For this capstone project I partnered with the Breman Museum, a Jewish heritage museum in Atlanta, GA, that is working to broaden their visibility by creating exhibits for the Atlanta roll out of the Google Arts and Culture project. I created two archival exhibits, focused on Jewish human rights advocates, described and uploaded a hundred artifacts to the online collection, and wrote an exhibit creation guide for staff and volunteers. This project brings to light Southern Jewish voices, humanizes the Jewish experience, and stimulates awareness of the collections held by the Breman Museum.

Cascade Bicycle Club handles 220 of King County Metro’s leased bike locker units and manages over 160 customers who rent these eco-friendly and affordable lockers. Cascade relied heavily on manual transactional processes to facilitate their bike locker leasing program. Our project, C-Bike, has successfully eased the process for this non-profit by creating a secure, data-integrable customer management database for locker administrators, and a clear, concise frontend locker rental webpage for customer inquiries. Through C-Bike, customers and administrators can have swift and more secure interactions, thus ensuring that these resources are quickly accessible to those who need them.

Refugees seeking refuge within the United States are denied entry due to government policies. Currently there are 1.4 million refugees who need resettlement and 37,000 people are forced to leave their homes everyday. The current atmosphere allows for misinformation about refugees to persist and denies refugees accurate representation and recognition. Our solution is a free web-based, open-access information source that educates users on issues and policies concerning refugees while providing them with a holistic range of information. Castaway enables people to identify the problem, gives them the tools to learn and encourages them to take action as advocates.

Documents reflect the historical contexts of their creation, and in doing so, become information objects. The serial novel is a type of information object, but due to re-editioning, reversioning, and digitization, most readers have lost touch with its historical significance. This analysis of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (1849–1850) uses the lens of information theory, in relation to literary criticism, historiography, and the history of the book, to grasp the serial novel as an information object, arguing that doing so requires intimate familiarity with the physical nature of the book in parts and the historical context of its production.

ChirpOut gives employees the ability to anonymously ‘chirp out’ serious issues that they are impacted by and to do so without fear of retribution–they are “canaries in a mine.” Companies can then view these aggregated claims as indicators in data visualizations and address them to create a higher standard for handling workplace concerns and improve the overall quality of the workplace.

Dr. Ann Huppert and Dr. Pamela O. Long are developing a history of the Church of the Gesù, the first Jesuit church built in Rome. I implemented data organization, performed data entry, and created a Table of Contents for the 16th-century account book. The TOC tracks peoples involved, monetary transactions, materials, and other details relevant to construction that occurred between 1568 and 1581, and establishes a relationship between folio photographs and corresponding pages of the transcription. My work complements the researchers’ architectural and historical expertise, giving them a clearer picture of the construction project and facilitating the capture of data.

Students who choose to learn programming through non-traditional routes face more obstacles introduced by predominantly remote learning. The CodeBreakers (coding bootcamp) website promises that coaches will be available 24/7—a large and demanding commitment. By developing a LeetCode Chrome extension and Slackbot for Codebreakers students, the addition of these tools will assist in offloading some of that weight, streamlining teaching processes, and lessening pain points. We can track impact by analyzing differences in CodeBreakers’ graduates' success rates prior to and after implementing our solution, as well as the feedback from surveys completed by students, usage rates, and performance in mock interviews.

For many years, local libraries have been unable to field requests for access to both of Coeur d’Alene’s high schools' yearbooks. The solution has always been to refer patrons to the high school administration. These requests put an added burden on school secretaries and, because of school hours and school holidays, there is limited access throughout the year. Library workers and school administrators will now be able to easily forward requests to cdarchives.org for access to LCHS’s yearbooks. Plans have been created for both the upload of CDHS’s yearbooks and a full marketing campaign.

From developing news stories to fake news, satirical posts to outright deceitful information, there is a lot of misinformation out there. For students and young adults, it can be difficult to understand how these revolve around your life and how they impact you. Alongside the Center for an Informed Public, we set out to build a supplemental educational platform that teaches high school and college-age students about how misinformation impacts their life in an interactive, reflective, and engaging way.

“Collections as data” (CaD) goes beyond traditional archival practices to analyze cultural heritage collections that support computationally-driven research. We analyzed George Mason University’s (GMU) Special Collections Resource Center’s (SCRC) procedures and metadata, drafted a report for the SCRC, and presented our findings. The team liaised between the SCRC and GMU’s Digital Scholarship Center (DiSC), a stakeholder in CaD initiatives and digital scholarship. This project modified SCRC’s workflows, procedures, and standards, improving accessibility to data-driven digital scholarship. The emerging strategic partnership between the SCRC and DiSC will provide researchers with new opportunities to interact with special collections materials.