This week I continued to make progress on my DH final project. I installed nineteen plugins that will help to increase my Omeka site functionality and uploaded additional sources of the Congressional Globe meeting minutes to address Radical Republican ideas and ideologies towards the framing of the Fourteenth Amendment. I solidified my choices on what Supreme Court Cases to talk about within the framework of the Fourteenth Amendment. I chose the 1873 Slaughter-House case because it describes the Privileges and Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment that Congressman Johns Bingham believed to be necessary for the Fourteenth Amendment. The most recent case I will discuss is in 2015 the Obergefell v. Hodges case that legalized same-sex marriage because it depicts a very broad and expanded interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment in contrast to the Slaughterhouse cases.
The various plugins I installed will improve my site functionality such as Geolocation, voyant for text analysis, and the creation of one or more timelines that depict when the SCOTUS cases occurred as well as the timeline of the Fourteenth Amendment. The final project will focus on a large section on how the Fourteenth Amendment was created as well as text analysis from SCOTUS cases. It will subsequently focus on newspaper articles on the Radical Republicans. I will add the rest of my sources to the Omeka site by April 1st and continue creating a timeline as well as working with Geolocation and data visualizations. I considered incorporating youtube videos into the project but the plugin made my website unusable so I deleted the plugin and will mainly focus on text and the timeline.
My next steps include uploading the remainder of my sources. I anticipate having approximately fifty sources of text and letters or speeches that I can find online. The challenges I have faced include finding actual correspondence of Radical Republicans online because of Covid19. Nevertheless, I anticipate being able to upload the remainder of my sources and continue working with site functionality.
The overall goal of my DH project is to highlight the Radical Republicans’ efforts to pass the Fourteenth Amendment along with a biographical sketch of notable members and their efforts during Congressional Reconstruction from 1865 to 1868. When I have finished uploading sources I will pay more attention to the visual appeal of the site and its ease of navigation.
