William G. Thomas, III is the John and Catherine Angle Professor in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and is the principal editor of the Railroads project. Thomas served as the Director of the Virginia Center for Digital History from 1998 to 2005, and as the Valley of the Shadow project manager from 1996 to 2001. He received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia in 1995, and is the author of Lawyering for the Railroad: Business, Law, and Power in the New South, published in 1999 by Louisiana State University Press. He has written several articles on the Civil War, a review of Civil War web sites called The Civil War on the Web: A Guide to the Very Best Sites, published by Scholarly Resources in 2000, and co-authored with Edward L. Ayers a digital article based on the Valley Project, The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities, published by The American Historical Review. He has also co-authored and produced a documentary film series on Virginia's history since the Civil War, called The Ground Beneath Our Feet. In addition to UNL, Thomas has taught history at the University of Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth University, James Madison University, and at Episcopal High School and Deerfield Academy.
Nathan B. Sanderson became the project manager for Railroads and the Making of Modern America in August, 2006. He supervises the day-to-day activities of the project and coordinates between the Project Leader and CDRH staff. Nathan's other responsibilities include directing student workers, editing documents, performing quality control checks, and ensuring the implementation of various components into the website. He also collected, transcribed, and encoded most of the speeches from William Jennings Bryan's 1896 presidential campaign. Nathan is a Ph.D. candidate in American History at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, studying under Andrew Graybill and specializing in the American West.
Karin Dalziel is the Digital Resources Designer for the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. Karin has been at the Center since 2006 and has worked on many projects. For the Making of Modern Amrica she has helped implement the new site redesign.
Brian L. Pytlik Zillig is Assistant Professor and Digital Initiatives Librarian at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. Brian is the creator of TokenX, a text visualization, analysis, and play tool. In part, TokenX offers the user the ability to highlight text based on patterns in words, show keywords in context, sort word concordances alphabetically or by frequency, and creatively explore texts. Brian manages the daily operations of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities and advises and assists on many aspects of Center projects, including the Railroads project.
Laura Weakly is the Metadata Encoding Specialist in the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. She works with numerous teams of digital humanities scholars to determine best practices for encoding innovative online scholarly projects and to ensure projects are in compliance with international metadata standards. Weakly supervises the Center's graduate research assistants and undergraduate student workers. In this capacity, she oversees students as they digitize, OCR and encode primary and secondary source materials and develop born-digital content.
Zach Bajaber was the Digital Resources Designer for the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities 2004-2008. He began working for the Center in early 2004 was involved with several major research projects, including Railroads and the Making of Modern America. His work focused on the development and maintenance of database-driven websites that are standards based and accessible. For the Railroads project, he designed and programmed user interfaces and navigation and searching systems.
Dan Becker did much of the initial GIS work for the Railroads project. He created the GIS framework and animated the maps for four views, including the 1877 Railroad Strike.
Catherine Biba edited summaries and normalized titles in the metadata of several documents.
Karin Callahan created several GIS maps for the project, including those on Nebraska Land Sales, the United States' rail network in 1861, and William Jennings Bryan's 1896 presidential campaign.
Sarah Dieter transcribed and encoded a number of documents relating to the 1877 Strike and the 1894 Nebraska Senate Campaign, including newspaper articles from the Pittsburgh Post and the Omaha World Herald.
Paul Fajman scanned, organized, and normalized the Baltimore and Ohio employee payroll records for 1855, 1857, and 1858. He also transcribed and encoded all of the Blue Ridge Tunnel documents.
Marco Floreani performed various duties on the project, including scanning images from Harper's Weekly and encoding documents.
Amy Gant designed several navigational and aesthetic components, assisted in overall quality control, transcribed speeches from William Jennings Bryan's 1896 campaign, and helped storyboard two views.
Erin Johnson assisted in several design elements, including those on the main page.
John Kemp worked on the project during the summer of 2006, scanning and encoding documents related to the 1877 Railroad Strike.
Kurt E. Kinbacher is a Post-doctorate Researcher and Lecturer in History at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln where he received his Ph.D. in May 2006. His dissertation, "Immigration, the American West, and the Twentieth Century: German from Russia, Omaha Indian and Vietnamese-Urban Villagers in Lincoln, Nebraska," analyzed 130 years of human movements on the Great Plains. For the Railroads project, he researched Nebraska land records, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and Indian Treaties. Kurt also worked on the "Nebraska Railroad Expansion" GIS map.
Miles Krumbach gathered Burlington Land Grant information on Clay County (NE) townships and recorded information from individual contracts and the 1880 census into a database. His work was integral to the creation of the Nebraska Land Sales view.
Dan Larsen collected, transcribed, and encoded many of William Jennings Bryan's speeches from the 1896 presidential campaign. He also scanned and encoded numerous Harper's Weekly images and regularized data in various other documents.
Steve McGuire researched land sales records in Nebraska, locating, scanning, and entering data from numerous individual contracts.
Lundon Pinneo transcribed many of the 1894 William Jennings Bryan documents from the Omaha World-Herald and gathered images from that campaign.
Chris Rasmussen served as the project's lead graduate research assistant during 2006, helping to create digital maps, a newspaper archive on the Great Railway Strike of 1877, and a collection of documents related to railroad labor.
Anastasia Smallcomb researched, scanned, and encoded documents on town development and marked up in XML the George Cather Ray, McConihe family, and Sim family documents.
Nic Swiercek helped normalize the encoding on the Railway Strike documents.
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