Introduction

Our team (Mya Pieper, Sylvie Marie Olson, and Trixie Aguas) created this project as part of our final for the Hacking the Humanities course taught by Austin Mason at Carleton College. When we were first presented with the project, we knew we wanted to delve deeper into student life at Carleton from the past. We were first intrigued by the topic of past student activities when one of our class assignments was to AI colorize a picture from Carleton’s digital archives. After this assignment, we learned about web mapping and became curious about exploring the spatial relationships between student activities and different campus locations. Our shared interests in the archives as well as web mapping led to the creation of this project! 

From completing this project, our team has learned that although some traditions have come and gone, the students of the present and the students of the past all have one thing in common: We are all Carls!

This project explores Carleton student life during the late 1800s to the early 1900s. We geographically mapped photographs from Carleton College’s Archives to create a more user friendly platform to explore the data. If you want to access the full database, visit Carleton Digital Collections.

To read through our discussion about our sources, processing, and presentation choices; look at our bibliography; analyze our documentation; and/or check out a map that compares student life from the past to now, click on a category.

Student Activities StoryMap

To learn where different events took place, explore the interactive map below!

Category Timelines

We further organized the photographs into subsections based on their content, allowing the user to explore timelines and outside sources to better understand the Carleton culture.

To learn more about a specific cultural aspect of student life, click on a category.