Digging in the Archive, Harvesting on the Web

This year, when I was planning my honors seminar on American Suffrage Literature and Modernist Print Culture, I found that most of the materials I was interested in using—materials that I had uncovered in archives and photocopied for my own scholarly use—were not available to students on-line or through our library. What I would like to discuss briefly here is how I turned this problem of access into a pedagogical opportunity when I made the digitizing of suffrage print cultural materials a part of the course.

For their final assignment, I gave students the option of preparing an online edition of a short suffrage text we had read for the course; for example, two of Sui Sin Far's stories, suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt's orientalist tales from The Woman's Journal, valentines from The Suffragist magazine, a play from Peterson's, Alice Duer Miller's suffrage poetry from The New York Tribune, and Djuna Barnes's stunt reporting from The World Magazine. These online editions were to include a scanned version of the text, annotations for unfamiliar terms and references, illustrations, a biographical sketch of the author, and a short essay providing the historical/ literary/ periodical context of the piece. Details of the assignment are outlined at http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/mchapman/491_assign.htm. I lent students my files—including photocopied secondary sources, archival research I had done, images I had located, websites I had consulted, and, in some cases, sections of a periodical's run—as starting points. About two-thirds of the class chose this option in lieu of writing a research essay, and the results were impressive. Only half the students had experience making webpages. Others sketched mock-up designs and put their files on CD.

The most successful projects focused on valentines sent to anti-suffragist Congressmen in 1916 and on a documentary drama about suffragists arrested for picketing the White House in 1917. Cait McKinney presented and interpreted personalized valentines sent to Congressmen in 1916 by the National Woman's Party, valentines that also appeared in the Party's magazine The Suffragist. Cait obtained scans of the valentines from the Sewall-Belmont House, whose library I had recently visited, researched the positions on suffrage the recipients held, and interpreted the literary and rhetorical success of the valentines. She also wrote a short essay analyzing the effects of the heteronormative appeal of the Valentines. Cait's project will soon be featured on the Sewall-Belmont's website at http://www.sewallbelmont.org/.

Robyn Corson edited Telling the Truth at the White House, a satirical docu-drama (that predates Pescator's documentary theatre of the 1920s) that was originally published in Pearson's. Robyn's edition contextualized the idea of "truth" within the suffrage campaign since picketers had been accused of being seditious for carrying banners that quoted the President. Robyn provided a key to the historical figures on which the characters were based, provided valuable notes about aspects of the text that reveal the racial exclusiveness of contemporary suffrage discourse, and wrote a short essay, "Staging Justice and Gender," which interpreted the literary and rhetorical success of the play.

Overall, the assignment had amazing results. First, they felt the confusion of the archive: what am I supposed to do with all this stuff? Then, they began to see themselves as scholars: to feel the curiosity, the thrill of the hunt, the "eureka" moment of discovery, that anyone who works in an archive feels. They also began to see themselves as editors, designers, and people with messages to convey through creative means, and the skills to convey them. They were amazed to discover that Proquest's searchable historical newspapers often summarized, advertised and reviewed the magazine materials they were looking at. They were also tricked into reevaluating the usefulness of the physical library, descending into the stacks to find bound issues of a magazine or a 60-year-old study of American magazines. In many cases, their projects allowed them to show off their multidisciplinarity—their good design sense, their knowledge of Chinese history, their ability to...