The time has come for me to reckon with EAD. EAD, or Encoded Archival Description, has been in my life for a couple of years now. During grad school, I did a lot of experimenting with converting the hierarchical, tag-based XML data of EAD into tabular data. One of the outputs of this was a paper in which I visualized …

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When was the last time you went through your 2020 camera roll? For me, it was last week, when I was putting together my presentation for the Lancaster University History Department postgraduate conference. This was an opportunity for all of us current MA students to present the current state of our dissertation …

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“Wow, that book was great!” said Grace as she wrapped up another installment in the Nancy Drew Files series. “Nancy’s life is so exciting, but it seems like she’s always getting herself into trouble.” Grace didn’t remember there being this much mortal peril in the original Nancy Drew Mystery Stories! If you can’t …

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I don't generally consider myself to be stubborn. I am very open to trying new things -- in fact, I love trying new things! I have no problem going off on my own to see a new place, I'll ask questions even if it feels like I should already know the answer, I'm very open to being taught or corrected. Figure 1: Just last …

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Did summer totally fly by for anybody else? Today, I head off on my new adventure -- if I were Nancy Drew, I'd give it a snappy title, but The Case of the American Grad Student in North West England just doesn't hold much allure. Anyhow, I'm heading to Lancaster University to begin my MA in Digital Humanities, and I'm …

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After a year of unboxing, researching, cataloging, photographing, rehousing, and, yes, writing, my thesis project is complete. I'm extremely proud of my end products: the physical and digital forms of the Bates College Clothing Archive, accompanied by a written portion explaining the reasoning behind the choices I made …

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I’ve been an explorer the past few weeks. As I begin working with my thesis collection, I am in a rather puzzling position: nobody actually knows what is in the collection. That’s the whole point of my thesis; the Bates College theater department owns boxes and boxes of historic dress, but there are no records or …

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This is a project I worked on in a course I just finished, called Archives, Data, and Analysis. It explores the early donations to the Maine State Seminary, the precursor institution to Bates College. Introduction When thinking about the financial history of Bates College, there is one name that immediately comes to …

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Time to venture into the Zooniverse! On Friday, I had the privilege of presenting my ongoing work with the Bates Museum of Art at our annual student research conference, the Mount David Summit. I was placed in the Research in STEM presentation session, which I found a bit funny. The two presentations before me were on …

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I presented my first webinar! I was so happy when the Rufus Porter Museum reached out to me last fall to ask if I'd be interested in presenting my summer project as part of the Museum's virtual lecture series! I was honored to have this opportunity to share this project with a bigger audience, and to have a reason to …

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