Laura Weakly

Laura Weakly is the Metadata Encoding Specialist in the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. She works with numerous teams of digital humanities scholars to determine best practices for encoding innovative online scholarly projects and to ensure projects are in compliance with international metadata standards. Weakly supervises the Center's graduate research assistants and undergraduate student workers. In this capacity, she oversees students as they digitize, OCR and encode primary and secondary source materials and develop born-digital content.

Weakly is involved in many Center projects, including The Gilded Age Plains City: The Great Sheedy Murder Trial and the Booster Ethos of Lincoln, Nebraska; The Writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson; Omaha Language Learning; German Sermons, 1550-1650; and the John Wyclif texts.

Projects Weakly currently is working on include French 17; Omaha Bound: Mexican and African American Migrations to Nebraska, 1880-1930; Visualizing the Battlefields of the Spanish Cuban-American War; Mountain Meadows Massacre; and Railroads and the Making of Modern America.

She has worked extensively on The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition Online, conflating and encoding more than 5,000 pages of text (XML/TEI) from the celebrated Nebraska edition edited by Gary Moulton.

Weakly recently co-authored, with Charles D. Bernholz, Brian L. Pytlik Zillig and Zacharia A. Bajaber, "The last few American Indian treaties—An extension of the Charles J. Kappler Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties Internet site at the Oklahoma State University," Library Collections, Acquisitions, & Technical Services 30 (2006) 47-54.

Weakly received a Bachelor of Journalism and Master of Arts in Journalism from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Prior to joining the Center staff, Weakly worked as an editor and website developer. She lives in Lincoln, Nebraska with her husband and two daughters.