This project has pushed me more than any project I have worked on thus far at Mary Washington. I had to learn new skills like website design, archival work, both physical and digital, and many skills associated with digital history. As a historian, my happy place is with the past, where technology was advancing, yes, but the majority of what I am dealing with is on paper. The digital world has always been like a scary monster to me, something that I would one day have to learn how to approach. With the help of my teammates (specific shout-out to Abby for keeping me sane and answering all my questions about WordPress), the DKC, and Dr. McClurken, I can confidently say I know much more about digital history than I did fifteen weeks ago, but most certainly not all. As someone who wants to make a career in public history, I used this project to dip my toes in the water by sharing the tradition of Devil-Goat Day with my fellow students, faculty, and the wider Fredericksburg community. As a current student who loves participating in Devil-Goat Day, I found it amazing to see how the event grew and shrank over the century, and the various ways students celebrated the uniquely UMW tradition.
Our group was able to follow our contract as written, with one exception. In our contract, we aimed to have ten items per decade. While we were able to accomplish that for the 1920s through the 1980s and the 2000s until the present (2020s), the 1990s were a spot of trouble for us. The activity during the decade severely decreased based on conversations with Dr. McClurken, and so there is a lack of evidence in memorabilia or pictures for this decade. For this page, we needed to put a disclaimer at the top of the page to explain the inconsistency of sources when compared to the other decades. For other aspects of the project, we followed our contract as written. We were prepared to present on the given days throughout the semester and adopted the feedback we heard from both our classmates and Dr. McClurken. We updated our assignment tracker and held each other accountable for our assigned tasks; the work remained evenly distributed. While not written in the contract, we divided the decade entries between Ben, Charlotte, and me to make it both more manageable and to ensure all decades were evenly covered. I focused on the 1920s to the 1950s, Charlotte worked on the 1960s to the 1980s, and Ben rounded it out with the 1990s to the present. Abby stayed focused on website design and implemented the research Ben, Charlotte, and I found through the digital and physical collections of UMW Special Collection & University Archives. Charlotte and I remained focused on the interpretive text of each decade, and especially the legacy page for the website. Ben kept the Instagram updated and oversaw PR for the project by reaching out to Student Activity and Engagement (SAE) and various Facebook Alumni groups to spread our project to the campus and beyond, and to gather information from alumni about Devil-Goat Day. In the contract, we stated that we would use TimelineJS, and I took over that aspect of the website. I wanted to use this timeline to show events on and off the UMW campus that would have affected Devil-Goat Day. I mainly used William Crawley’s University of Mary Washington: a centennial history, 1908-2008, for my research on the timeline and the early decades of Devil-Goat Day.
