As summer nears, the Theodore Roosevelt Center is readying for our next class of summer interns. In this week’s blog post, we’re revisiting some of the work past interns did during their time with us.
While the majority of work our graduate interns do is cataloging Roosevelt-related archival material to add to our digital library, we want to make sure that the skills we are teaching are cutting-edge and sought after in the current job market, beyond the traditional competencies they will gain in cataloging and metadata best practices. Whether our interns are coming to us from programs in History, Library Science, Archives Management, Museum Studies, or other fields, skills in the digital humanities are particularly sought after by hiring institutions.
If you are unfamiliar with the term, the digital humanities are just that, using digital methods and tools to better understand the humanities. This can include any number of things, including textual analysis, relational databases, interactive maps and timelines, and more. Often this scholarship is collaborative and transdisciplinary. For institutions with archival holdings, the digital humanities offer a completely different mode for users to interact with material and make connections between different items in a collection. As modern learners engage with information differently, "DH" is increasingly used in schools and museums to reach younger audiences. For a comprehensive collection like ours at the Theodore Roosevelt Digital Library, the opportunities for potential DH projects are nearly endless.
For the past few years, our interns have been tasked with creating a DH project on the topic of their choosing. I started working at the TRC as an intern myself a few years ago. I had previously worked in the digital humanities and was excited for the opportunity to highlight an aspect of Roosevelt’s life through digital methods. Using a free, simple tool called Timeline JS, I created a virtual bookshelf timeline of some of the books Theodore Roosevelt read during his first term as president. I pieced together his reading schedule using letters in our collection in which Roosevelt talked about what he was reading, and also link to digital scans of the historic books available on Archive.org.
Another current TRC employee, Christa Daugherty, also got her start as an intern here, and created a football related timeline using another tool, TikiToki, called, “Theodore Roosevelt Saves Football.” She looked at Roosevelt’s involvement with the sport of football during what she calls, “the endangered years” when current safety regulations and rules had not yet been solidified. Read her blog post, or enter her timeline below.
Former intern Chloe Elder took a different approach. Impressed by the sheer volume of letters Roosevelt wrote during his busiest times, and his nonstop schedule of meetings and events, she decided to use a program called Tableau to create a detailed digital desk calendar for the week of February 8-14, 1903. Her project allows users to visually track his appointments, events, time off (Sundays), and incoming and outgoing letters that week. Read her blog on the project here.
Jessica Kincaid took a similar approach to Elder, creating a sample relational database gallery of some of the people Roosevelt corresponded with in 1910-1911. Read her blog post about how she narrowed down a potentially large set of data on the people Roosevelt corresponded with, to make it manageable for a short term side project during their internship. Many of our interns start with a big idea and quickly realize that the volume of material related to that topic makes it unmanageable for a single person. Topics like hunting, books, his family, Rough Riders, or bird watching would each produce hundreds if not thousands of results. Finding their niche or focusing on a specific short time period helps interns create projects that are also engaging to the public, and truly allows the archival material to shine.
The opportunity to examine Roosevelt’s life spatially presents a number of interesting opportunities, whether childhood vacations to Europe or Egypt, expeditions and hunting trips, or campaign speech locations. While there are a number of different programs that allow for the mapping of data, many of our interns have chosen to use a free tool called StoryMapJS, from the same creator as TimelineJS, which I used for the Well Read President. Doing nothing more than entering dates, locations, and text into a Google Docs spreadsheet, and then copying a link to the spreadsheet into a program, the tool then creates a beautiful interactive map using your data. Creators can customize the type of map or timeline, make simple changes to layout and other changes at the click of a button. Those feeling more adventurous can add html to the spreadsheet to change color, font, or other stylistic elements.
Former intern Jennifer Hayner used StoryMapJS to digitally track Roosevelt’s African expedition, highlighting postcards, photographs and letters from the Theodore Roosevelt Digital Library and our partners, as well as Roosevelt’s own account of the trip.
One of last year’s interns, Matt Amyx, noticed patterns in speeches while cataloging, and decided to use StoryMapJS to visually examine how Roosevelt in a sense “practiced” his speeches, making changes while travelling from town to town. See Roosevelt’s campaign travel route and read the speeches from our digital library by clicking his digital exhibit "Whistle Stop Roosevelt" below, or read his blog here.
For themes that are not temporally or spatially based, there are still many of other tools available to highlight visual resources. Tracee Haupt connected with the wide variety of political cartoons in our collection, and used a tool called Sutori to look at his career through the scope of the cartoons. Still in timeline form, which Haupt splits into three eras from Roosevelt’s life, this particular tool has a different look than TimelineJS, and appears as more of a visual gallery, which highlights these Puck cartoons perfectly.
With new tools and programs available every month it seems, and countless possible topics within Roosevelt’s life to examine, we are excited to see what digital humanities projects this year’s incoming interns choose to create!
