Powering the Jane Addams Papers!

We are delighted beyond words to announce that the Jane Addams Papers has received two major grants.

The National Historical Publications and Records Commission awarded us $160,000 in support for 2022-2023. The NHPRC’s program in Publishing Historical Records in Collaborative Editions has been a stalwart supporter of the Project and has published many papers projects that document the lives of women.  Funds from this grant help support the salaries of editors working on the Jane Addams Digital Edition.

 


The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded us a three-year $300,000 grant (2022-2025). The NEH’s program in Scholarly Editing aids in the publication of the Selected Papers of Jane Addams as well as our work on the digital edition. The NEH’s support for historical editions has enriched the study of our nation’s heritage tremendously.


 

E. B. Waters portrait of Jane Addams (1902) Library of Congress

A Challenge: How You Can Help

Our new NEH Grant offers a way for you to help power the Addams Papers. The NEH will provide us with an additional $150,000 in matching funds if we can raise $150,000 from private sources. These much needed funds are needed to support the salaries of our student workers, research costs, and the editorial salaries that aren’t covered by the NEH and NHPRC.

We are currently short-staffed, with fewer student assistants than usual. Your support will ensure that we meet our goals for 2022-2023:

  • Entering over 1,000 new Addams documents with descriptive metadata in the Jane Addams Digital Edition.
  • Transcribing over 1,000 new Addams documents for the digital edition.
  • Proofreading student work to ensure quality before publication.
  • Submitting Volume 4 of the Selected Papers of Jane Addams to the University of Illinois Press.
  • Continuing research on Volume 5 of the Selected Papers of Jane Addams.
  • Working with high school teachers to develop AP resources.
  • Researching and writing biographies and descriptions of the people, organizations, events and publications mentioned in the Jane Addams Digital Edition.

So, if you can, please donate now. Your contributions will be matched dollar-for-dollar by the NEH and will power the students whose work makes all of this possible.

Thanks for your support!

 

 

 

Our Thanks to the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation

I am delighted to announce that the Jane Addams Papers Project has been awarded a grant by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation! We are extremely grateful to the Foundation for their support of our work and their support for humanities research.

The award for Making the Jane Addams Papers Accessible to the Public
will support the work of undergraduate student assistants who are currently entering Addams documents in 1924 into our system. Our students analyze the digitized texts, creating descriptive metadata that makes them easier to locate and understand, and transcribe the texts. This makes text searches possible and helps readers unfamiliar or unable to read cursive.  The Delmas grant will also fund the work of a student to help us create educational materials for high school AP and honors curriculum.

The grant will also be matched by the National Endowment for the Humanities. A win-win!

If you are able to help support the work of the Jane Addams Papers Project, please click on the donate link to keep our student workers typing away!

 

Moving House

When the Jane Addams Papers Project came to Ramapo College in September 2015, space was a concern. The project was designed with the idea that undergraduate student workers would be an integral part of our work and in the early years, we were not quite sure where we would be able to fit them. Ramapo College has been a great partner to the project, giving us new space and increased capacity as the project has grown.

Our current space. Students work at computers while Cathy and Tori discuss a document.

Our first office was a small faculty office, into which we squeezed three computer stations — one for Cathy, one for me, and one for a student.  A short time later, Ramapo provided me with an office next door. We squeezed in three more computer stations and were now able to have four (or sometimes five) students working with us.  We had to stagger schedules to make it work, and it got a little tight sometimes, but we built great camaraderie at close quarters. When we had too many students to fit, the Dean allowed them to use a conference room and sometimes we flowed out into the Library or student lounges. 

In 2018, with the Project hiring between 8-10 students per semester, Ramapo upgraded our space. We moved into a Project office, a large space where up to six students and two staff can work together. This space has become a hub of activity and attracts attention from faculty and students alike who pass in the hall. Working from home during the pandemic meant missing the collaboration that goes on in the office every day.

Cathy discusses details of the office while standing in the unfinished space.

When the construction is finished, we will have a new home at the Peter P. Mercer Learning Commons. Ramapo’s newest building, an expansion and enhancement of the George Potter Library, has been under construction since 2019. While it seemed the project would never end, and we feared that the pandemic would slow construction, the end is in sight: Fall 2021.

Inside Cathy’s office, still very much a work in progress.

The Jane Addams Papers will occupy the Library’s Digital Humanities suite, with a large workspace that can fit eight or more students at a time, as well as space for my desk, files, and books, and a separate attached office for Cathy. We will be located on the Learning Commons’s second floor, close to the College Archives. All around us will be a brand new, four story library with abundant private and group study areas, smart classrooms and conference rooms, a café, outdoor seating, and a maker space. The hope is that this new lively space will become the heart of the campus and we are delighted to have a place there.

Cathy and I were recently given a hardhat tour of the construction site so that we could see our new space. Guided by Ramapo’s Director of Capital Planning, Daniel Roche, and Ramapo’s Construction Project Manager, Kosta Svarnas, we finally saw our new space! We are so happy that Ramapo gave us exactly what we wanted and needed in our new offices, and we could see all the possibilities of the space even while still under construction. Cathy’s office,

Tori and Cathy stand outside the Peter P. Mercer Learning Commons.

connected to the main workspace, will allow her easy access to the staff while also being able to conduct private meetings with students and others. My space, just outside her office, will allow close work with both the students and Cathy, and we will finally have enough space to store our document images in our offices. We have an overhead projector and screen which will help train students and give presentations about the project.  And we will have a neat graphic presence that we will reveal once we are in the space.

While we don’t have an exact move in date, we are extremely excited about the future of the Project at the College and in this new space. And that, I think, is what really excites us the most.

Teaching Jane Addams in High School AP Classes

We are delighted to announce that, with a grant from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, we will be working with a group of New Jersey high school  teachers and an educator from the Jane Addams – Hull-House Museum to explore ways to use the Jane Addams Digital Edition in high school AP classes.

The award, Developing Digital Educational Modules for High School AP Courses, will support a series of virtual meetings between Addams Project staff, and a select group of high school teachers from around the state. We are especially excited to also be working with Michael Ramirez, the Education Manager at the Jane Addams – Hull-House Museum in Chicago.

Two Ramapo College teacher-education students, Allie Cheff and Marina Kaiafas, will work with the teachers and Addams staff to develop primary-source-based educational materials that draw from the digital edition.

Jane Addams’s work during the Progressive Era and early 20th century was wide-ranging, and available topics range from her work in establishing social settlements, professionalizing social work, fighting against child labor and the persecution of immigrants and African-Americans, working to win support for woman suffrage, and her efforts for peace and social justice through the Woman’s Peace Party and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

We will hold a virtual symposium at the end of the grant to talk about what we learned and make publicly available to the materials on the project’s Education hub. We will also develop a guide for archives and other editing projects to help them create similar resources based on their holdings.

Teachers invited to participate are from all over the state and have extensive teaching experience. They are: Staci Anson (Ramapo High School), Yvonne Beatrice (Mahwah High School, ret.), Katherine DeVillasanta (Clearville Regional High School), Joseph Dobis (Franklin High School), Joseph Dwyer (Nutley Public Schools), Angela Funk (Indian Hills High School), Keri Giannotti (Bloomfield High School), Scott Kercher (Sparta High School), Faye Johnson Brimm Medical Arts High School), Allison McCabe Matto (Red Bank Regional High School), Louis Moore (Red Bank Regional High School), Frank Romano, Jr. (Perth Amboy Public School), Robert Schulte (Neptune High School), and Patricia Yale (Hillsborough High Schoo).

This grant builds on work that we did a few years back, also funded by the NJ Council for the Humanities, that developed National History Day guides and lesson plans using the digital edition for middle school students. Renee Delora, who led that effort, has joined this project to provide support to the student workers.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

When the Jane Addams Papers started work in 2015 at Ramapo College, in many ways it felt like a brand-new project. We were focused on the digital edition, developing metadata rules, learning how to read Addams’s charming handwriting, and immersing ourselves in turn of the century Chicago and the work of Hull-House.  But we were not a new project. We built our edition standing on the shoulders of the original Jane Addams Papers Project, founded by Mary Lynn Bryan in 1975.

Working with a team of dedicated editors, Mary Lynn produced an amazing microfilm that became the basis for our digital edition. We scanned that microfilm in 2015 and started working with the images, beginning in 1901, on our digital edition. The  microfilm edition represented decades of work; they  conducted an international search for Addams documents in archives,  private collections and published sources, organized the documents and indexed them. At the start of our project, they had published two volumes of the Selected Papers of Jane Addams (since then Volume 3 has been published).

The microfilm headers that her team created gave our undergraduates a real head start when working with the texts. A letter to “Alice” was in fact a letter to Addams’ sister “Sarah Alice Addams Haldeman,” carbon copies of letters that had no signatures were identified clearly in the targets. They also identified the place where the letter was written from and sometimes the correct date.

We left the microfilm headers on the scans showing the work of the founding project.

And even more, we had the index to the microfilm. Unlike most other editing projects, the Jane Addams Papers Microfilm Index identified not just the authors and recipients of letters, but most time, the people mentioned in those letters, and in some cases the subjects. So, if “Edith” was mentioned in a letter and the students (or editors!) did not know who Addams was talking about, we could consult the microfilm index, and with a little adjustment, convert a microfilm reel and frame citation to our digital image files. This really helped in the early days of the project, when most of the correspondents and associates were not in our system.

This January, Assistant Editor Victoria Sciancalepore took a road trip to North Carolina to get some of the archives of the original Jane Addams Papers Project. We brought the precious boxes, filled with index cards, copies of the documents and targets that were used to create the microfilm, and archival search records. It was exciting to unpack them and fill our file cabinets (and then some!) with these records, which we immediately put to use.

While most of the scans from the microfilm are good quality, there are some that are difficult to read. In the past we identified documents with poor images with an “Onsite” tag. Slowly but surely we contacted or traveled to the archives to get a new image. Some were penciled originals or light blue carbon copies that had been copied, then microfilmed, and then scanned. To our delight, we were able to substitute the copy in the Addams Project files for a number of light scans, which will save us time and money.

Even more valuable, and appreciated by student transcribers, many of the files also included handwritten transcriptions for some of the more difficult to read handwritten documents. While the first three volumes of the Selected Papers only carry the story to 1900, these transcriptions are throughout the collection. It has helped clear up a lot of [illegible]s from our early transcriptions.

Our debt to the editors that went before us, finding, organizing, transcribing and editing these documents cannot be overstated, and we want to thank each and every one of them!

 

Data Visualizations and Jane Addams

Last spring I had the pleasure of working with two undergraduate students, Taylor Lundeen and  Catie Olson, enrolled in the University of Michigan’s School of Information. They worked on a capstone project on data visualization, using our Jane Addams digital edition databases.  Anneliese Dehner, our web developer, helped out with the some technical aspects of the collaboration.

One of the many great things about digital publication is that the information we create can be reused and repurposed in ways that we might not have thought of. Making our data available to researchers to explore has been one of our goals from the start of our work on Jane Addams, and with this investigation we have learned what we can do fairly easily, and what is more complex.

 Accessing the Data

Our first step was to get a copy of our data exported out so that Taylor and Catie could work on it. What they found worked the best was an Omeka plugin (Omeka Rest API) that allowed them to export data in a format that worked well with data manipulation software.

Our ultimate goal is to have a utility on the digital edition that will enable users to download all or parts of the data for investigation.

One problem that reared its head immediately is that we have a very large dataset, and it is growing larger every day. This made it difficult, using the tools they had available to work with the whole set.

Natural Language Processing

One of the approaches, which Catie worked on, was seeing what we could learn from analyzing the “Text” field in our database, where transcriptions are stored. This kind of analysis can track the frequency of words, or compare word usage over time. Eventually it could be used for topic modeling, where a digital tool tries to make sense of words that appear together. These groupings can uncover connections that we sometimes don’t expect.

An important step in working with our texts was data cleaning, the process by which HTML and special characters were cleaned out and text was split word by word. Then Catie built bar charts that displayed the most common words. She built a separate chart for each year to allow us to compare years to see what Addams was thinking and writing about.

The most obvious finding to me, was that we needed to think about stop words — words that are excluded in the results because they are too common or have no analytical meaning. Articles, like “a” and “the” are common stop words– we also had to consider “page” which we use to signify the next page in our transcriptions, and, gulp, even “Hull House” because we transcribed the letterhead that Jane Addams used. Other words like “Mrs,” “Mr.” and “Miss” and salutations like “Dear” are candidates for being pulled from the analysis.

We also got to see the frequency of that nemesis of editors – “illegible.” This comes up far more frequently than I would like, but I was gratified to see that in the years where we have proofread the texts, the frequency is much lower.

It will surprise no one that “peace” and “war” shot to the top in 1915.

Frequency of words in 1915.

In 1905, the most frequent words deal more with the plight of children and represent Addams’ work on child labor and welfare in Chicago.

Frequency of words in 1905.

Catie also worked on another way to show the content of Addams’ writings, plotting the frequency of a word over time. Similar to the Google n-gram viewer that can compare the frequency of words in Google Books over time, this gives you a sense of the chronology.  We did not have the capacity at this point to allow users to type the words they want, but were able to produce n-grams for some of the most popular words.

Seen together, it is a little frightening, but on the live version on the site, you can select a single word to analyze.

The Top 50 Words, all in one place!

Tracking “peace” from 1901-1917.

The n-gram for “Illegible” shows the power of proofreading! When the data was downloaded for use, we had just finished proofreading 1915!

An n-gram of words we could not read.

Social Network Analysis

Another approach was to see what we could learn from social network analysis. Using Omeka’s Item Relations plugin, we have been tracking relationships — mostly between documents and the people, organizations, and events that are mentioned in them. We also are building connections between people and organizations, tracking which people were members of which organizations, for example, or who participated in a specific event.  We wondered whether the relationships between people and organizations might yield some interesting insights, or whether we could find other connections between people and the metadata gathered about them. Taylor was responsible for this project.

Our large dataset proved to be problematic for developing a meaningful social network based on shared connections. We think there is promise for this in future by controlling which people are included in the network, but the sheer number of people and the amount of common tags produced a daunting graph.

This plot includes only 270 Addams connections associated with Chicago. The full data on 8,000 names was too complex to load.

Instead, Taylor created a geographical visualization of Addams’s social networks related to several topics. We used our tags for movements like “Woman Suffrage,” “Child Labor,” and “Peace” and plotted their geographic locations.  Compare Addams’ Settlement Movement network and her Peace network below to see the expansion of her work internationally.

On the live version of these maps, you can zoom in and out and mouse over each dot to reveal the name of the activist.

Going Forward

It was amazing to see what two talented students could do in such a short period of time!  The experience has helped us think more about how we want to make our data accessible, and has uncovered challenges that we need to think about. Our database is large and complex and developing means to limit the queries is going to be important.

We are looking forward to working with other UMSI students and any digital humanists interested in advancing this work.

Jane Addams Papers Receives Federal Funding

I am delighted to announce that the Jane Addams Papers has received two federal grants, one from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission and a two-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. We are extremely grateful for this support! Continue reading “Jane Addams Papers Receives Federal Funding”

Addams Papers Joins SNAC

I am pleased to announce that the Jane Addams Papers will be joining the Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) Cooperative in its final phase of work. SNAC has been hosted by the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities and the University Library and funded by the National  Endowment for the Humanities (2010-2012) and the Andrew Mellon Foundation (2012-2017). The Cooperative seeks to improve the economy and quality of archival processing and description, and build a global social-document network using both computational methods and human curation.

I first came across the SNAC web portal when doing research for biographies for our digital edition. SNAC provides biographical information, links to archival collections, and to related people, families and organizations.

I decided that we would make SNAC one of our go-to resources for our biographies. We link all our biographies to the SNAC record to enable our researchers to locate an ever expanding list of resources on that person. SNAC imports data from finding aids, Wikipedia entries, and other sources. As we made links between our biographies and theirs, I started to wonder whether we might be able to contribute materials as well. I reached out to Daniel Pitti, the project director.

The Jane Addams Papers is not an archive, but an edition, and I wasn’t exactly certain how what we we would interact with SNAC. With only two years of work under our belts, we have identified over 4,500 individuals, who wrote letters to Jane Addams, received letters from her, or were mentioned in the documents. Our individuals range from historical figures, like Plato and Wat Tyler, to Chicago police George Shippy and John McWeeny. We have over 100 suffrage activists, including Catherine Karaveloff, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Zofia Golińska-Daszyńska. There are philosophers, criminals, homemakers, and union leaders, and over 200 social workers and welfare activists. About 60% of the names we have linked thus far are men and 40% are women.

The people who come up in Addams’  documents are primarily American, but we have increasing numbers associated with Europe and Asia as Addams broadened her reach and networks. The screen shot below of our map view of individuals will change as we deal with more of Addams’s international peace work.

 

We are looking forward to seeing how SNAC can work with data coming from our Omeka-based digital edition.  We will not be the only editing project joining at this time, the Walt Whitman Archive is also coming on board.

I will keep you posted as the work begins.

 

Support Federal Funding for the Humanities

The Jane Addams Papers Project would not be possible if not for the support of the federal government, in our case, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The work that we do, bringing rare archival documents to broad audiences, serves a wide range of the public–from a scholar working on an interpretation of Addams’ philosophy, to a college student writing a thesis on the impact of women on the Progressive Era, or a high school freshman creating a National History Day performance on Hull House. (National History Day, by the way, is also funded by the NEH).

At the Addams Papers, support provided by these two agencies has funded:

  • The microfilming of the Jane Addams Papers in the 1980s, which serves as the basis for our digital edition. Without the work done finding, copying and microfilming materials, identifying dates and authors in a detailed index, our work would be much more difficult.
  • The scanning of the Addams microfilm to build our digital edition.
  • The salaries of eight students who describe and transcribe documents and conduct research. This is an added boon, because federal dollars spent on student workers pay twofold. Besides the help we get on the project, it provides the students with unique experience in historical research and digital humanities work that helps them stand out whether applying for a job or going on to graduate school.
  • The salary of an assistant editor who helps supervises student work and training, and insures quality control over their work through proofreading and verification. She also conducts research, transcribes documents, and works on clearing permissions so that we can publish the documents.
  • The salary of a part-time assistant editor who manages work on our book edition. She selects the initial pool of documents to be published as a fully annotated scholarly print edition. She also helps with proofreading and verification.
  • The work of our Chicago researcher who gathers newly found Addams documents, helps us with difficult transcriptions, and conducts research on Chicago-area topics.
  • The efforts of two web developers who have customized and designed the functionality of the Jane Addams Digital Edition and designed a beautiful site.

Our goal is to provide free public access to Jane Addams’ correspondence and writings, via a digital edition. You don’t have to be a scholar who can travel to an archive, or a student at a large research library to access these documents. The site is also building a unique resource of identifications of the people, organizations, events, and publications discussed in the documents that will provide students of the Progressive Era with a rich resource.

The Addams Papers is but one of the many projects supported by the NHPRC and the NEH that help enrich our understanding of the past.

What you can do

Once a year, the National Humanities Alliance focuses support and attention for federal funding for the humanities. Advocates from every state come to Washington on Humanities Advocacy Day (Tuesday, March 14) to talk to their representative and senators about the importance of this work and its value to all Americans. It is especially important this year due to rumors that funds for the NEH may be eliminated from the President’s budget.

You can help!

Stacy Lynn Joins the Jane Addams Papers!

stacymcdermottIt is with great pleasure that we welcome Stacy Lynn to the Jane Addams Papers team as our new Assistant Editor. Stacy comes to us with a wealth of over 20 years experience as a scholarly editor, gained at the Papers of Abraham Lincoln, where she most recently served as Associate Editor and Assistant Director.

Stacy holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois and is the author of two books that came out of her Lincoln research: Mary Lincoln: Southern Girl, Northern Woman (2015) and The Jury in Lincoln’s America (2012). In addition, she worked on four volumes of the The Papers of Abraham Lincoln: Legal Documents and Cases, 4 vols. (2008). She has written many articles and book reviews and given conference papers and presentations.

Stacy’s primary responsibility will be managing our work on the Selected Papers of Jane Addams, starting with Volume 1, which will cover 1901-1913, but we anticipate that she will also work on our social media outreach and other editorial tasks.