For my HIST 694 digital public history project, I will be using Omeka to create an online exhibit showcasing several previously obscure local authors from Summerville, South Carolina, focusing on both their primary literary contributions and their respective place in the timeline of the region’s historic development between the early nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I will be partnering with the local Summerville Museum and Research Center for this project, which houses the majority of primary source material relevant to this project, including original copies of the local authors’ works as well as additional biographical information on them. The idea came from a fusion of my experience and interest in literary history and some research into local towns for historic writers that are not featured prominently in regional history. Hence, while literary historians like myself will be an important demographic, the overall target audience will most likely be the increasing number of local residents who are becoming more interested in learning about historic figures from the region’s distant past. In discussing this point with the museum archive staff, this demographic of historically minded locals and volunteers has been growing steadily, so I believe that this project will be an effective way at drawing public attention to this section of regional history.

Overall, this project seeks to answer questions about the literary landscape of the region and what that reveals about the course of local history – all while shedding new light on little-known writers and their works. The profiles of each writer and their books will be largely biographical in nature, but each entry will be a part of an overarching analysis on their contexts within South Carolina Lowcountry history. As the research portion of the project continues, more questions or directions may be added or changed depending on the information uncovered, such as discussions on common themes, subject matter, and other contexts in their life or works. Thus, the overarching historical interpretation part of the project will follow these findings, addressing possible connections between the writers’ lives and how they reflect the overall history of the town – including reasons for writing, possible local audiences, and why the majority of them fell into obscurity.

The project will be constructed with Omeka’s online exhibit-making software, with a focus on individual profiles for each featured writer. Each individual will have a respective entry that profiles as much biographical information that can be uncovered on them, as well as an overview of their body of work – or most important work – including photographs and cover scans when available. As none of these works have been digitized yet, access to the texts themselves is not a focus of the project; instead, the project will provide a valuable interpretive analysis on local literary history using each entry. The specific layout of the Omeka site will be a chronological list of the entries, from the earliest in the eighteen thirties to the latest around the turn of the twentieth century. Likewise, the upcoming prototype will be focused around the two most prominent entries uncovered during research, which will likely be the earliest and latest examples from the sources. In conclusion, this project seeks to renew attention towards local literary history as a part of the greater historical record of Summerville, South Carolina, illustrating a record of obscure writers and their context within greater Lowcountry social history.