For all of the members of my team, this week has comprised collecting and documenting sources for the next database-development and textual analysis steps of our project. Each member selected either two or three colleges from among our collective six (i.e. Bryn Mawr, Haverford, Swarthmore, Carleton, Davidson, and Vassar Colleges) during Week Five and began the process of selecting five to ten objects from their respective institutional digital collections in relation to our theme: our colleges’ coverage of the women’s suffrage movement during the first decades of the twentieth century, how the demographics of each college affected efforts for organization around said movement, and responses to the eventual enfranchisement of, in particular, white women. The colleges that I chose to work with for this assignment are Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges.
These two colleges, along with Swarthmore College, house their digital collections on the same website and in close relation to each other (see: TriCollege Digital Collections). For this reason, the less-populated areas of an institution’s archives can be relatively easy to conceal, hidden by those more plentiful offerings of another. This phenomenon can be observed in Haverford College’s relative lack of coverage of the suffrage movement, supplemented by Bryn Mawr College’s relative abundance (though Swarthmore College maintains greater and more diverse records). Most of Haverford’s materials on the subject populate their digitized collection of “The College News,” the student newspaper resulting from the merging of Haverford News and Bryn Mawr College’s earlier student news efforts.
On Friday, I attended Marcella Lees’ office hours with the rest of my team where the importance of documenting this absence within the archives was discussed. It has certainly been something that I have kept in mind as I explore the college collections and decide which objects to choose to represent Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges in our final database.
Other than this reconnaissance project, I have been assembling my source documentation assignment (to be combined with those of my team members) and reading through some blog posts and informative documents on the various features of Omeka that may prove useful in our next steps. Overall, I am happy with where we are and am excited to continue working towards our final presentation!
