Marcy L. Galbreath received her PhD in Texts & Technology from the University of Central Florida, and is currently a lecturer in UCF’s Department of Writing and Rhetoric. Her research focuses on the rhetoric of agricultural and environmental communications in oral, print, and digital genres, and how the literacies associated with these genres contribute to meaning-making within and between associated communities.
Amy Larner Giroux, PhD
Amy Larner Giroux received her doctorate in Texts and Technology from the University of Central Florida and is a computer research specialist in UCF’s Center for Humanities and Digital Research. Her current research explores the interactions between researcher, subject, artifacts, and digital interfaces. She has 30 years’ experience in computer programming and project management. Her portfolio may be viewed at humanities-kaleidoscope.net.
Nathan Giroux
Nathan Giroux has a degree in Music Performance with a Minor in Computer Science. He has been working as a programmer for 7 years and is currently a software engineer in the military simulation industry.
Search
The Search page of Historical Agricultural News is organized by search category. The first category is organizations, and at least one of these much be checked for the search to run. The default is set to “All,” but if you wish to look for just one organization, for example the Farm Bureau, just click All to deselect, and then click Farm Bureau.
The other categories are arranged by type of agriculture: grain crops, vegetable crops, livestock and dairy, and fruit and nut crops. You must select at least one of these to activate the submission button for the search engine.
The listed choices are not exhaustive, so an “Other” option is listed where you can enter your own search term.
In addition to specific types of farming, under Time and Place you can select a year range, specific newspaper, or specific state. The default setting for these is All.
To demonstrate an example of how this search tool can be used in a research project, we’ve included an option to Highlight Genre Examples. Genres in the context of this search includes items such as bulletins, reports, and surveys, and results are highlighted in blue.
Once you’ve selected all your search terms, click Submit. If you wish to clear your selections, click Reset.
Results
Results will show 25 or 50 results per page. These are organized in columns with thumbnail images of the newspaper page, article details, place and date, and highlighted retrieved terms. Clicking the thumbnail image will open a window with the OCR article text and newspaper details, as well as a link to the original Library of Congress result with the article title highlighted for ease of locating it on the page.
Results can be reordered according to relevance, date (oldest or newest), or alphabetic listings by newspaper or article. The top of the results area will display your search terms, and total articles will show how many items the search located.
At the top right of the page, you have the option to run a new search (query), export the data (as an Excel file), or view a map that provides a visual representation of where the newspapers in this batch of results were located. The map additionally shows the land‐grant universities associated with the newspaper locations.