Overholt Diary

ABOUT THE PROJECT

To start the project, all 341 pages of the diary were scanned. These pages were copies, as the location of the original copy of the diary is unknown. Based on their contents, certain pages were selected to undergo Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This, along with simply reading and typing the pages, was used to convert the scanned images of the pages into a text format. From there, these text documents were transferred to Oxygen XML Editor in order to be marked up by hand. Additionally, up-conversion by regular expression was used to mark-up the text.

We then converted the mark-up TEI, the XML language of the Text Encoding Initiative, a consortium which collectively develops and maintains a standard for the representation of texts in digital form. One goal was to identify how frequently each person was mentioned throughout the journal entries. In order to accomplish this, a personography, or a list to handle metadata about the people mentioned in the diary, was created. Along with each person's id, this person list contained their birth and death dates, gender, and brief biographical notes about them. These biographical notes were developed based on the analysis of documents located in the archives of West Overton Village and Museums.

MEET THE TEAM