Sources

Our team decided to use Harvey E. Stork’s photography collection because it included a plethora of images that depicted student activities from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. From these images, we learned more about what life was like outside of the classroom just a century and a bit ago. However, many of the traditions, such as freshman hazing and May Fete, have been lost to time. In addition with these images, we decided to search for other primary sources from the Archives that contextualized the student activities. Thus, our other source that we utilized for this project was old issues of The Carletonian. These newspaper articles definitely helped our team understand the history surrounding past student activities.

Processes

Gathering Data

Firstly, we created a spreadsheet with all the metadata from the archives articles. We included information such as the image’s title, campus location, creator, description, year taken, link to the original archives article, and link to the IIIF version of the image. All three of us inputted information for a total of 150 images. 

Cleaning Data

Then, we cleaned the data by deleting rows that did not have a campus location or year taken, and we assigned latitudes and longitudes for each row depending on its campus location. We wanted to put this data into a StoryMap, which is an extension of ArcGIS. However, at first, we had issues generating the StoryMap, but our professor, Austin Mason, showed us that we needed to trim any trailing space in our latitude and longitude columns.

Processing Data

After cleaning the data, creating the StoryMap was a success! However, when we imported the data into ArcGIS, all of the points were aggregated in one location. Thankfully, Mya took the time to individually move all the dots so that users could better see and analyze the general locations of the different student activities.

We also wanted to find a way to show the progression of student activities across time. We decided that there were four main categories that emerged from our data – Hazing, Homecoming, May Fete, and School Spirit. We decided to create separate datasets for the images that fell into each category and create timelines using TimelineJS from those dataset

In order to contextualize the timelines, we had a meeting with Tom Lamb who works with the Carleton College Archives. With his help, he pointed us in the direction of other digital collections such as The Voice (the alumni magazine), The Algol Yearbooks, and The Carletonian. We ultimately ended up using The Carletonian, as we found that it was the easiest way to get background information about various Carleton traditions of the past.

Presentation

Finally, we decided to present our interactive visualizations and contextual blurbs onto a WordPress site. We created separate pages for each student activity category to keep everything organized. Our team formatted the website so that navigation through the website was intuitive and understandable.

Additionally, our team presented to our Hacking the Humanities class about our overall process, which you can view below.