Photo of Baylor University students taken on Burleson Quadrangle, February 26, 1920 (Click photo to enlarge) This installment of “Hidden in Plain Sight” features a group photo of Baylor students posed on risers on the Carroll Science Building side of the Burleson Quadrangle. The photographer – P.N. Fry of Kansas City, Missouri – would have…
A New Dimension for our Collections: Introducing the Digital Collections Podcast
Imagine a world without sound. Your favorite music – gone. No more conversations with loved ones, oral tradition is extinct, beloved stories lose their impact. A world without sound would be a world without texture, without emphasis. This is the world of document-based archival collections. The printed word is great for many things – conveying…
Checking In
We wanted to post a brief note to let you know the good folks at the Digitization Projects Group are alive and well, despite our noticeable lack of blog posting of late. Spring Break hit the campus of Baylor University two weeks ago, and this past week, we’ve been very busy getting things spiffed up…
A Post for the Statisticians in the Audience (Or, Who’s Been Looking at Our Stuff?)
The phenomenal success of the Browning Letters Project did more than just expose the world to the first digitized images of more than 1,400 pieces of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s correspondence. It also exposed the server that hosts the collection to more than 1,000,000 page views in just three days! In fact, over the…
Spring Hats, Julius Caesar and Marriage Proposals: Leap Day Through the Front Pages of the “Lariat”, 1904-1988
Today is February 29th, which of course means it’s Leap Day, the extra day added to the calendar every four years to make up for the fraction of an extra day we experience beyond the standard 24 hours. Over the course of four years, those fractions add up to another full day, so we add…
Hidden in Plain Sight: Looking Closer at the Diamond Jubilee, Baylor University, 1920
Baylor University was in the mood to celebrate in 1920, for that was the year of its diamond jubilee. Seventy-five years earlier, in the Washington County town of Independence, the university was established and named for Judge R.E.B. Baylor; the ensuing decades had seen it grow into a thriving institution in a new city, Waco….
“How do I love thee?” Let Us Digitize the Ways!
They were written between two of the most famous names in Victorian poetry, spanning a famous courtship, an elopement to Italy, and a widower’s final years. They were preserved by two institutions of higher education in the United States, one a private liberal arts college in the Northeast, the other a private Baptist university in…
A Friday Afternoon Lagniappe: Sketches from a Reconstruction Era Diary
We’ve got a big blog announcement going live on Tuesday morning, but until then, we present a lagniappe (from the Creole for “a little something extra”) from one of our current projects. The sketches below were found in the margins of a Reconstruction era diary kept by Henrietta Hardin Carter Harrison, the wife of the…
Tools of the Trade: The Specialized Scanners of the RDC
Following an encounter with one of the Dark Knight’s trademark high-tech gadgets in Tim Burton’s 1989 film “Batman,” the Joker famously quipped, “Where does he get those wonderful toys?” We get a similar question – thankfully, from people of better moral character – when people see the specialized scanners the Riley Digitization Center uses to…
Hidden in Plain Sight: Deconstructing a 1912 Panoramic Photo
Our first post of 2012 featured this photograph of a train excursion taken by the Young Men’s Business League (YMBL) to the Texas town of Comanche in 1912. It turns out there’s a lot going on in this one photo, so we’re going to take some time today to look a little closer at what…
A Visit From Rep. Chet Edwards
Former U.S. Rep. Chet Edwards in his office at Poage Legislative Library Baylor University recently announced that former U.S. Congressman Chet Edwards was appointed the W.R. Poage Distinguished Chair for Public Service, an honor that was accompanied with the news that his congressional papers would be housed in the Poage Legislative Library on campus. A…
“War of the Rebellion Atlas” Puts DPG on the Map in Tennessee
The Digitization Projects Group’s efforts to put the War of the Rebellion Atlas online have once again led to an exciting collaboration, this time with Zada Law, Director of the Fullerton Laboratory for Spatial Technology at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU). Law will be utilizing high-resolution copies of several Atlas maps of the Nashville area…