Writing History in the Digital Age (archived site)

Creating Meaning in a Sea of Databases (Sklar & Dublin) Fall 2011

Creating Meaning in a Sea of Databases: The Women and Social Movements Web Sites (Fall 2011 version)

by Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin

See 2013 final edition from the University of Michigan Press

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 Fourteen years ago, funded by a small grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, we set out to give U.S. Women’s History a more substantial presence on the World Wide Web, then a rather modest and marginal new domain for history publishing. For six years we focused our energy on working first with undergraduates at the State University of New York at Binghamton and then with faculty and students at a dozen colleges and universities around the United States.¹

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 1 During this first stage, we published more than forty document projects that explored the history of women and social movements in the United States.  The document projects consisted of 20-30 primary documents complemented by an interpretive introduction, organized to answer a central historiographical question.  We sought in this way to combine historical interpretation with the publication of rich primary sources.  In launching this effort, we were struck by the way primary documents and interpretation supported one another and provided a distinctly richer combination for students and scholars than these material generated separately.

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 It was not simply a matter of the conjunction of the two kinds of resources; the electronic medium itself dramatically shaped and enriched our undertaking in important ways:

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 1 1) Moving away from the traditional scholarly article, we created a new genre, the document project that was at once interpretive but also placed a new emphasis on the primary sources on which interpretation is based.  The fact that we published solely on the World Wide Web led us to this new format that took advantage of hypertext links that the new medium makes possible.

¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 1 2) Publishing on the web permitted, even encouraged, more extensive collections of primary documents than would ever be economically feasible in print medium. Thus we brought previously inaccessible documents to a wide audience. Web technology made this development possible.

¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 1 3) This format opened up the interpretive process to readers, encouraging them to engage primary sources and evaluate historians’ arguments by making their own interpretations.

¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 4) The new format encouraged creative connections between secondary and primary sources (and among primary sources), which contributed to much more substantive debate about accepted historical explanations. We were able to offer robust challenges to old interpretations.

¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 2 In 2003-2004, we moved beyond our dependence on grant funding and our reliance on a limited number of historians and history students and became a peer-reviewed online journal in American women’s history—Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000.   Partnering with an online publisher, Alexander Street Press, and distributing the online journal/database through subscriptions and purchases by academic libraries, we simultaneously acquired a higher degree of technical competence in publishing and greater financial stability, which assured a regular publishing schedule without periodic funding crises.  Innovative in its format–publishing document projects rather than scholarly articles–and in its medium—online–the journal has grown remarkably in seven years.   In addition to publishing original scholarship in a new format, we assemble and publish scholarly collections of primary sources, often with accompanying interpretive introductions, book and web site reviews, teaching tools, and news about U.S. women’s history from the archives. We also created another new format, the document archive. Bringing together a larger collection of primary documents—typically 60 to 80 in number—the document archive combines a brief interpretive introduction with a very substantial collection of documents.

¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 1 Our main goal in establishing the site was to make documents pertaining to U.S. Women’s History and the interpretation of those documents more widely available.  Three rationales prompted that priority.  First, the internet is a perfect venue for the publication of documents, since space is not a major consideration.  The internet has moved us from a publishing world of scarcity to one of plenty, making it especially valuable to historians, whose main work is that of interpreting documents but who are not usually able to publish the full texts of the documents they interpret.²  The ability to select, curate, and publish documents online is therefore a significant new path for historical studies.   But historians are not interested in just any documents. They select documents of special interest and meaning. So scholars can best use the internet to publish selected documents chosen to connect with their changing interpretations of the past.

¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 1 Second, we want to use this new plenitude to make documents about women available not just to historians of women but also to other historians of the United States.  The cascade of scholarship published about American women in the past thirty years is underrepresented in the mainstream of U.S. history.  Perhaps scholars who tend not to explore secondary writings about women might be willing to read primary documents about women, especially related to their own research interests.  Thus, for example, historians of the American Revolution might be interested in the writings of Esther Reed and other elite women who raised funds to support the patriot army.³

¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0 Third, we want to draw scholars in U.S. women’s history and in women’s history generally into greater dialogue across specializations.  Like other historical fields, that of women’s history has developed specializations that often make it impossible for scholars to learn about work outside their own focus.  Thus scholars in the history of women’s health in the antebellum era might not know about recent work in women’s labor history in the Progressive era, or the history of African American women in the civil rights movement.  Here, too, we hope that it might be easier for scholars to learn about fields outside their own specialty by accessing primary sources.  Secondary works sometimes require a considerable commitment of time and familiarity with related historiography to digest.  Primary documents offer a more direct route to learning.

¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 0 One brief example can show how a document project in U.S. Women’s History might contribute to all three of these rationales:  to make selected documents more available generally; to influence mainstream interpretations of U.S. History; and to facilitate more communication across the boundaries that separate historians of American women.

¶ 13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 0 Carol Faulkner’s document project, “How Did White Women Aid Former Slaves during and after the Civil War, 1863-1891?” analyzes the gendered construction of power in the freedmen’s aid movement during Reconstruction.⁴  She offers documents that demonstrate women reformers’ opposition to the policies of the male leadership as articulated by General Oliver O. Howard, head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and Horace Greeley, noted editor of the New York Tribune. These policies led to the early closing of the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1869 because these men feared that assistance to freed people would create economic dependency.  The leading historian of Reconstruction, Eric Foner, has described the dominant ethos in the Bureau as reflecting “not only attitudes towards blacks, but a more general Northern belief in the dangers of encouraging dependency among the lower classes.”⁵ Faulkner’s exploration of correspondence between General Howard and freedmen’s-aid advocate Josephine Griffing shows that women reformers tried to provide more generous aid to freedmen and challenged Howard’s concern about dependency.  Faulkner’s document project shows us that the publication of selected documents in U.S. Women’s History can alter our understanding of major issues in American History.

¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 1 In publishing Women and Social Movements in the United States, we keep two publication streams going at the same time.  The first consists of document projects submitted through our peer-review system, each making monographic contributions to knowledge in U.S. women’s history.  Each document project begins with an interpretive question that builds on the historiography and aims to contribute to our understanding of women and social movements in the United States.  Each project contains 20-30 primary documents that address the question, accompanied by scholarly citations and interpretive headnotes, supplemented by a bibliography and set of related WWW links. Each document project is peer reviewed, a process that we find quite valuable for improving its historiographic contribution.  We key-enter documents into HTML so that they can be more effectively indexed and made full-text searchable.  These important characteristics of our documents cannot be achieved by scanning the originals.  Finally, the journal is indexed in America:  History and Life and “Research Scholarship Online” produced by the Organization of American Historians, the two leading bibliographic resources in U.S. History, so that WASM publications will enter ongoing historiographical debates.

¶ 15 Leave a comment on paragraph 15 1 The document project format permits scholars to showcase key documents related to a compelling question arising from their research.  By publishing transcripts of entire (sometimes quite lengthy) documents, author/editors permit readers to join in the exploration of the sources and enter into the analytic, interpretive process for themselves.

¶ 16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 0 In the seven years that we have been a more formal online journal, we have seen an interesting shift in the content of our submissions.  Our focus has consistently been on United States women and social movements, but increasingly our submissions have come to explore the international dimensions of these social movements.  Nancy Hewitt and her students at Rutgers University prepared a document project in 2003 on the relationship between the early women’s rights movement in the United States and early British and European feminism. Colonial themes also added an international dimension to the web site as Tracy Leavelle explored the interactions of 17th-century French explorers and Jesuit missionaries with Illinois women (2007) and Patricia Cleary researched women’s sexual, familial and public activities in 18th-century St. Louis, successively an outpost of Spanish and French empires. (2008)⁶.

¶ 17 Leave a comment on paragraph 17 0 As we witnessed the emergence of this international focus, we actively sought to nurture it with two collaborations.  First, we established a “Canadian initiative,” aimed at encouraging document projects for a special issue on Canadian women and social movements published in September 2009.  Second, we organized a collaborative project with Japanese and American historians, encouraging the submission of document projects exploring the interaction of women reformers in Japan and the United States since the Meiji Restoration of 1869.  We have published three bilingual document projects from this collaboration since March 2009 and see this project as a model for internationalizing the history of women and social movements in the United States.

¶ 18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 0 Our online journal, while very much shaped by the electronic medium, is part of the historiographic process that shapes scholarship in the history of the United States more generally.  A major trend in American History in the past decade has been the growing internationalization of the field and that trend has been equally apparent in scholarship published in Women and Social Movements in the United States.

¶ 19 Leave a comment on paragraph 19 0 Simultaneously with the steady stream of scholarship in document projects, we have nurtured a second stream of online resources by publishing about 5,000 pages annually of full-text sources.  We began in the fall of 2003 by publishing groups of primary sources that complemented the site’s document projects.  The first group included about 30,000 pages of full-text documents consisting of books, pamphlets and convention proceedings related to the struggle for woman suffrage in the United States, 1830-1930.  There we brought together for the first time all the published proceedings of the women’s antislavery conventions of the 1830s and the many women’s rights conventions held between 1848 and 1870.  Women’s rights conventions are not just about Seneca Falls in 1848 any more.  Instead, scholars can now view change over time in the women’s rights convention movement, seeing that movement much more fully than ever before because scholars can now use the database functions of the website to retrieve information–for example, the number of speeches or letters in convention proceedings that mentioned married women’s property rights, or education or health.  By exploring the topics addressed, speakers named, and rhetoric employed at these conventions, historians can begin to explore change over time much more systematically.

¶ 20 Leave a comment on paragraph 20 0 Women and Social Movements offers the advantages of a database as well as a journal.  For example, our indexing of the six volumes of The History of Woman Suffrage, edited by Stanton, Anthony, Gage, and Harper, totaling some 5,800 pages, reveals more than 800 individual documents in those volumes, including 152 speeches, which our database further identifies by author, race of author, date, and place (among other variables). These volumes themselves were largely compilations of published and unpublished documents and the database indexes these works in ways that permit scholars to search for the authors and titles of hundreds of separate documents included in the volumes.

¶ 21 Leave a comment on paragraph 21 0 We followed this focus on the woman suffrage movement by organizing a collection of publications of the national and state branches of the League of Women Voters between 1920 and 2000.  This collection consists of more than 660 publications totaling roughly 8,000 pages and provides a valuable resource for exploring changing approaches to women’s issues after the achievement of suffrage.

¶ 22 Leave a comment on paragraph 22 0 As our full-text sources took shape, we moved in a new direction by compiling all the publications we could identify and photocopy of state and local commissions on the status of women between 1961 and 2005.  This database, fully integrated into Women and Social Movements in the United States, dwarfed our earlier efforts, including almost 1,900 items with some 90,000 pages overall.  In a new practice, we commissioned scholarly essays to explore various dimensions of the state commissions publications.  We have published eight essays in all, exploring such issues as economic security, race, sexuality, labor feminism and conservatism as they play out in the publications of commissions in the database.

¶ 23 Leave a comment on paragraph 23 0 The combination of these two threads—the work of scholars in document projects and the publication of full-text primary sources—means that Women and Social Movements is much more than a journal whose articles are accessible online.  This resource is truly an online database with extensive indexing and full-text searching that enable it to provide rich support for scholarly research.  With the publication of each new issue (now occurring twice a year), we index the authors of the new primary sources and we vigorously pursue data about authors in online and published sources with a view to minimizing missing data associated with the index fields we employ.  This research means that when users of the database seek to craft searches that employ the author indexing, they are able to limit those searches by the birth and death dates of authors and also use race, gender and occupational information about authors.

¶ 24 Leave a comment on paragraph 24 2 What comes into play here and gives particular value to the WASM database is the fact that the documents collected in the database have been thoughtfully vetted by the scholars who crafted the site’s document projects and by the web site’s editors, who have selected particular focuses for organizing the site’s complementary full-text sources.  The documents and the questions they address have been selected to engage important historical and historiographical questions that historians are thinking about with regard to women and social movements in the United States.  In this way the site connects with the full timespan of American history and reflects the breadth of thematic issues that U.S. historians are exploring.  It’s a lot of work and we fully understand why most web sites in U.S. history do not weave together interpretation and documentation and those that do usually focus on one historical actor, event, or time period.  But now that the World Wide Web offers a sea of databases, we wish there were more sites that took the next step and helped scholars construct meaning within that sea.

¶ 25 Leave a comment on paragraph 25 0 Our interest in women and social movements in the United States and our success in drawing on historians in this field led us to expand our reach internationally.  The digital medium  made it possible to expand our focus to women and social movements globally and reach out to broader international communities.  In 2007 we set about to create a new, complementary online archive, Women and Social Movements, International—1840 to Present. ⁷

¶ 26 Leave a comment on paragraph 26 1 WASM International has taken much greater advantage of digital resources and possibilities than has been the case for WASM in the United States.  Not being an online journal dependent on submissions from the world of scholars, WASM International has been much more self-consciously constructed to encompass the editors’ growing understanding of the international history and historiography of women’s history.  From the outset, we assembled an international advisory board of scholars who have assisted in the selection of resources for the archive.  With a self-imposed limit of 150,000 pages of documents, we realized that we would need to be thoughtful in our selections. We began the formal work by convening an editorial advisory board of forty scholars at the Berkshire Conference on Women’s History at the University of Minnesota in June 2008.  There we received strong feedback that immediately shifted our selection criteria.  At first, we had conceived of the archive as focused on the international activism of U.S. women, feeling constrained initially by our own specialization.  From the assembled group we learned that these scholars felt an urgent need for an archive of women’s international activism (without national focus).  Our advisors helped us move beyond our U.S.-centric beginnings to construct a truly international resource.

¶ 27 Leave a comment on paragraph 27 0 As the work of the project progressed, the international advisory board grew dramatically, reaching more than 130 scholars by the project’s completion this year.  Another women’s history conference, at the Aletta Institute in Amsterdam in August 2010, gave the editors a second opportunity to present the project-in-progress to an international group of women’s history scholars.  Throughout the course of the work we shared bibliographies with members of our advisory board and received excellent recommendations for additions to the archive. We also expanded the archival dimension of the project over time; by the end we had secured scanned or digitally photographed materials from the Sophia Smith Collection, the Schlesinger Library, the Swarthmore College Peace Collection, the Library of Congress, Hollins University, the Aletta Institute, the International Institute of Social History, and the National Library of Australia.

¶ 28 Leave a comment on paragraph 28 0 All our work on WASM International was shaped and facilitated by the electronic revolution that had taken place since we first worked on WASM in the United States in 1997. For instance, we relied from the outset on linking online catalog records in WorldCat with a powerful database program, Zotero. In this way we downloaded from WorldCat the metadata for published works selected for inclusion in the archive and printed out intermediate bibliographies to show us and our advisors how the archive was taking shape.  Here, too, we relied on the new media, as we posted our topical bibliographies on the web site of the Center for the Historical Study of Women and Gender at SUNY Binghamton, which our editorial advisors could access on the internet.⁸  We also succeeded in outputting our Zotero entries into spreadsheets that permitted us to keep track of our work, particularly the major effort involved in securing permissions to publish copyrighted materials.  With these spreadsheets we were also able to analyze the contents of our archive as it grew—analyzing it by dates, geographical regions, and topical coverage so that we could periodically take stock of our work and identify underrepresented areas. This work permitted us then to contact our international scholarly advisors and ask them for help improving our coverage in areas of their expertise.

¶ 29 Leave a comment on paragraph 29 0 The electronic revolution assisted our work in still other ways.  From the outset we had decided that an institutional focus on organizations would be crucial to securing publications relevant to the history of women’s international activism. Appropriate keyword and corporate author searches in WorldCat permitted us to identify the publications of about a hundred organizations that had emerged as key players in promoting women’s international networks and activism from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.

¶ 30 Leave a comment on paragraph 30 0 As we worked we became aware that library catalogs provide a particular vision of the myriad books, pamphlets, flyers and reports that reflect women’s international organizing, and that established organizations with North American and European memberships and lengthy histories were much more fully represented in library holdings than groups founded recently in the Global South. To complement resources found in major academic libraries, we searched the World Wide Web for online publications of contemporary non-governmental organizations (NGOs). We identified 15-20 particularly important organizations and found rich samples of their online publications and worked with the organizations to improve our coverage of their activism still further.

¶ 31 Leave a comment on paragraph 31 0 In the course of constructing the online archive, we became a preservation project as well as a bibliographical project.  When, for instance, we could not find in library catalogs a good run of the annual proceedings of the World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WWCTU), we contacted (at the suggestion of an Australian colleague) the national WCTU archive in Evanston, Illinois. That archive no longer maintains regular hours, but a volunteer addressed our request and soon sent us a duplicate set of the WWCTU proceedings for scanning and future donation to an appropriate research library.   Thus this project unearthed rare copies of proceedings that were not readily available to scholars and we were able to publish them online.

¶ 32 Leave a comment on paragraph 32 2 We have had a similar experience in our work with the International Women’s Tribune Centre in New York. As our work progressed, a professor at Hollins University, who knew about our earlier work, contacted us by email to let us know that an important international activist, Mildred Persinger, had donated her papers to Hollins.  Focusing on the UN World Conferences on Women from Mexico City in 1975 to Beijing in 1995, her papers constituted an international gold mine. We visited the archive and arranged to photograph more than 3,000 pages of manuscript and published documents about these important conferences.  Equally important, anticipating our archival trip, we met Mildred Persinger at her home in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., and from her learned that the International Women’s Tribune Centre, which she had founded and directed for many years, was closing its office and moving its files into storage. She mentioned that we should try to get copies of slide shows that the IWTC had produced for each UN conference and find a way to include them in our archive.  We eventually secured copies of the slides for three conferences and scripts and cassette tapes of the audio portions of the original slide shows.  The resources dated back to 1980, 1985, and 1995—despite much international effort, we could not find the slide show produced for the 1975 Mexico City conference.  The slides were discolored with age and the cassette tapes were uneven in quality, but we had everything digitized and student workers at the Computer Center at SUNY Binghamton skillfully restored the slides with dramatic improvement.  A skilled videogapher then melded together slides and audio for each slide show, following the careful scripts that IWTC staff had originally created.  From the aged and deteriorating slides and cassettes of an earlier generation of activists, we now have produced three high-quality videos of the original slide shows that should be useful to scholars and activists in the decades ahead.  This preservation project was possible because of the networking that unearthed the IWTC slide shows, the cooperation of IWTC activists who wanted the history of the conferences to be widely disseminated, and the skills and resources we were able to mobilize at our university on behalf of the project.

¶ 33 Leave a comment on paragraph 33 0 These stories could be multiplied numerous times.  Many of the published works we have included in the online archive are available at only one or two of the libraries whose collections are recorded in the WorldCat online catalog.  By borrowing resources through interlibrary loan, scanning them, and securing permission from the original copyright holders to publish the works online, these rare works will now be accessible at what we anticipate will be hundreds of research libraries around the world. Similarly, we are including hundreds of online publications of contemporary NGO’s, most of which cannot be found in academic or public libraries. These documents no doubt will have brief lifetimes on NGO web sites, to be displaced shortly by more recent publications that better fit the organizations’ changing programmatic and fundraising priorities.  We have created an online archive that represents a slice in time documenting the priorities of women’s international activism between the mid-1990s and 2010 as expressed on these NGO web sites.

¶ 34 Leave a comment on paragraph 34 2 Finally, this online archive dramatically expands access to the rare and fugitive materials we have chosen for inclusion.  We have included about 30,000 pages of manuscript and published materials from archives in the United States and Europe, selected to provide depth of coverage of significant international women’s organizations and events.  In each case we secured permission from the archive and from copyright holders and then made arrangements for digital photography or scanning to produce electronic copies of the documents that best seemed to fit the selection criteria we established for the archive. These materials do not circulate and it is difficult in many cases to determine that the archive actually owns the items in question. Previously users would have had to visit the archive and conduct research onsite; now these resources will be accessible in hundreds of academic libraries around the world.

¶ 35 Leave a comment on paragraph 35 3 The entire database will be available early in 2012. The number of subscribers now in the fall of 2011 is small, but almost half of early subscribers or purchasers are libraries outside of the United States.  Institutions in Canada, Iceland, Norway, China, and Australia are among the first subscribers to the database.

¶ 36 Leave a comment on paragraph 36 1 What conclusions can we draw from this survey of our work on the Women and Social Movements web sites since 1997? What is worth noting in light of the emergence of electronic resources for historians in this period?  The content of the two sites—women and social movements–cuts a broad swath through all of women’s history and speaks to social, political, economic, and cultural issues  that have shaped the mainstream of national and international histories.  Second, the key method of our sites connects historical interpretation and primary source documents, permitting historians to share with readers the documents on which their interpretations are based and permitting readers to examine historians’ primary sources and reach their own interpretive conclusions.  Third, contributors, peer reviewers, and users of our sites constitute a broad community of scholars and this work builds and reinforces that community.  We draw upon hundreds of historians of women in the United States each year in publishing Women and Social Movements in the United States and we have relied upon the editorial advice of hundreds of historians, librarians, archivists, and activists to construct Women and Social Movements International. The electronic revolution has made this sort of collaboration much easier but also has made it much more necessary.  From our reliance on WorldCat and other online catalogs to our use of the Zotero database program, WASM International has been a “born digital” product.  With the electronic circulation of email messages, attachments, bibliographies, and document scans, we have been able to mobilize the women’s history community in the construction of this database.  Because there is a global market for an electronic archive focusing on women’s international activism, we could undertake the international project and mobilize others to join us in the work.  The Digital Age is a new age for historians and it is an exciting time to be working in circumstances so different than those we encountered when we first acquired the tools of our craft.

¶ 37 Leave a comment on paragraph 37 0 About the authors: Kathryn Kish Sklar is Bartle Distinguished Professor of History at the State University of New York at Binghamton.  She is currently completing Florence Kelley and Progressive Reform, 1899-1932. Thomas Dublin is Distinguished Professor of History at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He is the co-author (with Walter Licht) of  The Face of Decline: The Pennsylvania Anthracite Region in the Twentieth Century.