Project sponsor:
Adrienne Serra
VT University Libraries Special Collections

Project description: The Special Collections in the VT University Libraries are home to thousands of rare books, diaries, letters, and other documents, some of them hundreds of years old. The writers of these old documents often refer to locations — towns, buildings, roads, houses — using names that may be entirely forgotten nowadays. Towns are replaced by cities, streets are renamed or changed, houses are torn town, etc. For example, the northern part of downtown Blacksburg was an African American community known as New Town for much of the first half of the 20th century. The location of New Town is known today, but many other locations are forgotten or hard to figure out. In other examples, like street names in Syria, changes can occur rapidly even in modern times. If we could discover where these old places were located, we could place them on modern maps and connect them to their modern names, creating an important missing link to the past. Often times the answers lie in piecing together clues from documents scattered around the web, in digitized museum collections, web pages of historical societies, old news articles, etc.

For this project, we will create a social platform to help crowdsource the locations of old place names, allowing any interested member of the public to contribute. Readers browsing the documents could identify confusing or unknown places that are presented to the crowd as challenges to solve. As a starting point, we may focus on a set of 19th century diaries held in the Special Collections which refer to many places, some modern and others obscure. This project has the potential to enable important historical discoveries, help people learn more about the places where they live, and change the way we interact with information online.

Project deliverables: A social platform that supports crowdsourcing of the modern-day locations of old place names.

Skills: Web development, social computing, mapping, visualization, history, digital libraries/archives

Sponsor:
Prof. Bob Leonard
VT School of Performing Arts

Project description: The Community Arts Network (CAN) was a website focused on community-based arts that was highly active from 1999 to 2010, until it had to close down due to lack of funds. All of the material on the site — thousands of news articles, essays, resources, forum discussions, etc. — was archived but is not easily searched or discovered. Prof. Bob Leonard, a VT professor and one of the original leaders of CAN, is looking to revive it by creating a new online social hub around the CAN archive, to be called VTArtWorks. The new hub will provide social tools to allow community-based arts enthusiasts to connect, share news and events, and have discussions. Beyond this, it will investigate new, valuable, unobtrusive ways to integrate these new activities into the existing CAN archive; for example, exploring ways to surface relevant documents from CAN to provide historical context to a conversation about an upcoming local performance. The key challenge here is develop a technology that enriches people’s social interactions around a common interest (e.g. community-based arts) by making connections to a large digital collection of potentially relevant supplementary materials.

Project deliverables: An online social hub oriented around community-based arts that is tightly integrated with materials from the CAN archive, fostering new conversations about current events and issues but also allowing discovery of and connections to older, relevant discussions and ideas.

Skills: Web development, digital libraries/archives, online communities, performing arts