Here’s an interesting history I ran across in my research. It’s a little bit of situational irony, something that happens to everyone. This woman was able to notice it and find humor in it later in life despite all of the tragedy. This event is juxtaposed with another event that shows how interesting humanity can …
A Map of KZ Porta Westfalica
Converting PDFs to PNGs & My Workflow

I’ve posted about combining a bunch of images into one PDF, but how about going the other way? This site has a great tutorial for using GhostScript to convert a PDF into PNGs suitable for using for OCR. They do a great job explaining the different flags for GhostScript and some tips for getting the …
Copying Files From Mac to Linux With Umlauts
I ran into an issue today where I wanted to copy some files from my laptop to the web server. Usually, I just run the scp command like so: scp -r /path/to/files/on/laptop/ user@server.com:/path/to/put/files/ This will copy all of the files without problems. The problem is that there were nearly 300 files to copy, and so I …
Watermarking and OCRing your images

I have accumulated nearly 2000 images, all scans of documents, relating to the dissertation. One goal of the project is to make these documents open and available in an Omeka database. In order to more correctly attribute these documents to the archives where I got them, I need to place a watermark on each image. …
Das war die Hölle

While reading through the survivor accounts that I gathered from the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial last summer, I found a unique report. Apparently at one time either the Danish government, the National Museum in Copenhagen, or the Freedom Museum in Copenhagen put out a survey to former concentration camp inmates. Axel Christian Hansen was one …
History and Maps

I have been reading up on Geographical Information Systems/Sciences. There seem to be a number of flavors of combining history with maps and geographical data and methodologies. The various terms I have run across are Historical GIS, historical geography, cultural geography, spatial history or spatial humanities. Here are the list of books I would like …
Convert a folder of Images to PDF
GSA 2014 – DH Panel

I recently participated in the annual German Studies Association Conference. (On a side note, my last professor at ASU, Dr. Gerald Kleinfeld started the GSA.) I was delighted to be on one of two DH panels at the GSA. Since I don’t have anything noteworthy finished or started with my dissertation, I spoke about how …