August 6, 2021 – With about 400 individual scans, I am now done with the initial scanning process. There are still loose, unsorted letters I will go through, but the vast majority of relevant letters are now scanned, cropped, and sorted. The next phase of the project will involve using FromThePage to transcribe the letters […]
Author: Gideon French
Entry 2: Hands-On History – Supplies
June 16, 2021 – The first big hurdle came with the selection of equipment for the project. To scan the letters quickly and efficiently, we needed a scanner. Our first choice was a portable, overhead scanner. The software, however, was lacking: it did not let us scan in .TIFF format, a lossless format for documents, […]
Entry 1: Hands-On History: Digitizing, Transcribing, and Curating the Letters of a Civil War Chaplain
June 4, 2021 – This Summer and into the Fall, I was funded by the Jefferson Trust flash funding grants to organize, scan, and transcribe the letters of Rev. John W. Alvord. Alvord was a significant historical figure best known for his Letters from the South, Relating to the Condition of Freedmen, Addressed to Major […]
Game Jam 1: Super Lario
I started my little adventure in games when my January term for UVa ended and it was two weeks until Spring semester started. I tried out Unity a couple months into quarantine, but decided it wasn’t for me. The amount of options was overwhelming. But I decided then to try out Godot, a free and […]
Virginia Emigrants to Liberia
The summer of 2020 didn’t entirely go according to plan for anyone. With programs being widely canceled, I was worried that I wouldn’t have any project to work on for the summer. Luckily, I was offered a special summer stipend through the USOAR (Undergraduate Student Opportunities in Academic Research) program and was able to work […]
The Anne Spencer Project
I researched documents in the Papers of Anne Spencer and the Spencer Family, held in Special Collections at UVa, visited the historic home and garden of Anne Spencer in Lynchburg, VA, and translated that research to a digital format using online tools such as Timeline JS and ArcGIS StoryMaps. I then linked the life of […]
The Apple Tree
This was a short story for my creative writing class in Fall 2019. It was a cool crisp autumn in my youth. Middle school was out for Thanksgiving, and the world rejoiced in orange-gold freedom. Mike and Jake and I had drawn up an elaborate schedule with fun slotted in for every spare second. On […]
My Daughter
This was a short writing assignment for my creative writing class in Fall 2019. This was the room where she lived. Where she laughed, where she cried, where she studied for her calculus test, where I grounded her for failing. Maybe it was my high expectations that led to this situation. I can’t know; she […]
Harmony of the Spheres
This was a short story for my creative writing class in Fall 2019. The city was thousands of years old. Its stone walls were worn from countless acidic rains and bleached by the sun. The thick Venusian jungle stopped a hundred feet from the city’s edges. Within the city, nothing grew. Its winding alleyways were […]
What if, suddenly, you fell off the edge of the Earth?
This was a short story I wrote while applying to college in 2019. I licked my cracked, dried-out lips and peered through the spyglass. A dull whisper of wind whooshed past my ears, though the air was deathly still. Something felt off. Leaning forward over the ship’s wooden rail, I adjusted the focus onto the […]
