Our group’s project seeks to bring ArcGIS technology to bear to help tell the stories of early Carleton students. We will produce a map of the old campus that traces the social networks and nexuses of the turn-of-the-century students whose stories are recorded as oral histories in the college archives. Each location will, we propose, present a window of images, text, and (animated) audio files detailing, in their own words, the things our peers did for fun a hundred years ago.

Methodology:

• Our core data set is the collection of early oral histories collected by Carleton faculty and staff in the early 1970s. Most of these are available as .mp3 files on the college’s digital archives, and some of them have transcriptions. (We will transcribe the others ourselves.) The exact data–that is, where everyone went to hang out, what the social atmosphere was like on campus, and so on–is undetermined until we work through all the extant records.
  • Outside of the interviews themselves, we will be drawing on old issues of the Carletonian, old Algols, and a selection of period photographs, all of which are available digitally through the archives. We will also work with the archives staff–and visit ourselves–to go through non-digitized materials.
• Gathering and storage is pretty easy for us. We can save files on our hard drives or through cloudsaving platforms.
• Our analysis will be highly qualitative: we will listen to interviews, read transcripts, and work through period campus publications to develop a corpus of the locations and activities relevant to the Carleton social experience 100 years ago–and we will marry these locations and activities to individual, personal stories. Our interest is more in presenting stories than in interrogating them with an eye toward extracting explicit historical meaning.
• Our final product will be an arcgis map that has information, pictures, and audio in the pop-ups. The audio is the main feature, with pictures as supplements.

Timeline:

• Fifth week/midterm break:
  • Listen to oral histories. Transcribe untranscribed interviews.
  • Begin searching Carletonian and Algol archives for stories and locations relevant to campus social life.
  • Define project scope. What, exactly, are people saying in the oral histories? How much material do we have to work with?
• End of sixth week:
  • Finalize scope and plan.
  • Organize data in centrally-accessible location.
  • Delegate tasks.
  • Continue research.
  • Experiment with web tools/java libraries.
• Seventh week:
  • Start building draft of release version.
• Eighth week:
  • Finalize.
• Ninth week:
  • Edit, revise, fix.
  • Due.
• Tenth week:
  • Present.