A Digital Humanities Project by Nick Camp, Nolan Meyer, Reece Wenholz, and Justin Wu
War is a deeply complex, multifaceted issue that is commonly seen in only very broad contexts. There is a lack of nuance in discussions and insight surrounding war and conflict, especially those of soldiers and their families. In learning about - and analyzing data from - wars and conflict, the humanness of soldiers and their families is often muddled in over-simplified discourses. The purpose of this project is not just to examine the metadata of Minnesota soldiers that died in the First World War, but to tell a greater story about them: their positionality, struggles, families, etc. The lives of these soldiers can not be confined to numbers on a spreadsheet and we hope this project opens a greater discussion on the lives of soldiers in the World War 1 era.
This project is aimed towards the undergraduate students of Aisling Quigley's Ph.D. class, Introduction to Data in the Humanities. This site will also be public, meaning it and its content will be available to anyone who comes across it. There is a possibility that those in search of either the actual database or general information about soldiers from Minnesota that died will come across the project.