Individual Assignment
DUE: January 24 by 11:59pm
Purpose: Even though many of the documents produced in the eighteenth century about Native Americans are available in the public domain, they remain difficult to locate. This small project will allow us to begin sharing these records with the communities about whom they were written, to give them greater access to the written record of their own history in order to compare it with community memories passed down through oral histories, wampum belts, and other mnemonic devices. Similar work has helped tribes claim and maintain federal recognition, preserve land and usage rights, and correct historical inaccuracies inscribed in the documents.
Task: Each person will be assigned 4-6 entries in the Indigenous Documents spreadsheet to complete. You will be given links to the volumes that contain the documents. Some are in HathiTrust, so you may need to sign in with your UCLA ID, and some are in the Internet Archive.
- Follow the link in the spreadsheet to the volume that contains the document, find a plain-text version and paste it into the Text column.
- Remove all carriage returns (new lines) so the text doesn’t take up a lot of space on the spreadsheet. The text of the entire document must fit within a single cell and cannot extend into cells below it. The best way to do this is to copy the text into Word, a Google Sheet, or a text editor, like Sublime, to clean the text and remove all carriage returns before pasting it into the Google Sheet.
- Be sure not to include any footnotes, page numbers, and headings. We want just the text of the document.
- The spellings of names and tribes need to be consistent throughout the spreadsheet, including in the text of the document. Check the Documentation, Controlled Vocab and Tribal Name Crosswalk tabs for standardized spellings.
- Skim through the text of the document to correct the spelling of names.
- Use the dropdowns (Columns T through AE) to list all Native American tribes referenced in your documents.
- Insert NULL in all fields for which there is no information or the requested information is not applicable.
Criteria for Success: These records will be used for our own class projects, but they will also be shared with as many of the Native communities listed in them as possible. This means that the records need to be:
- (50 pts) Complete: all known information for each of your records is included in your entry, including all referenced Native American tribes
- (40 pts) Accurate: based on the printed source material
- (35 pts) Clean: no page numbers, headings, or random characters in the middle of words, etc.
- (25 pts) Consistent: the spellings of individual names and tribes need to be consistent throughout the spreadsheet, including in the document texts. This will make the spreadsheet searchable and enable more accurate text analysis.