Project Directors

• 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 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.

• Richard Healey is Professor of Geography at the University of Portsmouth (U.K.). He specializes in Historical GIS and regional economic dynamics focusing on the railroad and mining industries in the nineteenth-century United States. Healey earned his Ph.D. at University of Cambridge, taught at University of Edinburgh from 1980-1995 and served as Co-Director of the ESRC Regional Research Laboratory for Scotland. He is the author of The Pennsylvania Anthracite Coal Industry 1860-1902: Economic Cycles, Business Decision-Making and Regional Dynamics (University of Chicago, 2007) and editor of the International Journal of Geographical Information Systems Special Issue on GIS and Parallel Processing in 1996. He has written numerous articles on the spatial and economic development of the railroad and mining industries in the U.S. Healey and Thomas are Project Directors for the National Endowment for the Humanities Digging into Data grant to "Railroads and the Making of Modern America."

• Ian Cottingham is the Software Engineer for the Computing Innovation Group in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UNL. His work has focused on the development of the Aurora Project apps for the Railroads project that integrate large bodies of railraod related data and are standards based and accessible.

Project Managers

• Leslie Working became the project manager for Railroads and the Making of Modern America in November 2009. She a Ph.D. candidate in American History at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, studying under Margaret Jacobs and specializing in the American West, women's history, and digital history.

• Nathan B. Sanderson became the project manager for Railroads and the Making of Modern America in August, 2006. 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.

CDRH Staff

• 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.

• 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.

• Keith Nickum is the Programmer for the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, and his work on the project has focused on the development and maintenance of project databases.

• 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.

Project Interns

• Trevor Muñoz worked on the Railroads project in the summer of 2009 on text concordances of the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion volumes deailing with the 1862 Peninsular Campaign and the 1864 Atlanta Campaign. He served as a project intern while completing his Masters in Humanities Computing at Kings College, London.

Project Staff

• 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.

• Luci Bolwer worked on normalizing geographic encoding of place names and railroad company names in the Richmond Daily Dispatch for the Civil War years.

• 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.

• Michelle Tiedje has transcribed the letters of Samuel B. Reed from the University of Iowa Levi Leonard collection as well as other documents for the project.

• Rebecca Wingo has worked on digitizing art and visual images for the project from Harper's New Monthly and on developing an Image Flow demonstration view for the project.

• Robert Voss has transcribed worker payrolls and newspaper articles. He is also working on a student project focusing on the Choctaw and the railroads in Oklahoma.