Author: chajo

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Excavating the History of Women and the Peace Movement

The peace movement dominates Jane Addams’s work from 1914 until her death in 1935. Working through the Woman’s Peace Party, the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Addams worked with her counterparts in many nations in a global movement to bring about peace, social justice, and equality.  She also served as the de facto leader of the American women’s peace movement.

Our detailed focus on the content of the documents and our efforts to identify the people mentioned in them yields a different kind of history than one that only focuses on the leaders of movements.  As we have begun publishing WILPF documents from both the United States and abroad, we are finding the names of early adherents, donors, and activists and adding them to the project’s database.

We know about Emily Greene Balch, Crystal Eastman, and Lucy Biddle Lewis, who were Addams’s coworkers for peace in the United States. But what about the rank and file? The women whose dollar donations funded the work of the WILPF? It turns out that within Jane Addams’s correspondence, we can learn about them too.

Eleanor Daggett Karsten, the secretary of the Woman’s Peace Party and then the United States Section of the WILPF, updated Addams every few weeks in 1920 with information about the women joining the new league, founded in 1919 at the International Congress of Women. As a document to add to our edition, I have to admit that each time I saw one of these multi-page columnar lists, I sighed, knowing that this one document might take a week or more to completely enter into our system due to the number of names. Thankfully, most of these lists contained street addresses, which made it easier (though not always easy!) to identify the women.

It didn’t take long to realize that instead of drudgery, adding the names of the early members of the WILPF was historical excavation of the best kind. Our biographical work is carried out in two steps. First the student or editor who enters the document into our system tries to link the name on the document to an existing name in our database. We use an Omeka-based system and a plug-in called Item Relations, to search the more than 12,0000 names in the system. When the person is not there, we add them. In this stage, the goal is to simply identify the person so that we are sure they are not duplicated and that we have verified their basic information.

We strive to add birth and death dates, full names, and a short biography, which we don’t publish until the second stage, when a student researcher does more in-depth work and drafts a full biography. Our goal is to then create relationships between the people in the edition and the organizations and events they participated in. This social network of Addams’s world being built slowly document by document, is one of the results of the project that we are most excited about. It will take time to build the data up, but it is time well spent.

For women, that means that “Mrs. Jerome H. Frank on 168 Hamptondale Road in Hubbard Woods, Illinois,” becomes “Florence Kiper Frank (1887?-?)” A draft biography, that isn’t publicly available yet notes that she was a member of the United States Section of the WILPF and was married to lawyer Jerome H. Franks and had a daughter named Barbara. Much of this comes from census records (having a street address on these lists is an enormous help),  local newspapers, and other web-based resources to get accurate information.  We create a bibliography pointing to the sources used so that others can follow our trail.

It is extremely exciting to find a photograph of the women, often in the U.S. Passport Applications that we access via Ancestry.com. Though the images are not of the best quality, hopefully we can add scanned originals at some point in the future.  We have also found that having even these short biographical stubs accessible on the web means that family members can find the project and see the associations that their ancestors had with Addams and peace. We have already received some photographs and biographical information from family members and hope that this will increase as we add more names.

Some of the more challenging research revolves around women who worked for peace outside the United States. There are many complicating factors—misspelled or partial names, the lack of genealogical resources for most non-English speaking countries, lack of language skills among our staff to read and search foreign-language resources (Google Translate only helps so much!), and often a lack of detailed geographical  information about where they lived.  Many of these peace activists are hard to trace through World War II, as records of pacifists and peace organizations often did not survive the war.

But adding them, even with partial names and limited dates, accomplishes something. As we enter more documents and move into the 1920s and 1930s, we uncover the names of those who participated in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and in time we will learn more about their lives as well.

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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.

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Monuments vs. Documentary Editions: How Best to Remember the Past

A statue of Christopher Columbus outside the Minnesota State Capitol was taken down by American Indian Movement members on June 10, 2020.

We have all been thinking and talking about monuments, about how they are created, what they mean,  and when or whether they should come down.  Whether it is the toppling of the likeness of Christopher Columbus in Minnesota, efforts to remove the Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond, or the removal of Margaret Sanger’s name from Planned Parenthood of New York’s downtown clinic, the meaning of monuments and our understanding of the past is being challenged. Monuments are a problematic way to understand history. They are a one-note, simplistic way of claiming that a person  mattered to the people that put them up. Over time, they become something else, icons of the cities in which they are located, and a shorthand guide to a history that glorified mostly male and mostly white political and military leaders. They offer a simple message — hey, this guy was great! We understand the danger of this kind of simplification when talking about living people. We even have a phrase to warn us about the risks of doing it — putting someone on a pedestal — or to believe or behave as if someone  is perfect  to the extent that one ignores that person’s flaws or faults.

The Robert E. Lee Monument in Richmond has been defaced with graffiti. The governor announced plans to take it down on June 4, 2020, but this has been challenged in court.

And it is the faults and the flaws of the people we have honored with monuments that are being exposed now.  It is past time. No one, now or then, is perfect. How can we reconcile honoring an individual who owned slaves, or who fought against the Union, or who held racist, sexist, or eugenic views? On the flip side, how can we ignore the context of the times they lived in? Is it right to hold people to ahistorical standards of behavior? We have to place people in historical context, based on an understanding of what the world was like when they lived. This isn’t just making excuses or becoming an apologist for figures from the past.  We have to stop seeing people as either good or evil, heroes or villains, and instead be able to see the grey, to praise what they did well and condemn what they did that was intolerable. We have to stop putting them on pedestals.

A Better Way to Learn About the Past

A name on a sign or a building, or a statue doesn’t tell much about the person, for good or ill.

If a monument is too simplistic — too one-note — to convey the complexity of a human life and the historical times they lived in, what is the alternative? I would argue that it is the documentary edition, made freely available, that brings understanding of the complexities of the past. My career as a historian has been as a documentary editor, first with the Margaret Sanger Papers, and now with the Jane Addams Papers, so I may be biased, but I also speak from experience.

A documentary edition is not a film, it is a compilation of historical documents, prepared by scholars, on a theme of historical importance. It is usually centered around a single person’s life, but occasionally describes a group, such as the Freedmen and Southern Society Project or the Yale Indian Project’s Native Northeast Portal.

We center the work around the words of the historical figure

Much of the work of the editor revolves around finding, selecting, and transcribing the letters, speeches, diaries, and other texts produced by a historical figure. We use our historical training and long hours of reading literally everything a person wrote to select documents that offer a nuanced and complex view of that person’s life and career.

We don’t shirk from the negative or controversial. When selecting documents for the Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, we made sure that her views on race, on eugenics, and on abortion were included alongside her views on women’s rights, civil liberties,  and reproductive freedom. With the Selected Papers of Jane Addams, we look to highlight Addams’s views on race, poverty and immigration, just as much as her ideas about social work and peace.

The Jane Addams Papers Project consists of a microfilm, print edition (6 volumes planned) and a digital edition based on the microfilm.

Many editions create two products. The first is a comprehensive edition, often digital nowadays, but in the past they were published on microfilm. These collections, resulting from years-long searches in archives and private collection, are extremely valuable for scholars because they bring together materials that were dispersed over the globe. The selected edition, often published in book form, though increasingly in digital form, takes the most historically significant materials and adds annotation, to create a readable series that tells a shorter, yet nuanced, story of the figure’s life.

We work really hard to make sure that the texts of the documents that you read in our editions are accurate and complete.  You won’t find snippets of texts removed or taken out of their context  in order to make an argument.  We proofread the transcriptions as many times as is needed to get a good, accurate text. The focus is on the document, and by reading them, one after another, you gain a deeper, personal understanding of the subject.

We provide historical context, but leave interpretation to you

Editions use annotation (headnotes, footnotes, and introductory texts) to give the reader a sense of the times, to fill in the gaps when the texts don’t do it. Editorial annotation is not the same as historical interpretation. This was brought to my attention when working on an early draft of my dissertation on birth control clinics, when my adviser, Linda Gordon, pointed out that I wasn’t disclosing what I thought about all the materials. My text was descriptive and it needed to be analytical and interpretive.  I was writing like an editor, carefully researching and describing situations, but not bringing my own views, ideas, and analysis to the foreground. Writing an interpretive narrative is a different animal, one in which your experiences and the times in which you live color the way that you approach a topic. Think about multiple biographies of the same person — the basics of their lives stay the same, but the questions we ask, the values we bring to the topic affect the way that we view and interpret the past. Editors aren’t immune to those same biases, but our approach is different.

Our annotation is document-driven. What I mean by that is that we look at the texts, written by our subjects, and explore their content. When a person or event or topic is mentioned, we add a footnote to explain who or what they are talking about. There is no better training than researching for a documentary edition.  You don’t get to decide that the topic is too hard and you can’t skip over things or change your research direction, like you might do in a monograph or term paper.  These notes are generally short and informational rather than interpretive, which teaches you to be precise and succinct. Reading the text with the footnotes helps the reader understand things that a contemporary reader would already know.  I liken it to reading with the town busybody standing over your shoulder, providing you with the backstory for each document.  Except that busybody is a historian.

Jane Addams to Theodore Roosevelt, August 24, 1912.

Annotation can also fill gaps in documentation. The nature of a selected edition is that we have left many, many documents out.  For example, we selected a letter written to Theodore Roosevelt from Addams in 1912 about her role in winning women to the Progressive Party. This was not the first letter written about the topic, so we use annotation to summarize what already occurred before that document was written. It brings the reader up to the now.  We also use annotation to refer readers to material in archives and in our comprehensive microfilm or digital edition where they can go deeper.

Where does interpretation fit in all this? After reading so much and researching every bit of a person’s life, editors do form opinions and interpretations. They might turn up in the introduction to a volume, a conference paper, a blog post,  journal article, or monograph. The litmus test, for me, is whether a person who doesn’t like the subject can use our work with confidence. Will they trust that you haven’t hid or obscured documents or other materials that could make your subject look bad? My favorite review of the first volume of the Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger was from the Weekly Standard, where David Tell wrote:

Somewhere, amidst the sucker punches and cries of foul, the truth must reside. And “somewhere,” it turns out, is the enormous and altogether dazzling selection of public and private records just put out by the manuscript curators at New York University’s “Margaret Sanger Papers Project.” They too, like the earlier biographers, unambiguously admire the woman. But they have done their editing with scrupulous care, they have annotated the documents they reproduce with monk-like dispassion, and on the face of it they have held nothing back. (January 27, 2003)

History for the Masses

Digital scholarly editions, made freely available, are a far better monument to the life of a historical figure than statues or buildings could ever be. They provide a historically accurate, nuanced look at a life. They show the moments of weakness as well as moments of great strength and more than biographies or statues ever can, they render historical figures as real people. People with problems, people who have difficult family members, who follow fad diets, watch plays and movies, and fully lived in their times. They also foster critical thinking about historical figures and moments. While editions won’t fit easily into 140 characters or a 15-second TikTok video; neither does history.

Who we select to be the subjects of editions matters

Editions don’t stand outside society, and there has been a long history of privileging the papers of white male politicians and military leaders. Whether the founding fathers, presidents, or generals, the subjects of these editions sound much like the names on monuments, and the names we all learned in history books. The editions of these papers provide a more nuanced view of those lives, including co-workers, rivals, families, and in some cases, slaves.

A statue of Jane Addams lifting an immigrant child on the campus of Cal State Fresno.

In the 1970s, the field began to open up, adding a handful of projects featuring women and African-Americans. But it is not enough. We need to broaden the topics of editions to include the voices of marginalized peoples. And we need to broaden the range of people who become editors, because more voices will reveal a more vibrant story of America’s past. Smaller projects, based on intriguing people reveal lives and stories that have been erased from popular notions of history.  It is happening, albeit slower than we would like.

Thinking again about monuments, I wonder if there might be an “edition-worthy” check before you put up a monument. Could you devote years of research, funding, and scholarly effort to create the Papers of Edmund Pettus? And after you had done so, exploring his ideas and providing context for his military career, his political views, and his leadership in the Ku Klux Klan, would you build a statue or name a bridge after him?

 

 

 

 

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Visualizing Jane Addams’ Social Networks

I recently took a course on Gephi, an open-source network visualization tool offered by the Programming 4 Humanists group at Texas A&M University. This three-session Zoom-based course, taught by Katayoun Torabi was a great entry to a digital humanities topic that I have long been interested in.

One of our long-range goals at the Jane Addams Papers Project is to make the underlying data in the digital edition accessible so that digital humanists can use it for research. Having a chance to play around with network visualizations helped me to think through how we might use this tool to understand Jane Addams’s life and her causes in new and interesting ways. It also helped me better understand what we need to do to make data from our edition available.

A few ideas popped out immediately:

    • a visualization of Addams’s correspondence, modeled on the ideas used to create the Mapping Republic of Letters project at Stanford.
    • a visualization of how people in the Addams’ digital edition were connected via organizations, looking at for example, the interactions between women involved in the suffrage movement and the peace movement.

In this post we will look at correspondence networks.

Thinking About Data

The examples that Katayoun used in our class were all drawn from literature. We mostly worked with data from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, looking at instances of speech between characters to create visualizations of how the characters related to one another.

Here is my visualization of Hamlet using Katayoun’s data set. Central characters have larger circles and appear in the center, while less important characters are further out, smaller and have fewer appearances.

What struck me almost immediately was that the difference between this kind of analysis and what I hoped to do, was that with a literary work (or any single historical record), this analysis can provide an accurate representation of that text. As I thought about how we could this tool to understand the Jane Addams Papers, the problem of incomplete data reared its ugly head.

We have to understand that any visualization of the Jane Addams papers cannot fully be a visualization of Jane Addams’ life.  Addams’s papers are incomplete. We are missing many of Addams’ most intimate letters between family members and her long-time companion, Mary Rozet Smith. At best, we might be able to visualize more of her professional life than her personal one. But we are also missing many, many letters sent to colleagues and acquaintances that never made it into archives and private collections. Many of the papers of Addams’s European counterparts did not survive World War II. So what we are left with is an impression, a partial glimpse into her world, but an imperfect one.

What can counts of letters tell us about Addams’ life? When I first took on editing the Addams Papers, I tried to estimate (by counting entries in the microfilm edition index) how many documents we had in the base collection so that we could estimate how long the project would take. Even as basic a visualization as the one below can help you see the broadening of Addams’s life as she moved from a local activist to one who operated on a global scale.  It can give a rough visualization of when things happened in her life.

Counts from the microfilm index.

This red line (total documents) gives us a good sense of scale, and also the  years where we could expect the heaviest number of documents. In the first ten years (1901-1910) we had low document counts, which rose dramatically in 1912 (Addams’s participation in the 1912 presidential election), 1915 (Addams’s establishment of a peace movement in the U.S. and international peace congresses). Her activity through the 1920s and early 1930s remains high, with peaks in 1927 and 1931 (Addams’s Nobel Prize).

Looking at the lighter green line (letters written by Addams), we see a fairly consistent output until the end of her life. The only outlier is 1923, a year in which Addams was on a tour of Asia and then suffered from serious illness.  It is possible she wrote fewer letters, or fewer of them survived. Most of the dramatic peaks come from increases in incoming letters.

Anneliese Dehner, our web developer prepared a spreadsheet that represented the Item Relations for people in our digital edition. I was able to work with that in a rudimentary way to explore Gephi.

Nodes and edges

In network visualization there are two tables of information, nodes, which are unique objects, and edges, which link nodes by some kind of action. The hard work of network visualization is gathering all this data so that it can be displayed by Gephi or any other tools.

    • For a correspondence network, the NODES are the people in the database. They get an ID (in our case the Omeka ID number on our database) and a LABEL (the name of the person).
Here is a snippet from the Nodes table. Each name in the database is assigned a unique identifier.
    • The EDGES represent the letter. They contain an unique ID, a SOURCE (the ID number of the author of the letter) a TARGET (the ID number of the recipient of the letter) and a WEIGHT (the number of times that that same combination appears). They can also have a LABEL (the relationship — in this case “Written by”). The most common recipient, with 234 letters, is Sarah Alice Addams Haldeman (#50), the sister of Jane Addams. In second place is Emily Greene Balch (#501), a co-worker in the peace movement, donor Anita Blaine McCormick (#60) in third place, and social worker and settlement founder Lillian Wald (#33) in fourth place.
This table of edges show author Jane Addams’ (#5) most frequent recipients.
    • Another table of EDGES describes the people who were Mentioned in a document, not just the authors or recipients. This might get at a more representative understanding of Addams’s network because one could surmise that important people might be mentioned in letters even if the correspondence between those two people might be lost. And here we do see different results. On this table Mary Rozet Smith (#164), Addams’s companion comes out at the top, with Woodrow Wilson (#4596) coming in second, donor Louise DeKoven Bowen (#814) in third place, and Addams’s niece, Marcet Haldeman-Julius (#30) in fourth place.
This table shows the most commonly mentioned people in letters written by Jane Addams (#5).
Basic Visualization

My first visualization of the mentions data was, to be frank, underwhelming, unless you like big black boxes of goop!

There are simply too many points in this data!

We have over 10,000 names in the NODES table. To get to a visualization that is more legible, I excluded edges with less than 10 mentions in the correspondence.  Now that is readable! The weight of the line indicates the number of mentions.

These are the people mentioned the most in the digital edition, thus far.

I played with the appearances of our networks to make them easier to understand. Making the labels and the circle sizes proportional to the number of mentions allows you do see things more clearly.

The visualization is interactive. If I click on Paul Kellogg’s circle, only those names associated with him are highlighted– in this case a small subset of the network.

Paul Kellogg of the Survey’s network.

While Emily Greene Balch, a peace activist, is far more interconnected.

 

Emily Balch worked with Addams in the Woman’s Peace Party and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

The idea here is to explore the various networks that Addams built in her work for peace, social justice, social work, and other causes.

Next steps

Generating the data to build the NODES and EDGES tables requires some work, and filtering the data to get a meaningful result will be critical to creating data sets that the public can use. Our goal is to make this kind of data accessible to students and digital humanists to explore data visualization and Jane Addams.

We are still adding documents to the digital edition, so the first step may be building a dataset of correspondence for each year that we have completed.

In my next post, I’ll look at building a network using our data on people and organizational membership.

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Survey on Digital Editions

 
 
The Jane Addams Papers Project, in partnership with the University of Michigan School of Information, is exploring the user experience for both the Jane Addams Digital Edition and scholarly digital editions in general. If you are a student or a scholar who has used at least one print or digital scholarly edition in the past, we would be grateful if you could take 5–10 minutes to participate. The survey will be open until Wednesday 3/18. Responses are anonymous, but we will gather your email address at the end to enter you in a drawing for a Starbucks gift card!
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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!

 

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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.

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“Peace, War and World Order”- Dr. James Marquardt’s Web-based Timeline

The influence Jane Addams had on society is no secret; we still talk about her beliefs, achievements and historical footprint today. Jane Addams has done so much in her life that Dr. James Marquardt, Associate Professor of Politics and the Chair of International Relations Program at Lake Forest College, and his students have created an online timeline of her achievements. The timeline is called Jane Addams- Peace, War and World Order: A Web-based timeline.

The abstract of the timeline acknowledges her strides to improve the lives and living conditions for immigrants and the poor, but this timeline focuses more on her “peace advocacy,” during World War I. After looking over numerous primary and secondary sources Dr. Marquardt and his students have completed their timeline, successfully illustrating Jane Addams’ pacifist beliefs and opposition to international armament and war.

“I started digging into her primary writings on the war,” said Dr. Marquardt, “and I decided that I wanted to do this a little more elaborately so I offered a course called Jane Addams Peace Advocate. It mostly focused on her international peace advocacy before, during and after the war.”

After Lake Forest College received a grant for the school to develop digital pages and Chicago-related events, phenomena and historical developments in the humanities and social sciences, Dr. Marquardt then applied for a grant to build a page dedicated to Jane Addams peace advocacy and her historical significance, which he received and then began hiring students. Together they began studying, analyzing and building the Jane Addams – Peace, War and World Order timeline.

The timeline focuses mostly on Addams’ involvement in WWI and her opposition of the war, but Dr. Marquardt plans to continue to study Addams with the hopes of continuing to expand the timeline from her involvement in the Peace Movement with it ending when Addams received the Nobel Peace Prize. He plans on taking all of his knowledge about Addams and writing a book entitled “Jane Addams: The Great War and Her Quest to Transform National Relations.”

He’s not the only one who feels passionate about Addams; Dr. Marquardt explained that his students are very passionate about her as well. “They’re really into [the project]. Addams is such an inspirational figure that they’re a little too generous towards her, in terms of their writing and their public presentations that they’ve made about her.”

Since the timeline highlights Jane Addams’ peace advocacy I had to ask Dr. Marquardt to define peace advocacy in his own words.

“I would define it as actions, writings, ideas related to efforts to end war. That’s my thinking about it, but my students have a much more generous viewing of peace advocacy, they see peace as not simply something we ought to strive for in our international relations in our social relations generally.”  

Dr. Marquardt has learned a lot from his students during this process. “Their understanding was that advocating for peace is not simply a global issue but an issue of interpersonal relations. It’s about the end of violence along racial lines, it’s about the end of violence against women, violence against children, hunger, deprivation, unemployment.” They share the same vision and beliefs that Jane Addams did and they carry on Addams’ beliefs and visions for a brighter future for everyone.  

The website went live last week and for those interested in viewing Dr. Marquardt and his students work the link is here: http://digitalchicago.lakeforest.edu/exhibits/show/jane-addams/our-purpose. 

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Ardent Girls and Amy Merrill’s Passion for Addams

 

Amy Merrill (https://www.amymerrillplays.com)

Amy Merrill, playwright of ARDENT GIRLS, has an upcoming reading of her play on February 22. The play is about Jane Addams, the sisterhood at Hull House and Addams’ 1896 encounter with Leo Tolstoy. She was willing to talk to me about her project, her work and her passion for Jane Addams.

Merrill was inspired to write her play once she read about Jane Addams’ encounter with Leo Tolstoy.  She read an excerpt from the “Second Twenty Years at Hull House,” where Addams traveled to Russia and Tolstoy could not stop staring at her sleeves. Merrill explained that this encounter gave Addams a lot to think about because Addams admired Tolstoy. But the experience gave Merrill “leeway to sort of come up with my own idea about what happened and how she felt about it and how the impact of the visit had on the rest of her life.”

In her play, Merrill depicts her idea of the Addams-Tolstoy encounter. She’s always been attracted to encounters by different types of people. Addams and Tolstoy are very idealistic, high-minded people, but they’re both different types of people. “It’s also fun to write the scene because it takes place in Russia at the Tolstoy Estate whereas most of the place takes place in Chicago. So it’s kind of fun to sort of transport everybody to Russia. So it’s the improbable, real-life encounter with Leo Tolstoy.”

These are rather large sleeves! (Jane Addams, 1898, in the gown she wore to visit Tolstoy).

Not only Tolstoy and Addams, but Merrill also paints the picture of Florence Kelley and Mary Rozet-Smith competing for Addams’ attention. She explains the two as an “effective duo” with Florence Kelley being very passionate with an interesting background and Jane Addams as a moderator. Mary Rozet-Smith was fun for Merrill because she’s not as flamboyant as the other women are, and writing all three of them in “ARDENT GIRLS.”

Addams was a “fighter for people having better lives and it’s inspiring.” With all of the sexual harassment cases and accusations coming out today, it’s important to remember Addams’ legacy. Amy Merrill admires Addams work and legacy and truly enjoyed writing a play about her. “To know Jane is to love her.” People have been thinking about her legacy and wish that she could be with us today.

For those in the Waltham, MA area, the public reading of “ARDENT GIRLS” will be held at the Merrick Theatre (Spingold Building) on February 22 at 7:30 pm at Brandeis University, Waltham, M.A.