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.