As of yesterday the xserve I’ve been working on most of the summer went live. I’m particularly proud of one project in particular that’s hosted there, the Saratoga Census Project. This project builds off of work I did at Bowdoin (especially the Romantic Audiences Project) and also manages to incorporate some ideas I’ve been working on since my junior thesis back at Wooster College. (not that Wooster actually let me go with the thesis I had hoped to – basically I was asking them for more than $20k for research and outside of my major I was one of the biggest underachievers you could imagine, so I don’t blame them for laughing at me). Anyhow, the site is a wiki designed to help students at Skidmore and residents of the Saratoga community build out a body of knowledge about the region they live in. It features an underlying database of the actual 1850 and 1860 census data for the community which is both searchable and integrated into the wiki itself using an extension to the wikipedia engine which we developed.

It’s something of an experiment for the instructor, Bill Fox, and the site itself is only now going live so there’s not much in terms of actual historical data in the site yet. But our hope is that this is successful enough to allow us to continue to feature it as a component of courses here at Skidmore and to write grant/s against it so that we can add additional census datasets, add features like maps, GIS encoded datasets, and more.

I love this project. Ever since Wooster I’ve been interested in the idea of having academic resources that are grown and nurtured over time by successive generations of students, and this is the first time I’ve been presented with an opportunity to really see how well this could work. Much depends on how this first semester goes, but so far things are promising. I’ll post again about this by January if not sooner with a followup on how things went.