The Dale Center’s 103rd Infantry Division Project
By: Sarah Anne Hogue
The 103rd Infantry Division project of USM’s Dale Center for the Study of War & Society is a hybrid Digital Humanities collection with a combination of digitized historical records stored on a dedicated website and physical primary records stored in Southern Miss’s McCain Library’s Archives. The project focuses on the 103rd Infantry Division’s history, with a focus on the unit’s combat in the European Theater of World War II. The project contains both declassified official military records and soldiers’ personal accounts. At this time, the priority of the Dale Center’s Project Team (myself and PhD students Brian Valimont and Daniel Ward, with Dr. Kyle Zelner supervising) is to create a new website to store and make available the currently digitized materials as the existing website can no longer be updated.
The current work on the project included cataloging the existing digitized materials, locating archival material for future digitization, organizing the materials for researchers, creating a research guide for different types of researchers, and creating a new website to store all this information. The project will also eventually not only store the items in this Digital Humanities collection, but also provide researchers with clearly organized collections of historical documents, give users a navigation guide to assist in their researcher, and facilitate research by a variety of researchers working on research projects related to these collections. This project is ongoing, but we hope that at least part of this website will be launched in late 2023.
Before beginning my work on this project, my background in Digital Humanities was limited to taking several Digital Humanities courses offered at USM and working on smaller projects for my own research. While I had a great training in the theoretical background of the subject, this was the first time that I had the experience of actually working on a large-scale Digital Humanities project. In addition to never working on a Digital Humanities team before this project, the Dale Center’s 103rd Infantry Division project also pushed me to learn more about the history of World War II, especially as someone who primarily studies seventeenth-century colonial America.
Sarah Anne Hogue is a Ph.D. student at the University of Southern Mississippi, and her research interests include gender, legal history, and the study of war and society. Her research examines how and to what extent the legal doctrine of coverture—a legal classification that severely limited married women’s legal rights to own property—functioned during the colonial period in New England.
Since this project is still in its early stages, much of the digital work done so far has been building a new website using Squarespace. This was a platform that I had never used before, so there was a steep learning curve involved with creating the new website. After working with Squarespace over the last few months, we came to understand that the platform’s flexibility and large hosting capabilities are a great fit given the project’s goals. As the website redesign has continued, it has been amazing to see the project really come to life. In addition, Squarespace will allow us to keep expanding the project and the collection as new archival materials are digitized by the University Libraries at Southern Miss and/or donated by members of the 103rd Infantry Division Association. In addition to using Squarespace for this website redesign, our team member Brian Valimont worked on developing an in-depth timeline for the project using Knightlab’s StoryMap JS program. This program allows the 103rd Infantry Division’s combat timeline to be projected on a physical map. This has the added benefit of allowing website users to physically trace the combat route of the 103rd Infantry Division and see where they fought.
The biggest challenge of this project so far has probably been the vast size of this DH collection. We wanted to not only to rebuild the existing website and add more documents, but to really take this opportunity to make the website easier to navigate and better organized. We want researchers, students, genealogists, and family members who visit the website to not feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of materials available, as we felt overwhelmed by the vast size of the collection when the project team first started sorting through the documents.
In addition to all of the official documents of the division, there are a myriad of oral histories, personal accounts, and even audio files with first-hand interviews and memoirs. Because there was so much material, one of the first phases of work was to go through all of the documents, personal accounts, and web pages in order to catalog it all. From there, we were able to create coordinated research categories and sort each document or file into an easily accessible and logical collection. Though this process took a long time, it will hopefully make it much easier for researchers to navigate the collection. This organizational work had the added benefit of making everyone on the team extremely familiar with all of the items featured in the collection, which in turn made creating and writing the new webpages much easier.
The biggest success of the project so far has been the achievement of our two main goals: organizing the material into well-defined collections and creating clear and purposeful website design. Because the project’s team knew the collection so well after sorting through and organizing the documents, we have been able to build a website that centers its experience on the various users of the website in the future. From very early on, the team thought deeply about the various groups of people who would be using the website and collection. We strived to always keep their priorities and research goals in mind. Since we knew there would be a wide audience for this site, from student researchers to veterans and their family members to professional scholars to genealogists, all who would have very different research goals for the site, we have created a guide to help each person who visited the website with their specific research priorities. This navigation guide will also walk each category of visitor through the process of easily locating the information and documents that they are most interested in finding.
USM’s Center for Digital Humanities has so many amazing projects in the works right now, and I have been lucky to have the opportunity to see some of this scholarship as it is produced. Dr. Ural’s Civil War and Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project is one of these projects that has really inspired me. Dr. Ural’s clear organization and priorities in this DH project helped clarify how a DH project’s design can help website users navigate such a massive project. In addition to the projects coming out of USM’s Center for Digital Humanities, the center itself has also been influential when working on the Dale Center’s 103rd Infantry Division project. While working on this project, I had the opportunity to work with multiple people in the Center for Digital Humanities.
This collaborative scholarship has allowed me to develop ongoing works in this project with support from others working on similar projects. In particular, Ted Racicot, a PhD student at Southern Miss and the Center for Digital Humanities Graduate Fellow, has been a valuable resource for our project’s team. By discussing this project with Ted while working through it helped frame several of the major project designs. This collaborative effort and the ability to talk to those in the process of creating and working on project such as the Civil War and Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project gave me a foundational understanding of how Digital Humanities projects can be built to best serve their future users. While working on this project, this style of scholarship and the ability to access the resources of USM’s Center for Digital Humanities when I had a question of just needed help working through a tough challenge has been absolutely invaluable.
I had already learned that using Digital Humanities could be extremely useful in my own research, but this project has really taught me that working on a Digital Humanities project team can be just as important as focusing on an individual project. I now see Digital Humanities as an exciting collaborative process where each team member gets the opportunity to not only utilize their own skills and talents but also to learn from others with very different abilities and expertise. I am looking forward to hopefully getting to work with other Digital Humanities project teams in the future and will seek out these opportunities both while in school and in my later career.
