Join Digitization Center Coordinator Karmine Beecroft and Metadata Librarian Emily Baldoni at Milner Library’s 6th Floor Southwest Learning Space on November 12 from noon to 1 p.m. for “Voices From the Trenches: Uncovering World War I Stories through Digitization and Visualization.”
This presentation will explore a multi-year-long project to provide digital access to thousands of archival documents that speak to the World War I experiences of 682 Illinois State Normal University (ISNU) affiliates. Collected and arranged by ISNU’s first full-time librarian Angeline Vernon Milner, these questionnaires, letters, photographs, and newspaper clippings provide a remarkably granular and immediate picture of everyday people’s experiences of the war.
Beecroft will provide in-depth discussion of the digitization and ingest process, as well as crowdsourcing the transcription of over 2,000 handwritten documents. Baldoni will describe the application of metadata (descriptive information) to the resulting digital files, then explain how her team leveraged this data to create a series of visualizations, maps, and narratives to explore stories from the collection. These have been compiled into Over There, a digital exhibit created using the StoryMap platform.
In addition to providing an overview of the collection, the site includes geospatial visualizations and highlights a variety of individuals from the collection, including narratives focusing on the Influenza Epidemic of 1918, the Red Cross, and the Pioneer Infantry.
This presentation is part of Milner Library’s ongoing Digital Scholarship Speaker Series.
