Riley Houston, and I’m currently a second-year MA/MLIS student! My research interests include the history of the American South from the mid-19^th century to the early 20^th, with a focus on how the intersections of race, class, and gender have affected Southern identity and experience. After graduation, I’m hoping to pursue a career in either museum education or academic librarianship. Museum education in particular interests me because I am incredibly passionate about sharing historical information in ways that are accessible to the public.

My experience with digital humanities is, I would say, rather limited. Before coming to Southern Miss, my experience pretty much only included putting my research into PowerPoint format to present it, such as when I had to present my undergraduate Honors project. Over this past summer, however, my experience broadened a little. I worked part-time for the school on the ongoing 103rd Infantry Division website, as well as helping to process our WWII poster collection for a digital collection. My responsibilities included re-formatting pages on Squarespace for the mobile version, uploading images and documents to the website, scanning images of the posters in our collection and uploading them to Dropbox, and eventually transferring the images to Modern Campus in preparation of publishing them to the Dale Center’s website. I also learned a good deal about metadata, and I spent a good deal of time exploring the Library of Congress’s database of Subject Headings to find tags for each poster. I know that as a student and researcher, I have absolutely benefitted from the digital scholarship of others. For example, for my thesis, I am researching Unionist women from Mississippi, and the Southern Claims Commission, a digitized database of applications from Southerners asking the Federal government for compensation on the basis of loyalty throughout the war, has been my primary source of data. Without these digitized records, my thesis topic would be significantly more difficult to research. I have also greatly benefited in my research from websites such as Ancestry.com, Newspapers.com, Fold3, and more for their digitized records of newspapers, Freedmen’s Bureau records, and even some archived images I have been able to use in my own presentations.

What I am really hoping to learn this semester is how to create interesting and interactive online exhibits and webpages that people can use to educate themselves or their students about historical topics. I think that the coolest thing ever would be to create an online learning tool that a history teacher anywhere in the country could use to help teach their class in a “fun” and memorable way. I’d like to be able to create an online exhibit for a museum, archive, or university in the future, and I’d like to learn about the best practices and tools with which to do that. I feel like we have aleady been introduced to so many different resources I had never heard of, such as GitHub and accessibility checkers like WAVE, and I’m looking forward to getting hands-on with some of the tools and resources that we’ve been discussing so far!