The American Soldier

Center for Human-Computer Interaction, Virginia Tech

Kurt Luther, Technical Director
Dr. Luther is Assistant Professor of Computer Science and (by courtesy) History at Virginia Tech, where he directs the Crowd Intelligence Lab. His research group builds and studies crowdsourcing systems that support creativity and discovery, often with applications to historical research. Along with The American Soldier, he serves as PI of the National Science Foundation-funded Civil War Photo Sleuth project and co-PI of the NHPRC-funded Mapping the Fourth of July in the Civil War Era project. He is also a contributing editor for Military Images magazine.

Nai-Ching Wang, Zooniverse Project Developer
Nai-Ching Wang, an alumnus of the project, received his PhD in Computer Science from Virginia Tech in 2018. He is a software engineer at Akuna Capital in Chicago, Illinois.

College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, Virginia Tech

Edward J.K. Gitre, Project Director
Dr. Gitre is Assistant Professor of History at Virginia Tech. His scholarly interests and publications focus on the history of the social sciences, interdisciplinarity, modern war and society, popular religious movements, and twentieth-century American culture. He holds a Ph.D. in History from Rutgers University and two additional advanced degrees, one in theological studies, and the other in cultural history, the latter from the University of Manchester, England. He has held fellowships at two interdisciplinary research centers, the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. He has been published in the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Church History, History of the Human Sciences, and The Hedgehog Review and is currently working on two book manuscripts. His research has received external institutional support from Duke University, the University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center, American Philosophical Society, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Rockefeller Archive Center. In 2017, he received recognition from Virginia Tech with the xCaliber Award for making significant contributions toward integrating technology into teaching and learning experiences, associated with The American Soldier in World War II.

Michael Hughes, Social Psychology Consultant
Dr. Hughes is Professor of Sociology at Virginia Tech. Most of his research has been on how social structural factors such as social integration and racial inequality are related to psychological well-being. Current work focuses on understanding the racial paradox in mental health, with particular attention to racial identity. He is an author of over 70 professional articles, comments, replies, and book chapters, including work appearing in, among other journals, the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, the American Journal of Public Health, and the Archives of General Psychiatry. Recent articles have appeared in Social Science Research, Social Psychology Quarterly, Society and Mental Health, Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, and The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. With Carolyn J. Kroehler he is author of Sociology: The Core (11th ed). He has served as Editor of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior (2000-2004), as President of the Southern Sociological Society (2004-2005), and from 1992 to 1994 he worked on the National Comorbidity Survey at the Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan.

Jessica Brabble, Project Research & Administrative Assistant
Jessica Brabble is a first-year history graduate student at Virginia Tech. She previously attended North Carolina Wesleyan College, where she graduated summa cum laude in May 2019 with bachelor degrees in history, sociology, and psychology. While there, she researched the rehabilitation of disabled World War I soldiers upon their return home. She also researched the annexation of the Philippines and the Philippine-American War, and created a Reacting to the Past game based upon these events. While at Virginia Tech, she hopes to continue her research of late 19th- and 20th-Century U.S. medical and cultural history.

University Libraries, Virginia Tech

Marc Brodsky, Archivist Consultant
Marc Brodsky is Assistant Professor and Public Services and Reference Archivist at Special Collections, Virginia Tech. A section editor for Archival Practice, he is active in the Society of American Archivists as a member of the Committee on Ethics and Professional Conduct and is engaged in work that incorporates the use of primary-source material in the emerging field of Veterans studies.

Corinne Guimont, Project Coordinator for University Libraries
Corinne Guimont is a Digital Publishing Specialist at Virginia Tech Libraries focusing on disseminating Open Educational Resources and Digital Humanities Projects. With experience in project management, cataloging, and open access publications, Corinne is interested in the production of digital scholarly output that utilizes various tools and technology. Her graduate work in information science focused on digital preservation and digital humanities which has led to an interest in creating sustainable projects.

Sarah Mease, DH Outreach Coordinator for University Libraries
Ms. Mease is the Digital Humanities Assistant at Virginia Tech University Libraries. In this role she assists with DH projects, outreach, and research to support the Digital Humanities and various library initiatives. She also provides faculty and student support for Digital Humanities at the university. Sarah is a Virginia Tech graduate in Literature and Language and Political Science and is interested in Digital Humanities and Digital Publishing. She is currently working to bring focus to understudied Black authored texts as a grant recipient through Kansas University’s Black Book Interactive Project.

Nathaniel Porter, Data Consultant
Nathaniel Porter is the Social Science Data Consultant and the Data Education Coordinator in the Informatics Lab at Virginia Tech University Libraries. He specializes in non-traditional data collection, social network analysis, missing data techniques, and sociology of religion and culture. His data collection work includes surveys, interviews, web scraping, complex online experiments, crowdsourcing, and administrative records. His current research includes crowdsourcing best practices, Indian religious demography, and using online purchasing patterns to study the informal relationships between religious groups.

Michael J. Stamper, Data Visualization Designer and Consultant
Michael Stamper is the Data Visualization Designer and Consultant for the Arts at Virginia Tech Libraries - Research and Informatics - Data Services group. He advises and supports administrators, faculty, and students with their data and information visualization and design needs, helps to define requirements for projects, performs user research, specializes in user interface/experience (UI/UX) design, and integrating the arts, design, and sciences into effective, meaningful, and insightful visualizations. He holds a BA in Graphic Design and Art History and a Masters in Fine Arts with an emphasis in Interactive and Graphic Design, both from Indiana University-Bloomington. He has taught as an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at Minnesota State University-Moorhead. He is a multifaceted designer with a vast body of work that ranges from large (and small) scale data visualizations and information design projects to traditional graphic/interactive design for print and Web.

Social and Decision Analytics Division, Biocomplexity Institute and Initiative (BII), University of Virginia

Gizem Korkmaz, Research Scientist
Dr. Korkmaz is Research Assistant Professor at the Social and Decision Analytics Lab (SDAL) at Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech. She is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at Virginia Tech. Her research focuses on social and economic networks, involving mathematical and computational modeling, and empirical analysis. Gizem received her PhD in Economics at the European University Institute in 2012. Her PhD dissertation spans game theory and network theory; focuses on the interplay between the network structure and strategic decision-making. She is the principal investigator (PI) of 2016 Minerva research project titled "The Dynamics of Common Knowledge on Social Networks: An Experimental Approach." She was selected as the 2016 Outstanding New Faculty by Virginia Tech Northern Capital Region Faculty Association. The hallmark of her research is to blend her knowledge in traditional economics with big data using tools from social network analysis and machine learning. She works with traditional as well as novel data sources (e.g., social media, 911, Fire/EMS, patient records, census) to ask how we can make data useful for people and communities.

Devika Nair, Research Scientist
Devika Nair is a Research Scientist at the University of Virginia’s Biocomplexity Institute & Initiative. Devika completed her Master of Science in Analytics from American University and is a former graduate fellow of Virginia Tech’s Data Science for Public Good program where she gained valuable direct experience discovering and ingesting new geographically coded data to inform Virginia Cooperative Extension policy decisions. Devika is assisting with both survey
data extraction and script customization.

Aaron Schroeder, Senior Research Scientist
Dr. Schroeder currently serves as an Information Architect and Data Scientist at Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech Social Decisions and Analytics Lab (SDAL) where he is responsible for planning, securing and executing major research projects focused on the techniques, methods, and theories related to the integration, storage, retrieval, sharing, and optimal use of policy-relevant data, information, and knowledge for the purposes of policy analysis and program evaluation. He has extensive experience in the technologies and related policies of information/data integration and systems analysis, policy and program development and implementation, quantitative and qualitative methodologies of evaluation, and the general application of data and web technologies to the enhancement of public and private sector services. A particular focus in this role has been on the integration and analysis of education, health, social service and non-profit administrative data streams for the purpose of conducting policy analyses and program evaluations impacting a wide range of constituents, including: pre-K child social and health service recipients; child care service operators; primary, secondary, post-secondary and adult education service recipients; state workforce training service recipients; and, U.S. veteran health and social service recipients. Continuing, high-profile information integration projects in the Commonwealth of Virginia are the USHHS-funded Project Child HANDS and the USED-funded Statewide Longitudinal Data System. A previous high-profile information integration project was the design, development, deployment, and evaluation of the U.S.’s first statewide travel information system, Virginia 511.

Advisory Board

Beth Bailey, University of Kansas
Dr. Bailey is Foundation Distinguished Professor, founding director of the Center for Military, War, and Society Studies, and a member of the department of history at the University of Kansas. Her military history publications include Understanding the US Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (2015), which she co-edited with Richard Immerman; America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force, and a work on World War II, co-authored with David Farber: The First Strange Place: Race and Sex in World War II Hawai’i. Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the American Council of Learned Societies, and she has been a visiting scholar in Australia, Indonesia, France, and Japan. With Andrew Preston, she co-edits the Military, War, and Society series at Cambridge University Press.

Kara Dixon Vuic, Texas Christian University
Dr. Vuic is the LCpl. Benjamin W. Schmidt Professor of War, Conflict, and Society in Twentieth-Century America at Texas Christian University. Her research bridges the history of wars and militarization, the history of gender and sexuality, and social and cultural history. Her newest book, The Girls Next Door: Bringing the Home Front to the Front Lines, will be published by Harvard University Press in early 2019. Her first book, Officer, Nurse, Woman: The Army Nurse Corps in the Vietnam War (2010; paperback 2011), won the 2010 Lavinia L. Dock Book Award from the American Association for the History of Nursing, was named a 2010 Book of the Year in History and Public Policy by the American Journal of Nursing, and was a finalist for the Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award. She edited The Routledge Handbook on Gender, War, and the U.S. Military (2017) and co-edits the University of Nebraska Press's series "Studies in War, Society, and the Military." Vuic has been honored with a number of grants and fellowships from, among others, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, the Rockefeller Archive Center, the Military History Institute, and the Center for Military History. Vuic brings to the project not only research expertise on the intersection of war and society but also on the gendering of war.

Amanda French, George Washington University
Dr. French is a long-time member of the digital humanities community who specializes in making humanities content (both cultural content and scholarly interpretation of that content) openly available online and in teaching humanities scholars how best to make humanities content openly available online. Dr. French is currently Director of the Mellon Foundation-funded project "Resilient Networks for Inclusive Digital Humanities," whose goal is to build a multi-institutional network of support for digital humanities research and pedagogy. Dr. French was previously Digital Research Services and Associate Professor at Virginia Tech University Libraries, where she helped strengthen digital humanities infrastructure and managed the open access scholarly repository VTechWorks. From 2010-2014 she was THATCamp Coordinator and Research Assistant Professor at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, helping scholars worldwide organize their own version of The Humanities and Technology Camp, "an inexpensive, open meeting where humanists and technologists of all skill levels learn and build together in sessions proposed on the spot." She has written and spoken frequently about many digital humanities topics, including Open Access, the scholarly publication landscape, Omeka, Scalar, Hypothes.is, the Digital Public Library of America, Wikipedia, and alternative careers for humanities PhDs. Her current research project in her field of 19th- and 20th-century poetry and poetic form is an online catalog of Edna St. Vincent Millay's personal library.

Thomas A. Guglielmo, George Washington University
Dr. Guglielmo is Associate Professor of American Studies at George Washington University. He has a PhD in History from the University of Michigan. His research and teaching interests include race and ethnic studies, immigration, civil rights, and the military. His first book, White on Arrival (Oxford, 2003), explored the history of Italian immigrants and race in Chicago. His second book, under contract with Oxford, looks at America’s World War II military as a critical, if often overlooked, site of race-making and civil-rights-movement-making. His work has appeared in publications such as the Journal of American History and the American Journal of Sociology and has been supported by Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center and Stanford University's Research Institute for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity.

G. Kurt Piehler, Florida State University
Dr. Piehler is Director of the Institute of World War II and the Human Experience and Associate Professor of History at Florida State University. He is author of Remembering War the American Way (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995) and World War II (2007) in the American Soldiers' Lives series. He is the editor of Encyclopedia of Military Science (2013), The United States in World War II: A Documentary Reader (2013) and also co-edited The United States and the Second World War: New Perspectives on Diplomacy, War, and the Home Front (2010). He also edits two book series: World War II: The Global, Human, Ethical Dimension (Fordham University Press) and Legacies of War (University of Tennessee Press). As founding director of the Rutgers Oral History Archives, Piehler conducted more than 200 interviews with veterans of World War II. During his tenure, he also pioneered digital humanities, uploading searchable interview transcripts on the Web beginning in 1995. Too, he has significant experience in the field of documentary editing, serving as an assistant editor of the Papers of Albert Gallation, and as a National Historical Publications and Records Commission Fellow in Historical Editing at the Peale Family Papers, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

Jeff Pooley, Muhlenberg College
Dr. Pooley is Associate Professor and Chair of Media & Communications at Muhlenberg College. His research interests center on history of media research within the context of the social sciences, with special focus on the early Cold War behavioral sciences. He is author of James W. Carey and Communication Research: Reputation at the University's Margins (2016), and co-editor of The History of Media and Communication Research (2008) and Media and Social Justice (2011). He is co-founder of the Society for the History of Recent Social Science, and has published articles and book chapters on a range of related topics relevant to the Research Branch's umbrella organization, the Information and Education Division.

Zooniverse Moderators

BobbyV
Robert “Bobby” Vandenbush is a veteran of the US Air Force having served with the Armed Forces Radio and Television (AFRTS) Service later reorganized as the Armed Forces Network (AFN). Bobby is also a veteran of the US Army Reserve having served as a non-commissioned officer in the Army Signal Corps. He is a member of the American Legion and served as his post’s commander from 2015 to 2019. Now retired, Bobby worked 30 years for General Motors as a fuel and emissions engineer at the Milford Proving Grounds, receiving a US Patent for a method to establish catalytic converter efficiency. He provided technical support to the Automotive Service Education Program (ASEP) at community colleges training technicians on the new Inspection/Maintenance program required by the Clean Air Act. He was involved in transitioning GM’s technical service information to ISO Standard HTML. He sat on the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) standards committee for vehicle service information. He received a Telly Award as a scriptwriter for GM’s advanced powertrain control systems. Prior to GM, he was employed as a technical writer for the telecommunications industry. Check out our feature of him on Twitter and Facebook.

SUEJ1949
Sue Johnson lives in the UK. She has been a history teacher in secondary schools all her working life. Since retiring she has had more time to work with original documents, and has even done some work for the National Archives in London. Working on The American Soldier project enables her to work at home. Sue finds it interesting to read about the lives of soldiers and their varied opinions and thoughts, and she believes it is so important that such documents are made available.

LibrarianDiva
Annick Lynn Rodriguez is a native New Yorker, born and (still lives) in The Bronx. She has been a Reference Librarian, in public libraries, for over 25 years. She loves History and being a part of creating it and preserving it (like she does on the Zooniverse!) She loves listening to music, doing crossword puzzles and binge watching episodes of Rhoda and the Love Boat, alternating with Schwarzenegger and/or James Bond films. Check out our feature on her on Twitter and Facebook.

Preacher357
Christian Mobley is a 46 year old man, married, with three kids. He injured his back at his job on August 21, 2003, resulting in a herniated L4-L5 disc. After 7 surgeries, rehabs, and many other things, he am disabled today, and will be the rest of his life. Around the beginning of 2017, his friend told him "I heard about a web site that allows any person to help look for planets and other things." That site was Zooniverse. Looking for planets did not interest him at all. Then, he began checking out some of the other projects that were on Zooniverse. He found a project by the Getty Research Institute called the Mutual Muses in which he allowed him to transcribe letters written between two artists. He fell in love with transcribing! Being disabled, transcribing has helped him to feel like he is contributing to society by doing this work.

Trecia
Trecia McGinniss lives in a snow globe in Pennsylvania with a wonderful and patient husband. Two small white fur babies round the family out and provides the snow for the snow globe residence. Trecia initially found an article concerning volunteer transcription work for the National Archives African American Civil War Soldier Project. While researching and participating in the project she found Zooniverse. She immediately started trying out all kinds of projects available, so many wonders to explore. How do you pick just one? Then she found the American Soldiers Project and it picked her. It is a match made in zooniverse heaven. The rest as we say is history. Check out our feature on her on Twitter and Facebook.

Top Transcribers

catmom4
Beth is a retired veterinarian in Atlanta, GA. Her daughter introduced her to Zooniverse, and since she has a great interest in WWII, this project was perfect. She thoroughly enjoys reading what these young men were feeling during that time period and feels it is very eye opening.

SusanV
Susan Vomocil lives in the central valley of California (Stockton). She is now retired, but spent her work life primarily in human resources. She is a "master gardener" through the University of California, a volunteer effort to share horticulture information and research with home owners who have questions about their gardens. She has been a birder for more than 40 years and spend time outside in the field as she can. Her father served in the Army during World War II, and in part, she does this work to honor his service.

marie.eklidvirginmedia.com
Marie Eklid is 75 years old and now retired. She lives in Newcastle Upon Tyne, England. She spent 35 years living in Plymouth Devon before returning back to Newcastle where she once lived. She has always been interested in history among other things. She enjoys computer work, typing and transcribing projects - The Zooniverse projects suit her down to the ground. After spending a lot of time transcribing the WW1 Zooniverse project (now on hold and she is waiting for it to come back), she discovered the American Soldiers project and really enjoy transcribing the pages. She did not know much about the Americans in WW2 and although it is very sad at times, she finds it very interesting. These projects make her feel she is part of a team and not working on her own since she can interact with others.