Khedival American Soldiers

About

My name is Victoria Oliviero and I am a graduating second year masters student in English at Boston College. This project is the culmination of my research over the past two years and the final product of my Digital Humanities Certificate program. While it is by no means a finished product, it is already a solid collection of 24 American soldiers who served in the Egyptian Army under Khedive Ismail Pasha. My studies focus on nineteenth-century American travel literature and Egyptomania in the U.S. This project was born out of my analysis of William Wing Loring’s 1884 memoir A Confederate Soldier in Egypt in my undergraduate thesis project. Since then, I have written multiple papers on Egyptomania and have produced two digital projects on the 48 American soldiers.

My main purpose for creating this CollectionBuilder website is to preserve and organize the works and biographical information of the 48 American soldiers. As mentioned in the Previous Scholarship page, there are only a small number of comprehensive projects on the soldiers that exist, and many of them are outdated. I essentially wanted to create a database for the soldiers that could help me produce future projects, digital or written. My network analysis project on the Analysis page is just one small example of what I intend to do with this website.

Creating this CollectionBuilder website was difficult yet highly rewarding. Given that this model of GitHub is specifically used for digital collections, I found it straightforward to organize my metadata for each object and to upload each file. Difficulties arose when I attempted to combine objects into soldier-specific folders, or “compound objects.” Doing this limited my ability to add images to these folders, making them look like blank files rather than actual portraits of the soldiers. Additionally, CollectionBuilder does not allow any thumbnails to be attached to pdf files, so I was also unable to add any images to the books or manuscripts. At one point I considered switching over to GitHub CSV, however, I did not want to lose the highly structured nature of CollectionBuilder, and I ultimately valued practicality over aesthetics.

Other decisions I made with this project included uploading soldiers’ Civil War era photographs in addition to their Egyptian portraits. I felt that simply displaying images of the soldiers wearing Egyptian military uniforms from 1869 to 1879 only conveyed part of their lived experiences. I made the decision halfway through the semester to upload their Civil War portraits, as well as their older portrait after their Egyptian years, to give my audience a fuller picture of their complex lives. I think that this expansion of each soldier’s collection provides their American context—typically their Union or Confederate allegiance and their rank during the Civil War—alongside their Egyptian experience and careers thereafter. Furthermore, I believe that this decision has allowed me to create an even more complete database.

There are currently 24 out of the 48 soldiers to be found on this site. As this is an ongoing project, I will add soldiers as I find more information about them. One thing I have avoided this semester is the inclusion of the soldiers’ manuscripts, which I have come across many times in digitized university archives. I believe that my next step is to find and transcribe soldiers’ manuscripts (consisting of letters, diaries, and field notes) to then upload to this website. In addition to uploading the scans of the manuscripts, I want to upload my own transcripts to make the documents more accessible.

Overall this has been the complicated yet most rewarding project I have undertaken. I owe this project to the Boston College Digital Scholarship Group: not only have they helped me produce a project that I am very proud of, but they have also taught me invaluable skills. I hope that I will be able to continue to work with them in the future as I expand this project.