Future Projects

The Portable Historian Initiative

The Portable Historian initiative at the College of Charleston will create an open source framework for the creation of portable digital scholarship applications including tablet-optimized web content, eBook/PDF creation and QR code generation. This framework will serve as a historian's digital toolkit. This toolkit will allow for the creation of highly accessible, dynamic applications from scholarly materials without the need for any technical knowledge normally required for online scholarship. The framework we will build will utilize well established, open source software as well as in house authored Python scripts and standardized web forms to automate the proposed workflow. For the purposes of this project, the Portable Historian will use the newly redesigned After Slavery website and its associated primary document digital repository as a root source for content and will create several digital scholarship applications from this data.

South Carolinians at Home & Abroad

South Carolinians at Home and Abroad (SCAH&A) will digitize and make dynamically digital the travel diaries of South Carolinians from the 18th to 20th centuries. Travel journals and diaries offer a unique view of cultural production, scientific inquiry, political change, and social construction. Though many travel diaries are available from commercial publishers, the majorities of these manuscripts languish in archives or, rarely, are digitized and housed in static electronic repositories and available only for passive consumption. South Carolinians At Home & Abroad seeks to reinvigorate the genre by creating dynamic open source data visualizations based on digitized primary content and providing these interactive tools, the data files they are sourced from, and electronic versions of the diaries to the public through a well-curated web portal dedicated specifically to the project.

The web applications created for the South Carolinians At Home & Abroad project will employ faceted browsing and will be generated through the use of VisualEyes software, which will create dramatic web-accessible visualizations, and through the use of XML and Simile Exhibit, an open source software application that creates mobile and tablet friendly visualizations. Different points on the visualizations will link out to relative primary sources housed in digital libraries across the state. All of the travel manuscripts will be marked up using TEI encoding, allowing for the generation of eBook content.

The end result of the project will be a public web portal where the user can engage with customized web applications that create visualizations of the manuscript data, download electronic versions of the travel diaries, access source code and files used for the web applications, and follow tutorials, for both the amateur and professional user alike, on how to create similar visualizations from their own materials.

Charleston in 1883

Charleston in 1883 is an augmented reality project that employs the use of Layar and the Layar platform to build an augmented reality browser application for the downtown Charleston, SC area. This augmented reality "layer" will highlight the architecture of Charleston from the late 19th century and will provide historical images, scholarly content and links to relevant primary documents housed in digital libraries across the state. This project will be freely accesible to anyone with a mobile device and the free Layar app.

Reverend Alexander Glennie Meteorological Observations, 1834-1880

Born in Surrey, England, Alexander Glennie (1804-1880) was brought to the United States to be a tutor for Francis Marion Weston's son, Plowden. After serving as a lay reader in All Saints Parish Glennie was made a deacon in 1832 and a priest the following year. Shortly thereafter, Glennie became rector of the Episcopal Church of All Saints Parish, South Carolina. Glennie's records include thermographic, hygrometric, and barometric readings, as well as the number of inches of rainfall each day. Charts note the wind direction and velocity and include observations about the weather (fine, cloudy, variable, loud thunder, and similar remarks). Selected observations were made three times during the day. This project will employ the use of Simile Timeplot to chart out all of the Reverend's observations over the 46 year period of his record keeping.

Carolina Lowcountry African American Records Project

The Carolina Lowcountry African American Records Project will establish a database to provide free and open access to tens of thousands of previously inaccessible records of the African American experience in and around Charleston, South Carolina from the colonial period until immediately after the Civil War. This project will bring together archivists, historians, and administrators from across South Carolina to pool their resources and expertise in the creation of a free online database that will give researchers instant and in-depth access to previously inaccessible materials in public archives, libraries and historical societies.

In the first phase of transcription, we will include the following series of public records, incorporating data from 1736-1875: slave mortgages (1736-1865) [South Carolina Department of Archives and History (SC DAH) - virtually unused and inaccessible to researchers], Charleston City Death Records (1819-1875) [Charleston County Public Library (CCPL) - containing over 20,000 names of slaves, free people of color, freedmen, etc.; a little known resource of great importance], over 50 years of tax lists on the little understood group of free people of color who lived in a shadow world between the races [SC DAH; CCPL; Charleston Library Society], and post-Civil War state censuses from 1869 and 1875 [SC DAH].

In The Storm So Long:
Race, Labor and Citizenship in Carolina 1670-1970

In recent years historic sites around the nation have expanded and enhanced their presentation of previously invisible histories of the African-American experience. Nonetheless, in Charleston in particular and the Carolina Lowcountry in general there is still a considerable "acknowledgment gap" in the general public understanding that fails to give due consideration to the contributions of South Carolina's "black majority" in shaping the physical and economic landscape of colonial and revolutionary America. Although there have been very significant developments in addressing some of this "acknowledgment gap" in recent years, local tour guides report that many visitors still harbor a "moonlight and magnolias" mindset of Charlestonian and Old South gentility. We believe that humanities scholars have a vital role in laying this history to rest, not in order to forget it, but in order to relate to it in fuller knowledge both of its historical facts and contemporary implications.

CLAW has already established city and state-wide collaborations capable of rendering more fully visible the African American contribution to the development of Charleston, the Lowcountry, South Carolina, and the nation. This project will initiate an unprecedented collaboration between local historical, cultural and tourism organizations and the humanities scholars based in and associated with the College of Charleston that will result in comprehensive digial exhibitions and augmented reality applications that will serve to draw attention to the African American contribution to Charleston and the Lowcountry. These digital projects will reach out through a range of media and forms, including a web based virtual tour site and a downloadable smartphone app, to a range of audiences from local school students to visitors and tourists.

The Holocaust Quilt: Commerating Charleston's Survivors

An adventure into Holocaust history by a group of eighth grade Social Studies and Language Arts students at Gregg Middle School turned into a commemorative quilt. The finished product, a 94 by 79 inch quilt, now hangs on display in the Charleston County Library at the Jerry and Anita Zucker Holocaust Memorial.The project served as an effective learning tool for the students to comprehend the incredible impact of the Holocaust, with an emphasis on understanding its connection with contemporary history. The students' research consisted of contacting the survivors and their families in order to collect artifacts such as photographs and other memorabilia, some unimaginably graphic and poignant, to sew into the quilt. The students also recorded interviews of four of survivors.

This project involves the construction of a website that links the quilt to the Holocaust Archives Project at the Addlestone Library of the College of Charleston. The intent is to aid students and others to access information about local Charleston area Holocaust survivors. Each quilt section will have a page dedicated to it that contains information such as additional photographs, videos, sound clips, transcribed interviews, or other documents pertaining to the survivor's experience.