About
Co-Directors
Timothy Schaffert, the Project Director for the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition Digital Archive, is an assistant professor of English at University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He is the author of five novels, most recently The Swan Gondola (Riverhead/Penguin, 2014), which is set mostly in Omaha during the 1898 Expo. He also edited and wrote the introduction to You Will Never See Any God: Stories by Ervin D. Krause (University of Nebraska Press, 2014).
Wendy Katz is the Project Administrator for the Plains Humanities Alliance, part of the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The Plains Humanities Alliance is dedicated to encouraging humanities research and programs throughout the region, including digital scholarship, at http://www.unl.edu/plains/pha/pha.shtml. Katz is Associate Professor of Art History at UNL and is currently working on an anthology of essays on the visual and material culture of the Trans-Mississippi Exposition.
Katherine L. Walter, professor and department chair of Digital Initiatives & Special Collections at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) Libraries, is co-director of the innovative Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, http://cdrh.unl.edu. A joint initiative of the UNL Libraries and the UNL College of Arts & Sciences, the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities advances collaborative, interdisciplinary research in the digital humanities, and develops tools for scholarly discovery. In her role as co-director at UNL, Walter works closely with faculty in the center and with faculty in the departments of English, history, anthropology, libraries, religion, and modern languages and literatures. She has directed many humanities research projects funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, including several multi-institutional digital humanities research projects. Currently, Walter co-chairs the steering committee of an international network of digital humanities centers, centerNet, and is past board member of the Association for Computers & the Humanities.
Other Project Staff
Sarah A. Chavez is a mestíza born and raised in the California Central Valley. She is currently a PhD student focusing on poetry and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in the anthologies Not Somewhere Else But Here: A Contemporary Anthology of Women and Place and Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence, as well as the journals North American Review and The Fourth River, among others. A selection from her manuscript, This, Like So Much, won the Vreeland Prize in 2011 and was chosen as a finalist for the 2012 Arts & Letters/Rumi Prize for Poetry. A selection from her chapbook manuscript All Day, Talking won the Susan Atefat Peckham Fellowship in 2013.
Karin Dalziel is the Digital Resources Designer and Developer at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. She has several years of experience with design, web standards, and encoding systems, and works with team members to create attractive, accessible, and usable websites.
Jack Hill is a first year MA student in Creative Writing, Fiction. Jack is from Northern California and completed his BA in English at Humboldt State University. He edits Crossed Out Magazine, a short fiction quarterly, and may be contacted at jack.hill@huskers.unl.edu
Anne Rimmington is an undergraduate art history and French major at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. As a UCARE research assistant for art history professor Wendy Katz, she focused on finding newspaper articles on the Trans-Mississippi Exposition, specifically from the Omaha Bee and the Omaha World Herald. Her main focus was reviews, reactions, and criticisms of the art exhibition and the major players involved with the exhibition, art community, and the overall exposition. She also investigated women involved with various exhibitions as well as scandals and controversies involving art and statuary at the Exposition.
Paula Rotschafer is an MA candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her focus is nineteenth-century American art. Her work for the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition Digital Archive includes transcribing and encoding textual documents and scanning collection materials.
Jeffrey Spencer, who has contributed materials to this digital archive, has served as a trustee of the Nebraska State Historical Society, president of the Trans-Mississippi Exposition Historical Association, executive director of the Historic General Dodge House Museum in Council Bluffs, Iowa, director of the Library/Archives Center of the Douglas County Historical Society, and executive director of Landmarks, Inc., an organization involved with neighborhood redevelopment and historic preservation in Omaha. He is the author of Building for the Ages: Omaha’s Historic Landmarks, Historic Photos of Omaha, and Remembering Omaha.
Jaclyn Cruikshank Vogt is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her research interests include twentieth-century American literature, women’s and gender studies, and digital humanities. As a graduate research assistant for the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition Digital Archive from 2012 to 2013 she scanned collection materials, transcribed and encoded textual documents, and developed image metadata.
Gary A. Wasdin is the Director of Omaha Public Library, and partnered with University of Nebraska-Lincoln on this project, making available the library’s extensive collection of Trans-Mississippi Exposition materials. Prior to Omaha, Gary was the Assistant Dean of libraries at The University of Alabama, and the Director of Staff Development at The New York Public Library. He was also the director of the Fogelman Library at The New School, and the Head of Access Services at Wesleyan University.
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.
