Projects

The staff of DiSC have worked with undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff on their works of digital scholarship. The following is a curated list of projects that we have contributed to as a part of GMU Libraries’ Fenwick Fellows program, as well as other projects we have created.

Anthologies of African American Writing created by Alok Yadav

This project is an enumerative bibliography of anthologies of African American literature. Included in this site are photographs of the books’ front and back covers, indices of the anthologies, and publishers’ blurbs. The site includes over 500 items of poetry, fiction, drama, slave narratives, speeches, cultural criticisms, and more.

Debby Kermer and Wendy Mann worked on converting the data from a Word document to Excel, which was then imported into Omeka S using the CSV Import module. Wendy worked with Alok on creating a site in Omeka S. Alyssa Fahringer created accounts for Alok’s hired undergraduate researchers, and worked with them on adding and describing items.

 

Chile 1988 created by Jennifer Ashley

Chile 1988 examines the historic plebiscite vote that occurred in October of that year. The project is a digital archive of individual testimonies, television programming, and other audiovisual material that explores how Chileans from different political perspectives and areas of the country experienced October 5, 1988.

Wendy Mann, Ben Brands, and Stephanie Walters assisted Jen in finding resources to learn how to use the Omeka platform and they created a prototype site in Omeka S to show her how that content management system could work for her project. Ultimately Jen decided to have web designers build her site.

 

Appalachian Trail Histories created by Mills Kelly

This website is a collaboration between historian Mills Kelly and his undergraduate students. The site includes exhibits that dissect the history of the Appalachian Trail, including how it was built and the role of the federal government in the creation of the Trail.  The site also contains collections of over 500 objects related to the Trail, including photographs, maps, texts, and other sources.

Joy Suh assisted Mills by locating historic maps that are now a part of the site.

 

Lord Fairfax Community College Herbarium (LFCC) Specimen Collection and Accession Records created by Andrea Weeks 

This project was created to facilitate research using the Lord Fairfax Community College Herbarium. The site contains images of Professor Robert Simpson’s notebook pages, which include descriptions of herbarium specimen, label metadata, and high-resolution images.

Wendy Mann and Alyssa Fahringer assisted Andrea by consulting with the digitization company on metadata creation. Alyssa created and configured the Omeka S installation, established a workflow for importing the digitized notebook pages and metadata into Omeka S, and linked relevant specimens in Omeka S to their accompanying records in the SERNEC Symbiota database.  

 

East German Poster Database created by Samuel Clowes Huneke 

This project makes information about the East German poster collection acquired by George Mason University Library’s Special Collections Research Center available to researchers and students through a searchable database. 

Alyssa Fahringer worked with Sam to create and configure the project’s Omeka S installation. Joy Suh created an overlay of East and West Germany and East and West Berlin. 

 

GeoData@Mason:  Accessing Geospatial Data and Maps, created by Joy Suh and Elaine Ding

Geodata@Mason, launched in 2021 by the University Libraries, allows users to search, preview and download geospatial data hosted by the Mason repository. It also provides access to various datasets hosted by other academic institutions (Harvard, Tufts, MIT, UC-Berkeley, MassGIS, etc.) that are in the Open GeoPortal (OGP) framework.

Access GeoData@Mason:

  1. Go to https://gmutantt.gmu.edu/opengeoportal or click on “GeoData @Mason” on the Libraries’ A-Z Database list.
  2. In the search boxes (Where and What), enter your keywords (a search result for buildings in Fairfax is shown above).
  3. Use Advanced Search option to limit a search by institution name, data type, year, etc.
  4. Click “ User Guide” to see more instructions or for help on how to use this site.

If you have questions about using this site, contact the Digital Scholarship Center at datahelp@gmu.edu.

Note: This project has been replaced by GeoBlacklight. Please use the linked website for a more updated data repository.

 

For our web hosting policy, click here.

For our acknowledgements policy, click here.