Digital Studies Projects at The W

Here is a showcase of projects completed by MUW students. All of these projects used either digital tools or methods to explore a question and share the results of that inquiry with an online audience. These projects are all shared with permission from the students.

Students enrolled in LIB 401: Digital Studies Practicum

Spring 2022

Students enrolled in LIB 201: Introduction to Digital Research

Spring 2023 – Elizabeth Panter and Sam Garrie focused on the Smith family children – Bernice, Christine, Martha, and Sam (aka “Sonny Boy”) – during the years prior to and during World War II. See their project, “Live, Laugh, Love with the Smiths: A Mississippi Family during WWII.“

Fall 2022 – Amanda Shinn examined the Smith Papers Collection through the lens of letters as the medium for correspondence. See her project, “Life through Letters.”

Fall 2021 – LIB 201 and HO 303 students collaborated on a project showcasing materials from the Smith Papers Collection with additional mini-projects they completed and compiled throughout the semester. Crystal Adams, Alyssa Cox, Tyler Dean, Johanna Ericson, and Olivia Sagely were the course project team for “A Day in the Life of the Smiths.”

Spring 2021 – All projects in the Spring 2021 course focused on the Smith Papers Collection, a collection of letters and diaries housed online in AthenaCommons and in the Beulah Culbertson Archives and Special Collections.

  • Helen Gao, Network Analysis of Smith Papers, 1929-1939. This network analysis uses Palladio to show the relationships among letter writers in the collection and the people they mention in their letters.
  • Emma Potter, Omeka Exhibit on letters related to political themes in the collection, specifically Roosevelt’s New Deal programs (e.g. FERA and TVA), prohibition, and politicians between 1929-1939.

Fall 2019 – projects from Fall 2019 used different collections within the Gale Primary Sources collections, and used the tools in the Digital Scholar Lab to investigate the materials within these collections.

  • Beckie Fuller, “Sentiment Analysis of Letters using the AFINN Lexicon Score.” About the project: Using content from three letter collections, Beckie used the Sentiment Analysis Tool from the Digital Scholar Lab (DSL) to see if she could track the positive and negative emotions conveyed in letters from women missionaries to their family members and close friends.
  • Elli Wilkinson, “Analyzing the Life and Activism of Fanie Lou Hamer.” About the project: Using the Tulane Amistad Research Center’s collection, “Fannie Lou Hamer: Papers of a Civil Rights Activist, Political Activist, and Woman,” Elli created a wordcloud of a selection of documents about Hamer’s life, and an accompanying timeline with select documents from that collection.

Other student projects: