The Early Seattle Theatre History Project (ESTHP) is a digital history project launching its website later this year. The website’s mission is to help enrich the research of scholars, students, and subject enthusiasts. The ESTHP team hopes to do this by supplying the researcher with access to a plethora of primary resources. However, while the team began to familiarize themselves with the materials, the necessity of contextualizing some aspects of the theatre and theatre history arose. For my project I created a prototype digital exhibit for ESTHP focused on Seattle theatre during World War I. The digital exhibits contain essays and digital objects that focus on explaining certain themes brought up by the collection materials. The exhibits hope to illuminate subjects that might be missed by viewing the collection materials on their own. When the website launches other exhibits will be available to help guide researchers in understanding the collection.

Many colleges and academic programs undergo recurring accreditation. In this process, documents and information about the college or program must be collected from all of the units within the college, collocated, and shared with the accreditation committee in a timely manner. This presents several challenges. Many of the documents involved contain confidential material. In addition, collecting the documentation can be very time-consuming in a large college. Third, collocating documents in a place where many staff people have access can involve the risk of accidental deletions or faulty editing. My project involved building a SharePoint site to facilitate the AACSB accreditation process for the College of Business at University of Wyoming. SharePoint is an ideal tool for accreditation because it is secure, provides version control for recovery of lost or damaged items, and offers robust permissions control. For these reasons, this project has a broad application to other accredited institutions.

My capstone focused on the preservation, arrangement, and description of photographs made by Dolores Varela Phillips, documenting the 1970 conflict between two tribes, Nisqually and Puyallup, and Washington state law enforcement. Results include EAD finding aid and digital access to the collection. These images shed light on a critical period of national and local civil-rights history. Phillips’ collection is comprised of negatives she hid in her purse lining to prevent confiscation by the police. The photographs capture an important event that was the catalyst to a revision in Washington state  laws. Negative collections are distinctive and a time-consuming variation from standard processing. This often hinders valuable materials from reaching the public; a mounting information problem archives face. Raising awareness about the significance of this rare collection is paramount as 2014 marked the 40th anniversary of the new law passing. Already, these images have received user-requests for a Smithsonian exhibit. 

The United States Forest Service has a long history of caring for the land and serving people. A significant part of that history are the foresters themselves: their memories, experiences, and stories. Every National Forest has a Heritage Program and for decades, volunteers and foresters have been collecting oral histories from retirees, volunteers, and their families. Some interviews were written down, others recorded in a variety of formats. The challenge: How to approach the preparation of these materials for storage and public access at the National Museum of Forest Service History. We worked with the Gifford Pinchot National Forest and the Museum to assess current resources and develop a sustainable process for digitization, storage, and public access. In addition to the immediate needs of the collection, we also wrote internship and volunteer handbooks and developed the business case to help sustain ongoing work at both the local and Museum levels.

The Paul and Mildred Brownell Photograph Collection is a large unprocessed collection composed of photos, film, and ephemera from the mid-twentieth century of the Brownells’ experiences as UW Alumni, Seattle Public School teachers, and their travels in America and abroad. These items span almost 5 decades and are a valuable experience of living in the Pacific Northwest as UW alumni. The collection has been organized into specific series with regards to intellectual order which facilitates curatorial use of the collection and some public access for general research, which is imperative to keeping UW history alive. Special attention has been paid to the context in which the items were created and in preserving these items. A preliminary Encoded Archival Description (EAD) finding aid has been created to enrich Special Collection’s growing EAD database and will allow others to share in Paul’s experiences.

Local courts noticed an increase in ‘pro se’ or self-represented litigation. In order to help better prepare these litigants, King County Superior Court judges and administration have commissioned a study to design the delivery of web-based information to better suit these users. Detailed analysis was conducted on the current website through the review of content inventories and sitemaps. Surveys of user behavior and observation were used to streamline assistance for domestic violence and consolidate Spanish language resources to facilitate ESL needs. In person testing was conducted with potential jurors to determine public perception and usability when facing tasks involving eviction, divorce, and juvenile justice. All data was compiled into a proposal for redesign, and presented to King County Superior Court as a set of recommendations for website improvement to better serve the needs of the pro se population.

ChronoZoom, an online, digital media exploration tool provides a unique approach to digital aggregation; however, it also presents problems in how to effectively find, explore, and collocate information in a meaningful manner. Working with the archives at CERN (the European Organization for Particle Research) I created a domain analysis, resource retrieval, and organization system that created just such a timeline of the history of particle physics. It is an efficient user-centric system that explores digital documents, their influences, and interconnections in innovative ways. The process has demonstrated applications for digital archival management systems, semantic technologies, teaching methodology, academic publishing, and knowledge management.

Visualizing the enormous timescales associated with cosmic events is problematic, especially when juxtaposed with the relatively short amount of time humanity has existed. Instructors of Big History, an interdisciplinary approach to understanding how the forces that shaped the universe relate to and drive modern events, are looking for ways to overcome this challenge. ChronoZoom, an online, open-source technology, seeks to address the issues associated with viewing massive timescales by allowing the creation of infinitely zoomable timelines. With sponsorship from Microsoft Research Connections, we created content within ChronoZoom describing events, data and discoveries relating to the history of energy and climate. This content is intended for use by the Big History class at Lakeside Upper School. Our project allows students to interact with Big History content in a fun, intuitive and informative way. Helping them to appreciate human history in the context of the larger events that shaped our universe.

The eXtensible Business Reporting Language is the new standard for business reporting and all companies who file their information with the government must comply. We have created an application which serves as a layer of abstraction between XBRL filings and BlackRock employees who want to monitor their competitors, which originally required tedious and time consuming scanning through individual PDF documents for comparison. We have gathered XBRL filings from BlackRock’s competitors and aggregated them on a website. Our tool enables BlackRock employees to conduct detailed evaluations regarding how the fees of a BlackRock fund compare to a competitor such that they may make informed decisions to adjust their business strategy accordingly.