By Peyton Bradshaw, Old Dominion University ENGL 368 Intern and Mellon Grant Recipient
By Peyton Bradshaw, ENGL 368 Intern and Mellon Grant Recipient
As part of my work this spring as an ODU Special Collections and University Archives intern, I spent time exploring the Tidewater Collections section of our rare books. As I was perusing the shelves, I came across My Virginia Childhood: the years 1903-1914 by Louisa Venable Kyle. The idea behind the book intrigued me; I was also once a girl growing up in Virginia. How different were our lives, really?
I kept searching through the rare books and found many more like Louisa’s: journals and memoirs written by women throughout history, all from the same place I was standing in right then. I knew I wanted to read them and turn what I found into an exhibition, and when my supervisor suggested creating a digital exhibition using Omeka S, the idea for my project took shape: an exploration of women’s journals and memoirs from Tidewater, Virginia, called The Witnesses.
It took nearly a month—working in three-hour sessions every few days—to gather enough research for each book and build a foundation for the digital exhibition. I made notes of important quotes and topics in each one, then later used those notes and some outside sources to write essays of the people I was reading about and their lives. This wasn’t hard; I do close readings all of the time, and essays are time consuming, but never difficult. The hardest part of this project was putting together the digital exhibition.
Up until a few weeks ago, I had never heard of Omeka S, and I envy the version of me who was not seeing the administrative interface of the site in their sleep. Part of the challenge was that we are switching over from Omeka Classic, which only made the learning curve steeper for everyone involved. My supervisor and I, as well as the University Archivist and the Library Systems Administrator were all in varying levels of confusion, myself admittedly more than others.
One of the funnier things about my internship so far was figuring out image sizing on Omeka S. The setting for “maximum width” needed to be set, and I wasn’t sure what that was, so I entered the number five just to see what would happen. It turns out the setting refers to pixel width—so my image ended up smaller than my mouse cursor. It was a small moment, but one that made both my supervisor and me laugh.
One of the main challenges we faced involved incorporating the daily weather data I had pulled from Elizabeth Curtis Wallace’s journal—a detail I had never thought to record myself, but one I found fascinating. I created a spreadsheet to organize this information, and I wanted to turn it into an interactive feature on the site, something users could click through. Unfortunately, a calendar-style display wasn’t part of the available tools we were working with, so we pivoted to building that section in Canva instead which allowed for more flexibility in designing and presenting the information visually. That flexibility mattered because Omeka S itself has fairly limited aesthetic customization. We learned this firsthand when we tried to center image captions beneath photographs in the exhibit pages. By default, the captions in Omeka S were left-aligned and did not automatically adjust when we changed image placement, so even when we attempted to manually modify the layout through the interface, the captions remained off-center. Our Library Systems Administrator eventually had to apply custom CSS code to force the captions to align properly beneath the images, overriding the platform’s default styling.
Aside from the technology mishaps, however, this whole project has been very rewarding. It might be morbid, but I wonder when the last time someone thought about these women was, especially those who lived centuries ago. When was the last time someone devoted their time and energy to their stories, and really paid attention to what they wrote? I don’t agree with everything these women stood for, and I definitely can’t relate to most aspects of their lives. However, I can acknowledge the fact that all of these women were smart, determined, and strong in ways that I have great respect for.
Links and Additional Information:
View the Digital Exhibition: https://exhibits.lib.odu.edu/omeka-s/s/the_witnesses/page/introduction.
Books Featured In The Witnesses Digital Exhibition:
- Child of Glencoe: Civil War Journal of Katie Darling Wallace by Katie Darling Wallace: Call Number: Spec Coll E 605 .W255 1983
- Glencoe Diary: The war-time journal of Elizabeth Curtis Wallace by Elizabeth Curtis Wallace: Call Number: Spec Coll F 232 .N8 W28 1968
- My 15 Years in France by Bertha Fanning Taylor: Call Number: Spec Coll ND 237 .T39 A3 1968
- My Virginia Childhood: the years 1903-1914 by Louisa Venable Kyle: Call Number: Special Coll. F 234 .N8 K9
- The River Me by Marty Glenn Taylor: Call Number: Special Coll F 234 .M76 T39 2010
