Civil War Soldier Diaries Group Contract

Civil War Soldier Diaries Group Contract

Alex Privitt, James Stewart, Callie Liberty, Mike Black

Mission Statement:

The purpose of this project is to create an online collection of Stephen W. Gordon’s diaries. Along with scanned images and transcription of the diaries, there will be a timeline of events that are relevant to Stephen Gordon’s life and times as well as a brief summary of the Civil War in Fredericksburg. The main goal is to provide the public with access to Stephen Gordon’s Civil War diaries and create a searchable database for these primary sources. The expected audience for this web site are Civil War scholars, visitors to the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, educators and general public interested in the Civil War. To publicize this site, it will be linked to the National Park Service as well as spread through social media. In order to make our site more sustainable in the long term, we are going to stick with more simple themes and plugins that are less likely to become outdated.

Tools:

-Omeka to create the website – best use for us because it functions better than WordPress when it comes to creating exhibits

-TimeLineJS to create a timeline that shows the major events relating to Pvt. Gordon; where he was at certain points in time and important entries → important entries being ones that stand out and provide brief outline of the individual diaries

-Scripto/for the turning page format (http://scripto.org/)

-Adobe Acrobat Pro because the library has it and we are using it for the OCR function

Division of Labor:

Scan all diaries – everyone

James (two diaries)

Callie (two diaries)

Mike (two diaries)

Alex (one diary)

Transcribe the diary that has not been transcribed – Alex

Upload images of scans to Omeka-

James (two diaries)

Callie (two diaries)

Mike (two diaries)

Alex (one diary)

Fill in metadata for each diary and pictures-

Each member will input the metadata for the diaries they worked on.

Contact Luisa Dispenzirie, take photos of the park site, and collect information at National Military Park that relates to Stephen Gordon – Mike

Create About page- Everyone as a group

Create Timeline- James

Create Civil War in Fredericksburg Summary exhibition-Alex → Brief synopsis of the Civil War in Fredericksburg with pictures of the city during the war → what Pvt. Gordon was seeing while he was in Fredericksburg → major battles with generals(*)

Create Stephen Gordon’s background information- Mike

Creating and entering citations – Alex will handle citations for the summary page (in text citations with works consulted sections down at the bottom of the page); create another section of the site that houses all the citations of the sources we consulted; James will handle the citations for the Timeline; Mike will do citations for the objects that he took pictures of while meeting with Luisa Dispenzirie

Timeline:

Final Due Date – Tuesday April 19 (10 total weeks of work)

Feb 8 – Feb 22: Scanning – Since there are a lot of pages to scan we will all work on scanning. Every time a person goes and scans the diaries and transcripts they will let the other group members know how far they got. Compile all digitized transcriptions onto external HD and backup amongst each other. Prioritize diary that has not been transcribed yet.

Feb 11: Set up Omeka subdomain which will be named gordondiaries.umwhistory.org.

Feb 15: Transcribe diary that has not been transcribed – whole diary and pretty lengthy; will take ~2 weeks (March 1)

Feb 18: Discuss and decide on tags and metadata format we want to use before data entry starts.

Before Feb 19: Meet with Luisa Dispenzirie at the National Military Park – discuss additional information about the unit he served for and/or background information about him – Mike will take photos of any objects/uniforms that are relevant to our online exhibit

Feb 23 – March 15: Input images as well as metadata for the diaries into Omeka (talk to Katherine Perdue regarding plugin that automatically enters meta data that is constant throughout multiple pages/entries)