Project News | Jane Addams Papers Project

March 10, 2017October 14, 2025

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!

Take a few minutes to look at the work supported in your state by the NHPRC and explore NEH-funded projects to get a sense of the breadth and depth of the work.
Call or write your congressmen and ask them to support funding for the NEH and NHPRC.
Share the call for help among your friends on social media. Use hashtags #SaveNEH #NEHMatters.

January 13, 2017September 29, 2025

Stacy Lynn Joins the Jane Addams Papers!

It 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.

November 30, 2016September 29, 2025

Jane Addams and an Anonymous Bull Moose

Members of the losing party of a presidential election are met with disappointment and sadness. In the following months the party is left to recuperate and reorganize. The losing and winning party must also plan how they will function with each other in the future. In the election of 1912, the election involved a variety of political parties with some overlapping and some clashing goals. Jane Addams had an important role in the election of 1912 and its many political parties as she became the first woman to nominate a presidential nominee by seconding the nomination for Theodore Roosevelt in the Progressive Party. The backlash she received for seconding the nomination of Theodore Roosevelt for the Progressive Party, also known as the Bull Moose Party, was astounding. It lead to some of the most interesting letters I have ever read throughout my time at the Jane Addams Papers Project. After the election, Addams continued to receive letters about her participation in the 1912 election.

roosevelt-and-addams-cartoon — A 1912 US cartoon, showing the “Big Four at the Two Chicago Conventions”. Front row (Progressive or “Bull Moose” party): Theodore Roosevelt, Jane Addams, Hiram Johnson, Albert Beveridge. Back row (Republican party): Boies Penrose, William Barnes, Jr., Winthrop M. Crane, Elihu Root.

While the Progressive Party was attempting to recover after a presidential loss, Addams received a letter that claimed that the party would potentially be destroyed by all of the other political parties involved in the election of 1912. An anonymous writer, referring to himself as “a Bull Moose,” wrote Addams on December 13, 1912 an at first seemingly innocent letter, praising Addams for her efforts with the suffrage movement. As “Bull Moose” continues, he wrote to Addams about an alleged “disaster” for the Progressive Party. In this alleged disaster the Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, and Prohibitionists had created a trap for the Progressive Party to fall into and ruin the party forever. “Bull Moose” decided to take it upon himself to create five “shamtraps” for the Progressive Party, in order to expose the traps of the other parties, but the “shamtraps” needed to be dealt with before December 15th or the plan would not work.

This was not even the strangest part of the letter. “Bull Moose” then goes on to say that Addams can tell no one else about the letter except Theodore Roosevelt, who he refers to as “our future President,” despite the fact that Roosevelt has already lost the 1912 election. “Bull Moose” must have been hoping for a 1916 victory for Roosevelt. Unfortunately for “Bull Moose,” Roosevelt would not enter the 1916 election. “Bull Moose” proceeded to give Addams a list of instructions that will prevent the other political parties from trapping the Progressive Party. The first few seem pretty reasonable – instructions such as “not to side with either Drys nor Wetts,” which makes sense since the Prohibition Party is allegedly involved in this “shamtrap” plot. Instructions six and seven are the strangest. In rule number six, “Bull Moose” instructed Addams that he would come to her as a “polish tramp to wash windows, with a raincoat on” and told her all of the horrible ways to treat him. Rule number seven instructed Addams to treat a hobo the same way, perhaps worse, if “Bull Moose” should have sent a hobo in his place.

Addams was instructed by “Bull Moose” not to share the contents of this letter with anyone besides Theodore Roosevelt until 1917. So far there has been no indication that Addams ever shared the contents of the letter with anyone, including Theodore Roosevelt. The Jane Addams Papers Project works chronologically so we have not yet read and transcribed the letters from 1917. I will certainly keep my eyes peeled for any letters about “Bull Moose” once we get there.

political-humor-1912 — This political cartoon follows the 1912 Presidential Election in which Woodrow Wilson (D) won in a landslide defeat over Theodore Roosevelt (Progressive/Bull Moose Party), William Taft (R), and Eugene Debs (Socialist Party). (From the November 8, 1912 issue of the Sandusky Register.)

“Bull Moose” was not entirely off the mark when he said that the other political parties were planning to destroy the Progressive Party. The Progressive Party ultimately did fall because of other parties, mainly the Republicans. The Progressive Party essentially merged back together with the Republican Party, especially after Roosevelt refused to accept the Progressive presidential nomination in 1916 and chose to campaign for the Republican Party. Maybe the Progressive Party would have lasted longer if Addams had followed “Bull Moose’s” instructions!

This document can be located on the Jane Addams Papers microfilm on Reel 7, frame 542. It will soon be freely available to read and view in digital form on our database website, which can be found by clicking the link to the right of this post.

September 26, 2016October 14, 2025

Join our Editorial Team!

The Jane Addams Papers Project is seeking a part-time Assistant Editor to help work on the preparation of Volume 4 of the Selected Papers of Jane Addams. The position is funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. It is renewable year-by-year dependent on funding.

The Selected Papers of Jane Addams is a six-volume, selected edition. Volume 1-3, prepared by Mary Lynn Bryan and her staff covers the years 1860-1900. Volume 4, prepared by Cathy Moran Hajo and the staff at Ramapo College of New Jersey, will cover 1901-1913. The volume will be published by the University of Illinois Press.

The assistant editor will work 25 hours per week, some portion of which may be done by telecommuting. Earliest start date is October 15. The successful candidate will help select documents for inclusion in Volume 4, prepare the manuscript, help identify and organize the annotation research process, conduct research, and assist with proofreading. Duties may also include proofreading transcriptions and identifications for the digital edition, writing blog posts, and supervising student workers.

Required: M.A. in American history or a related field or current enrollment in a graduate program. Meticulous attention to detail and familiarity with computers, including database use, is essential. Preferred: Subject specialization in the Progressive Era with emphasis on Jane Addams, the suffrage and settlement house movements; or experience in scholarly editing or the publication of scholarly materials. AA/EOE. For more information, and to apply for the position, see job 223009 at Ramapo College’s website.

August 11, 2016September 29, 2025

2016 Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents

2016’s Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents was held New Orleans, LA, in a hotel on the corner of Bourbon Street and Canal Street. Its courses promised to educate those new to the field of documentary editing, as well as a chance to ask questions about our own projects. Just after classes ended, the Association for Documentary Editing held their annual meeting in the same hotel. And, with a generous grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), the Institute offered a stipend for accepted students.

My very first question was – Where can I sign up?

After an application process and multiple emails with the Institute’s Education Director, the excitement of acceptance to the program gave way to agonizing anticipation. Finally, after months of biding my time and waiting until the night before my flight to pack, I was stepping off the plane into the hot and humid air of Louisiana.

The next day, we began promptly at 8am with breakfast, and at 8:30 transitioned straight into class time. I was one of 22 classmates, and initial introductions showed just how varied our backgrounds were: There were some, like me, working on a traditional project with a print edition of selected letters, as well as a digital edition on a website. But there were some working on solo projects, with many questions on how best an institute could help their projects. There were librarians who had enough of helping with research, and had decided to delve into their own projects. And there were some still in school as Ph.D. candidates who had become swept up in the world of editing historical documents.

Classes were taught by experts in their fields, and those experts were Amanda Gailey (Scholarly Editing), Cathy Moran Hajo (Jane Addams Papers), and Jennifer Stertzer (Washington Papers). We were educated in a range of topics, from encoding text to better represent a transcription on the web, to preparing to fund your project through your home institution and private donors. There were classes on publishing digitally vs. publishing in print, as well as the best method for indexing and annotating those published documents. And the week of classes wrapped up with a thought on the future of documentary editing.

But there were things we couldn’t learn from our “experts”, and could only discover by talking to the other Institute participants. Each one had their own obstacles to overcome, such as funding and staffing, and their own experiences with editing documents. But with each hurdle, they had their own slightly unique solution, and those collective exchanges definitely helped facilitate discussions for the keys to solving unanswered questions.

At the end of our stay, many of us knew how to get to Café Du Monde by heart, and some had walked the length of Bourbon Street multiple times. But each of us who attended the Institute found ourselves no longer identifying as a singular project, but rather as one documentary editor with a network of peers, never truly alone in our shared quest to preserve and interpret history.

— Victoria Sciancalepore, Assistant Editor

August 9, 2016September 29, 2025

Using Omeka for Scholarly Editing

OmekaForEditing-2016 — For PDF version, click on image.

At the recent meeting of the Association for Documentary Editing, held August 4-6 in New Orleans, Louisiana, I participated in “New Approaches to Publishing Editions, a panel that explored the diverse ways that projects are putting their documents online. Each panelist talked for a short time, and then we displayed posters and demonstrations of our platforms and tools. Joining me on the platform was Jennifer Stertzer, the chair (Washington Papers), Ben Brumfield (Brumfield Labs), Ondine LeBlanc (Massachusetts Historical Society), Erica Cavanaugh (Washington Papers), M. Safa Saracoglu (Bloomfield University), and Clayton McCarl (University of North Florida).

Representing the Jane Addams Papers, my poster outlined the project’s use of Omeka, a content management platform designed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media to create digital archives and exhibits for small-scale museums and archives. Omeka was a good choice for the Jane Addams Papers because we are digitizing a large number of documents (over 20,000), including letters, articles, speeches and reports from 1901-1935.

The challenge for the Addams Papers was to develop a system simple enough for undergraduate student workers to use, while also building complex connections between the documents using descriptive metadata. We wanted to be able to publish documents online easily and flexibly, without having to learn to program. Omeka fit our needs well, and allows us to transcribe the documents, making them searchable.

IMG_20160805_170249(1) — Cathy and Tori at the ADE after the poster session.

We also needed a system that would enable us to manage permissions and copyright clearance. For 20th century documents, permissions are complex–not only do we need the permission from the owners of the manuscript, but we also need the authors or their heirs to grant permission for all documents published after 1922. For unpublished documents, authors fall into the public domain if they died more than seventy years ago–before 1946, but if they died later, we need to locate and secure permission from their heirs. In eleven months’ work, we have already entered the names of more than 2,000 individuals and organizations. While we don’t have to clear permission for all of them (many are only mentioned, or received letters, but did not write them), there are plenty that we do need to clear and we needed our digital platform to be able to track permission status.

We also want to build a digital edition that can take advantage of emerging digital humanities tools. We are currently able to generate maps and subject indexes directly from the Omeka database, and are tracking relationships between individuals, documents, events, and organizations.

Out of the box, so to speak, Omeka offers great possibilities. It maintains complex relationships between the different items that we include–tracking the authors, recipients, and people mentioned in documents, relating the drafts and similar versions of documents to one another, linking enclosures to their letters, while also letting them appear as their own documents.

One of the most useful features of Omeka is that it is open-source and can be extended with plugins. This means that the plugins we develop for use at the Addams Papers can be shared with other projects that are interested in the same kinds of functions. We already have plans to share our publishing, mapping, and relations improvements with the Franz Boas Papers.

We will be posting a more in depth exploration of how the project uses Omeka on the digital edition site in the near future.

June 28, 2016October 14, 2025

Documentary Editors at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute

(This post was originally published on the Association for Documentary Editing’s website.)

Since 2001, the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), held annually in Victoria, B.C., Canada, has been an annual gathering of technologists, scholars, librarians, graduate and undergraduate students…and editors. For the past three years, Jennifer Stertzer and I, joined this year by Erica Cavanaugh (George Washington Financial Papers Project), have offered a course entitled “Conceptualising and Creating Digital Editions,” one of a rich slate of hands-on and theoretical week-long immersions into digital humanities.

Students working on their website designs.

The twenty students who took our course came with some incredibly varied and fascinating projects. Just a few include Deanna Stover’s plan to create a digital edition of H.G. Wells’s Floor Games and Little Wars, a 1911 narrative set of gaming rules, Fiona Coll’s work on a digital editions of Morgan Robertson’s short works of fiction based on his sea-going experiences, and Elizabeth Honing’s plan to create a classroom module featuring a digital edition of Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1598-1600). The breadth of topics spanned centuries, from Rachel Roberts’ work on Anne Dowriche’s The French Historie (1589) to Eric Rasmussen’s plan to create an online web resource for studying the artistic and social networks around the contemporary American writer Lynne Tillman, and Kate Sikloski’s project to create a digital companion to her critical biography of Tobagonian-Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip. Paula Johanson was seeking guidance on turning her guide to kayaking, Green Paddler, into a digital edition, while Ellen Malenas Ledoux investigated creating a critical edition of Mary Darby Robinson’s Memoirs. All the projects represented rich resources that will be greatly enhanced by the editorial work planned for them.

Jennifer with Rachel Roberts and Melinda Creech at the class showcase on Friday afternoon.

The four and a half day course covered a lot of ground, but was focused on introducing students to many of the editorial issues that arise when contemplating a digital edition. We discussed how the main tasks of editing, selection, transcription, annotation, and research are changed when the materials are presented in a digital platform. We spent time talking about the pros and cons of various digital edition platforms and the tactics editors need to use to adapt them, focusing on TEI/XML, Drupal, Omeka, WordPress and Scalar. Through description, demonstration, and analysis, we helped students decide between platforms by focusing on the goals of their edition and the nature of their documents.

Erica and I at the course showcase on the last day of DHSI.

Students used one of the tools, Omeka, to begin to craft plans for their digital projects. They drafted policies on selection, transcription, annotation, and searching, developed site maps to envision navigation, page appearance, and useability, and estimated the time and work hours that it would take to complete their projects. Students played with metadata by creating sample documents, transcriptions and descriptions of their materials. They had one on one time with Erica, Jennifer and I to ask for advice, to experiment with visualization tools such as text analysis, digital maps and timelines, and some created rough prototypes of their site plans using Drupal.

DHSI offers many other courses of interest to editors, from intensive work with TEI encoding to text analysis, and project management. Victoria is beautiful (we went whale watching!), and the immersion on hands-on work with other people passionate about documents, scholarship, and technology makes for an experience unlike any other.

May 11, 2016October 14, 2025

What Did Jane Write? Publishing Transcribed Documents in a Digital Edition

I’ll be the first to admit it. Reading Jane Addams’ handwriting is difficult, and just when you think that you have gotten it down, you run across a letter that makes you question your profession.

Working on a digital edition with such challenging handwriting has been a bit different than working on a print edition. With print it is essential to get the transcription as perfect as you can because it is unlikely that there will ever be a revised printing of your edition; the best you can usually hope for is an embarrassing errata page that highlights every mistake that you have made (at least those that you have found!). With digital publication, we can seamlessly correct errors in transcription as soon as we discover them. And while this means there is less pressure on us to craft a perfect transcription, we do have to grapple with the question of how good our transcription should be in order to publish it.

From Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, April 30, 1901. Our current reading is: “P. S. I am much impressed with the Methodists. Anybody who says “Protestantism is dying out” [ought] to have seen them Sunday night raising $50000. for a clinical University & heard them sing out the [illegible]—”

First pass transcriptions generally have errors. Most of our draft transcriptions are done by students (amazing students!), who have made great strides in reading and transcribing Addams’ hand, but they are not perfect. Errors are made even when transcribing typed documents, which are sometimes long and have repetitive elements. In order to ensure that these errors are caught and corrected, we proofread each transcription at least once, in teams. What this means is that one editor reads from the document (reading punctuation and capitalization aloud as well) while the other follows along with the transcription. Whenever the two do not match, we stop and identify the discrepancy and correct it. It is not always the transcription–sometimes we read the document incorrectly. But this ensures that we have carefully proofread the original.

Problems arise when we cannot make out the words at the proofreading stage either. We mark the places where we are unsure of the meaning of the word with [square brackets], adding [question marks?] when the reading is a bit less certain that that, and we admit that the word or words are [illegible] when we just can’t make them out. No editor likes to see [illegible words] in her edition–each one stabs at us, taunting us with our own inadequacies–no matter how hard that word really is to read!

hard-2 — From Jane Addams to Sarah Alice Addams Haldeman, Nov. 18, 1902. Our current reading is: “I have given a long lecture. Esther’s baby is so pretty and dear. I spent Sunday in St. Louis and came away with a lot of [cherubic?] [illegible]”

For most editors, the decision of when to give up and publish a problem document’s transcription is a difficult one, and we review and revise our readings of the document over and over until we throw our hands up in frustration and let it go out with an [illegible]. When publishing a digital edition, this decision gets even harder. Is it more useful for our readers that we publish a transcription of 99% of a document quickly, or that we wait and wait to get that last 1%? We have made the decision to publish the 99% and to invite help, both from experts on our Advisory Board, Addams scholars, but also from the general public, to help tease out that 1%.

Jane Addams to Richard T. Ely, November 27, 1902. Our current reading is: “Women [illegible] tending with the house–conventional [war]. [Women] entering into the commercial life & work industrial condition with its element of warfare, of competition of “racing” [piece] work withdraw the [illegible] in a certain sense.”

We’ve done this by creating a Help! tag for documents in the digital edition that have words that we cannot read. To get a look at them, follow this link, or select Browse Items, and then Browse by Tag. If you think you can read the [illegible words] that we couldn’t, drop us a line in the Comment box at the bottom of the document. If this is something you enjoy doing, reach out to us; we would be delighted to have you check our problem documents before they are published.

May 2, 2016September 29, 2025

Sneak Peek at the Jane Addams Papers Digital Edition!

I’m delighted to announce that we have begun publishing Jane Addams documents on our website — http://digital.janeaddams.ramapo.edu! We are still in the early stages, and have lots of work yet to do, but the site is up and running.

The digital edition is built on the Omeka content management system, with plugins built by programmer Daniel Berthereau in order to optimize it for operating a digital edition. Some of the features already in place for documents are:

Metadata–the Jane Addams Digital Edition provides detailed metadata on each document in its collection, helping you locate materials by date, type, subject, language, and description.
Images–the digital edition includes document images from the microfilm (and some scans from original documents as well).
Transcriptions–all documents will be transcribed so that they are text-searchable.

We are also building identifications of the people and organizations, and some events and places named in the documents. These short identifications will provide readers with some context for the documents, and will provide links to our sources and to open-access resources to help them in their research.

Metadata–We are also building ways for readers to explore Jane Addams’ world by searching her correspondents and associates. You can search descriptions of people using tags to identify all social workers, all men or women, all politicians, or all family members, etc.
Images–When we can locate a rights-free image of the person, we will include it with a citation.

We have gathered information on the repositories that contain Jane Addams material, starting by entering over 700 archival collections that appear in the Jane Addams Microfilm Edition, and adding new collections as we locate materials. Once documents from these collections are added to the digital edition, they will be linked to the archival collection.

The tag cloud allows readers to find everything on a set of large-scale topics. It also provides a good overview of the kinds of materials that are in the collection.

We are also using a map to plot people, organizations, events, and documents, producing another way to explore the materials. A search page below the map enables you to limit the items–looking at where Addams’ correspondents lived in 1903, or where settlement houses were located, etc.

Content

We began with the goal of publishing documents between 1901-1903 as our first installment. In order to publish a complete document, we need to:

Create and proofread the metadata
Create and proofread the transcription
Obtain permission to publish the image from the archive, library, or person that owns it.
Obtain copyright permission when needed.

We can only publish a document when all four steps have been completed. Fortunately, many of our document’s authors are in the public domain, which makes the process easier. We have received the cooperation of most of the archives and libraries that own the document, but obtaining permission is a cumbersome task. Proofreading our transcriptions of difficult-to-read documents has also been a slow process. This helps explain why not all of the documents between 1901-1903 are up yet. We are clearing them for publication as fast as we can, and will post them as soon as possible.

We have located over 1,000 individual people in our first six months of work, and while we have been creating entries as fast as we can, there are still many to go, and we haven’t proofread and checked all of them. As names go live, the links between documents and subjects will also go live.

What’s next?

This summer we will focus on getting more documents up, more identifications complete and developing the design of the site. Its an exciting time at the Jane Addams Papers Project.

Please let us know here, or by emailing me at chajo@ramapo.edu what you think of the work done so far.

February 4, 2016October 14, 2025

An Untapped Resource: Seniors and the Jane Addams Papers

Jo Anne Zellers, Tori Sciancalepore and Cathy Moran Hajo at the presentation at Brandywine Senior Living, Feb. 2, 2016.

One of the goals of the Jane Addams Papers Project at Ramapo College is to make our documents available and accessible to a wide audience. We have a dedicated cadre of student workers and volunteers here at the project who are transcribing and indexing the documents for web-based publication. While we have been interested in using crowd-sourcing as a tool to help complete first drafts of Addams’ letters, we had been thinking about it largely in terms of building an it as an option on our website. Last week, however, we started a collaboration with the staff and residents of Brandywine Senior Living in Mahwah.

The idea came from a conversation I had with Jo Anne Zellers, Ramapo College’s Director of Constituent Relations, about the difficulty that readers had with Jane Addams’ handwriting. Addams’ letters are daunting when you first look at them, hastily written, and filled with proper nouns and turns of phrase that are difficult for college students and all but impossible for younger readers. Providing transcriptions is critical to our mission, as they enable readers to make sense of the letters and enable text searches. Jo Anne surmised that older people might have an easier time of reading Addams and her contemporaries, and that led naturally to the idea of seeing whether there was interest from the seniors.

We met with Brienne Fuellhart, the Escapades Producer at Brandywine, and she was enthusiastic about the idea. On Wednesday, Tori Sciancalepore (Assistant Editor at the project), Jo Anne and I traveled to Brandywine and did a presentation on Jane Addams’ life and then a short introduction to transcription and Jane Addams’ hand. While the residents at first found Addams writing difficult, within a few minutes they were calling out their guesses. The next morning Brienne reported that “residents were excited and impressed and I think we should be able to put together a good group to help with this project.”

Our plan going forward is to share a folder of handwritten documents, via a share drive. Brienne will display them in the large screen movie room at Brandywine and residents will come and tease out the meaning of the documents in a transcription group. Brienne or another helper will type up their transcriptions and upload them to the shared drive, where we can access them and add them to our digital archive. Tori and I will proofread the transcriptions and make any corrections needed before we post them on the public site. We will visit Brandywine frequently, giving them some new pointers and introducing the project to residents who did not attend the initial meeting.

Engaging the public in this way is exciting and we feel certain that it will become a model for working with other community groups–schools, clubs, or anyone interested in historical documents. If you know of a group that would like to participate, whether in our neck of the woods, or at a distance, please contact me and we can set things up.