This week, we focused on the appearance of our Omeka exhibits. We concentrated on how the sites would be seen by other people; as website designer and creators, we don’t have much power over how visitors to our Omeka sites access and interact with our exhibits. Therefore, it is important that the website is attractive, fluent, and easily navigable. For instance, while the website will tell the “story” of our soldier, it’s important that if the user clicks the pages out of the ideal order we have concocted in our minds, that the website content still makes sense. My exhibit on Wilhelm Kurz will be divided into three main sections; before the war, during the war, and after the war. Antebellum, my only information on Wilhelm is his immigration record, so that will be the main focus of the section. During the war is the period that I have the most content on Wilhelm for, so this will be the bulk of my website. Tentatively, it is divided into “unit movement,” and “injuriess sustained.” The content will be text, still images of the Google Map Engine map I created (as well as a link to the actual  interactive map) , and a few of the records that verify Wilhelm reported injuries from the second Battle of Bull Run. In the after the war section, the exhibit will focus on his pension records and marriage to Philippine, because that is the only information I have on Kurz post-1963. Ensuring that the site flows well will be a challenge because this is a narrative with a clear timeline and order, but I believe it will be possible, especially since one can deduce that if they begin with his “military career,” there are obviously events in his life that occurred before that; in other words, Kurz’s military service makes it easy to tell in story un-chronologically.

Voyer mining referenced in this post: http://voyant-tools.org/tool/Cirrus/?corpus=1397698027170.9588&query=&stopList=stop.en.taporware.txt&docIndex=0&docId=d1397620924900.b1f86013-5db2-1c47-b75c-9bf1ab5be0c2

This week, we focused on the text that is available online on the internet. Because there is such a wealth of Civil War documents available to us, it is beneficial to use word-mining to find the frequencies of significant words in the hundreds of thousands of words per historic document. I used Voyant to word-mine the following document, highlighted in blue, from Cornell Library’s catalogue. After omitting the display of stop words, the most common words were quite applicable to the war; general, army, cavalry, va, etc. When I searched the document for the frequency of words like “death,” “disease,” “casualty/ies,” and “injured,” their frequency count was much lower than I expected. “Death” appeared only 26 times in the 369,000+ word document, and casualty only appeared one time.  This was surprising since I expected a document entitled “report” to include a count of casualties from battles.

In terms of the relation between these documents and my own soldier, Wilhelm Kurz. I searched for any indication of his 29th NY Infantry being mentioned and it never was.  Through numerous keyword searches, I have been unable to relate these documents to my soldier. I am worried, now, about how I will incorporate the text-mining element, wether through Voyant on Google NGram, into my final Omeka exhibit. My plan is to continue mining this document and search for locations that my soldier was in during that time frame, hopefully finding reports on the activities in the area at that time. This, at the very least, will link my soldier’s records to those from the Cornell Library. I am interested

• Series I – Volume XIX – in Two Parts Chapter XXXI – Operations in Northern Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. Sep 3-Nov 14, 1862.
•           Part II – Reports, September 20-November 14; Correspondence, etc., Sept 3-Nov. 14

This week, we focused on the physical locations of our soldiers during their lives. As a different way to observe and analyze our soldiers, we each used Google Maps Engine to map the locations where our documents indicate our soldiers were. Within the map of Wilhelm Kurz’s locations, I created two layers, one for his civilian life and one for his military life. The civilian life layer included pins in his birth place, death place, lifelong US residence, state of naturalization, and where he was married. His military life map is essentially a map of the 29th infantry’s movement through the Civil War from 1861-1863. The military map had many more location and was therefore more time consuming. I decided to plot all of the locations where Kurz’s unit was reportedly, even if his presence was “not stated.” To differentiate between where he was confirmed to be present and where it was unknown, I color-coded the pins.

The most time consuming part of this mapping was drawing lines between each location to indicate movement. Although it was challenging, it helped me make sense of some of the dates of his military movements. For instance, I found gaps of around 15 days between muster rolls at different locations to be odd until I realized that these large gaps in time occurred when the unit moved a significant distance. Seeing the movement mapped out visually allows me to comprehend the information much more deeply. I hope to add the the map of his civilian life by inputting the locations of where men provided affidavits for Wilhelm Kurz so I can see where most of his lifelong acquaintances were acquired. This mapping is without a doubt the most interesting technological component of the project thus far for me, because it helps solidify Kurz’s physical existence in my mind.

This week in class, we were introduced to Daytum, a website where one can log data. This site will be helpful in organizing the wealth of information that I have compiled on my Civil War soldier, Wilhelm Kurz. Daytum is a streamlined website, so there are few choices to make about how you input and display the data. In theory this is good because it makes it simple to use, but the limited number of ways that one can enter data is are not all applicable to a wide variety of types of data one may be recording. For instance, the only way to measure the amount of some data is in numbers (i.e. 1.1, 2, etc.) with no unit of measurement or adjustment for scales. Also, I found the tagging and display options to be tedious at times, for when I made some posts it would look like the post didn’t go through because I had to change my viewing settings to see it.

The assignment for this week is to keep track of our daily activities, namely our food and beverage intake, using Daytum from Thursday to Sunday. I have kept up with this, but to be honest I don’t find the website helpful. I organize my intake posts by day, but I feel as if there are tens or possible hundreds of websites and programs (Excel, for example) that are more user-friendly and customizable than Daytum for logging, graphing, and organizing data sets. It will be interesting to use the website in more direct relation to my soldier, but I have a feeling that it will prove to be more of a hindrance than a help in my work to better understand the life of Wilhelm Kurz. Daytum may work well for some people, but I cannot find a way to make use of this site well.

This week, we were introduced to Omeka.net during class. To share my soldier’s stories, I will upload the documents provided to us by the Blenheim House on Wilhelm Kurz. The process of uploading each individual document is simple, but becomes tedious because of the metadata one must record for each document uploaded. Metadata is, essentially, data about data; it provides a viewer of a data set information on how the data is formatted, how it was collected, who the author was, the date of creation, etcetera. Metadata seems to provide context for the documents we share, that way viewers of our websites can fully understand the data being presented.

For the two additional documents to be uploaded for homework, I chose to upload Wilhelm Kurz’s marriage certificate and then his death certificate. The metadata I provided for each “item,” as Omeka calls the uploads, included author, source, publisher, rights, title, subject, identifier, date, and language. The source, publisher, and rights for all of the documents were, the National Archives, Blenheim House, and http://www.archives.gov/faqs/index.html#copyright, respectively. The author of Wilhelm’s pension records and his marriage certificate are Wilhelm himself, and I indicated the coroner as the author of his death certificate. The “language” was the file type, which is JPEG for all the images I will be  uploading to the website. One important thing that I learned about metadata was the importance of consistency. In order for the metadata to prove useful and searchable, the way in which I type and identify things . For instance, if the source is the National Archives, I need to type it as “National Archives” for each document, not a combination of “the National Archives,” “national archives,” “National Archives Washington, D.C.,” etcetera.

Metadata is useful and simple to input, but may prove infuriating when attempting to upload over 30 documents to a website, each requiring a slew of individual metadata information inputs!

This week, we spent time discussing the significance of secondary sources, as well as the pros and cons of digital storage. We also discussed online security, passwords, and personal archiving.  Personally, the class session opened my eyes to how much more careful I need to be about archiving the important information on my computer. The most “archiving” I’ve done is synced photos from my phone and saved them onto my laptop’s hard drive. I had no idea that if something happens to my laptop, there is essentially no way for me to ever access those photos or documents again. In the very near future, I plan on saving a bulk of my files onto some kind of “cloud” program like Professor Robertson mentioned. This way, if something happens to my laptop the information, like photos and old essays and medical records, will still be accessible and usable.

In terms of security and passwords, I definitely need to be more cautious. I have a habit of reusing the same two passwords tirelessly. Without going into too much detail here, I can say that I am also guilty of attempting to make my passwords more “foolproof” with capital letters and numbers, but apparently hacking software has caught up to these commonplace tricks, so I need to become more creative. On the bright side, my passwords do not include personal information or guessable dates anywhere. In terms of other security, I use a Mac and update it at least one every two weeks (it asks me to much more often), but do not have any extra anti-virus software running on the laptop. I do, though, disable cookies in all my internet software to ensure my computer won’t get a virus through that avenue. Overall, I need to work on making major improvements in my digital security.

For week six, I was unable to attend class. I did all of the week six readings, as well as attempted to consider each of the questions listed on the class website. Since I missed class discussion, I cannot adequately comment on that here. I can, though discuss the use of Zotero and the two secondary sources I discovered there that relate to Galthaar’s article. “Touched with Fire: The Uncommon Soldiers of the Civil War.”

One of the questions for class addressed the importance of secondary sources in constructing the life of our soldiers. The secondary literature that exists on the Civil War is important because it can give a more complete picture of a soldier’s life and can provide more generalized information that extremely focused primary documents, like medical reports and pension affidavits, do not report.

One secondary source I have now saved on Zotero is an article entitled “Soldiers of the Cross: Confederate Soldier Christians and the Impact of the War on Their Faith.” My soldier, Wilhelm Kurz, was married in a Christian church and therefore was most likely impacted spiritually by the war. This article gives me an idea of what internal struggles Kurz may have experienced due to his time served in the Confederate Army. If I had only relied on the primary sources from the Blenheim house, all I would know is the name of the church where he was married. The second document I found was from the same EBSCO database and was entitled “‘The Money Matters’ of a Confederate Soldier.” It discussed general pension laws and regulations, the pay of soldiers during the Civil War, both Confederate and Union, and how soldiers went about supporting their families during the war years and after the war. This article provided me with more of a context for Kurz’s numerous pension documents.

This week in class, we reviewed primary sources and copyright laws in relation to our soldier graffiti project. While searching for primary sources with information on the 29th Infantry, I stumbled upon a record of the infantry’s participation in battles and the corresponding casualties from the unit. The document fits under the “Official Records” from the war years category from the Valley of the Shadow database we looked at in class. The document is a kind of spread sheet, outlining each battle the infantry took part in, what date they were there, and how many men were wounded/dead/missing, separated into officers and enlisted men.  This information can help pinpoint what our individual soldiers were experienced at specific times during the war, helping us better convey their Civil War experience.

The website was created by the New York State Division of Military  and Naval Affairs for the purpose of sharing public information with online browsers interested in the civil war.  The Source is in the public domain because it is an official government record, and sources from the United States Government are not covered by copyright laws.

Another facet of research we covered was the existence of OCR, optical character recognition, which converts image files into searchable text document. This is extremely helpful in research because it makes previously painful documents searchable, making finding information infinitely more simple. Here is a JPEG file from my soldier’s records that I converted using Google’s OCR program. The mistakes were minimal, so in this case it seems to be worth the error percentage over manually typing the document. I can see these small errors adding up and creating issues, though, in longer documents that have a greater need to be precise.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xiV9pSk8J-k22ZRRCc5WKv5R11A2LTbQKaYaiRUit8c/edit

Primary source referenced in this post: http://dmna.ny.gov/historic/reghist/civil/infantry/29thInf/29thInfTable.htm