Bryn Mawr College Community Learning Day: March 18, 2015

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Cross-posted from LITS blog:

Library & Information Technology Services staff and student employees are excited to participate fully in Bryn Mawr’s first Community Learning Day, scheduled for Wednesday, March 18. A number of the day’s interest sessions have been planned by staff and students associated with LITS. They include:

  • Women of Summer, a screening of the documentary film on the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers in Industry and discussion with filmmaker Rita Heller ’59 and Greenfield Center Assistant Director Evan McGonagill
  • Experiences of African American, Latina/o, and Asian American Staff panel, featuring Rod Matthews, Multimedia and Computer Specialist
  • Back Talk: Experience, Challenges & Controversy Working with the Bryn Mawr College African Art Collections, highlighting the new Special Collections exhibit in Canaday, including discussion with exhibition organizers Whitney Lopez, ’15 and Brian Wallace, Curator/Academic Liaison for Art & Artifacts
  • Black at Bryn Mawr: Walking Tour and Archives Project conversation with Emma Kioko ’15, Grace Pusey ’15, and Greenfield Center Director Monica Mercado, who are working to share stories of Bryn Mawr’s history of race and racism
  • Building Institutional Memory workshop, featuring Charlie Bruce ’16 and Rachel Appel, Digital Collections Librarian

These and all of the day’s events are designed to welcome a wide range of participants to learn together. The website will be updated with descriptions for all the interest sessions in the coming week, and you can follow along on Twitter using the hashtag #Mawr2learn. We’ll be tweeting from @BrynMawrLITS and @GreenfieldHWE.

All three libraries will be open, and event programming is scheduled for Carpenter and Canaday.  We look forward to learning with you!

For more information and a schedule for the day, including a link to preregistration: https://www.brynmawr.edu/community-learning

Black at Bryn Mawr

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The Greenfield Digital Center is currently supporting the work of three students undertaking Praxis III independent study projects exploring lesser-known aspects of Bryn Mawr College history. This week, two of those students — Grace Pusey and Emma Kioko, both Class of 2015 — are formally launching their research project, Black at Bryn Mawr. Readers can stay up-to-date with their research via the Black at Bryn Mawr blog and tumblr. Today, Grace shares the origins of the project, and its goals.

This semester Emma Kioko and I are collaborating on a Praxis III independent study course titled Black at Bryn Mawr, a project that will illuminate the history and experiences of Black students, faculty, and staff at the College. Using Bryn Mawr Special Collections as well as primary sources archived outside of the College, we are analyzing the ways in which Bryn Mawr has chosen to record, remember, and represent racism in its history. Using the archives, we are identifying spaces of both racial conflict and conversation on campus in order to develop a final project in the form of a campus walking tour and a digital historical record.

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Greenfield in the Classroom: Teaching the History of Women’s Higher Education

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Bryn Mawr College classroom, undated, via Triptych.

Professor Samuel Clagget Chew’s Bryn Mawr College classroom, undated, via Triptych.

This semester I’m back in the classroom, teaching a History Department seminar “Higher Education for Women: Bryn Mawr and Beyond.” With apologies to Professor Samuel Claggett Chew (pictured left), my class of smart Bryn Mawr third- and fourth-years looks absolutely nothing like the lecture class of old. We divide our time between the classroom, Special Collections, and a course blog** linking past and present.

That blog, along with links to my syllabus and digital resources, is now live:

HIST B332 Higher Education for Women: Bryn Mawr and Beyond

Although my students aren’t tweeting this semester, I’m tracking my class prep on Twitter (reviving the hashtag #bmchistory) and I look forward to using this space for reflecting on teaching the course and the research that it inspires. But today I wanted to put a call out to historians of education — how do you teach women’s higher education, in the U.S. and abroad? Similarly, how do women’s historians include the history of education in their teaching? Might we begin sharing our syllabi and readings with each other, online?

“Syllabi show how scholars put together a whole field,” reminds historian Lincoln Mullen in a recent Religion in American History blog post. “Yet unfortunately teaching documents are shared less routinely than our research, so we are much more likely to know a scholar’s books and articles than her syllabi.” This year I’m planning to overhaul the “Classroom” section of the Greenfield Center website, which currently focuses on high school lesson plans, by adding college-level syllabi and resources — much like the CLGBTH does for teaching histories of sexuality. [The Open Syllabus Project offers another intriguing model for analysis and visualization of what we teach.] In part, I’m curious to learn if and how women’s education history is being taught these days, but most of all, I continue to hope we can be more vigilant about sharing our work in the classroom, as much as we remember to share our research and digital projects.

** Students were given the option to blog anonymously, although no student has yet to choose this option. On student privacy and class blogging (or other instances of student work online that may be publicly visible), I’ve consulted this list of resources collected by Whittier College DigLibArts.

#ProjectPerry Preview: Tuesday, January 27 at 4pm

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The Relaunching Perry House Committee has been meeting since the fall, and we’re excited to gather on campus this afternoon to share a preview of plans for its reopening, slated for the next academic year.

Details and RSVP here.

Interested in learning more? Earlier this week, committee member Khadijah Seay, Bryn Mawr College Class of 2016, shared some thoughts on her blog, Life at the Mawr.

On the history of Perry House, visit “A Point of Difference: Diversity at Bryn Mawr College,” the digital exhibition created by Alexis de la Rosa, Bryn Mawr College Class of 2015, and Lauren Footman, Bryn Mawr College Class of 2014. Their research provides both the historical context of what was originally designed as a black cultural center at Bryn Mawr College, and highlights some of the original correspondence on the matter between students and administrators in the early 1970s.

As a member of the subcommittees on programming and library space, I’m particularly interested in how we collect the history of Perry House, build on that history, and imagine a vibrant future for the space.

Bryn Mawr College brochure, 1985. See the complete document here.

Bryn Mawr College brochure, 1985. See the complete document on Triptych.

One of the things we’ll be discussing in the coming months is the future of the Perry House library, which officially opened in September 1989. As we know from other explorations of campus history, Bryn Mawr College students have often been library builders.

"Realizing the dream" in The College News, 1989. Read the article here.

“Realizing the dream” in The College News, September 1989. Read the article here.

The Relaunching Perry House Committee looks forward to collecting community input, as well as reaching out to alumnae/i in the next few months. One way to connect with us is on Twitter: #ProjectPerry. A full list of committee members is online, with plans for a blog coming soon. Thoughts? Memories? Connect with us in the comments below.

Sharing Our Work: Reflections on Digital History for the New Year

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Campus may be quiet but the Greenfield Center is open for business.

Campus may be quiet but the Greenfield Center is open for business.

Last week, I returned to Bryn Mawr after nearly a week in New York for the annual meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA). My meeting was a busy one — catching up with old friends and mentors, checking in with one of my other professional organizations (the Coordinating Council for Women in History), helping to organize THATCamp AHA, and chairing a panel on feminist work in digital history. It was an exhilarating and exhausting week. But despite the conference fatigue, I left New York feeling energized for the work I’ll be taking on for the Greenfield Center this semester: teaching my first course, Higher Education for Women: Bryn Mawr and Beyond; advising students doing archives fieldwork as part of Bryn Mawr’s Praxis program; continuing to work on the NEH-funded Seven Sisters digital project; and planning our May conference, Women’s History in the Digital World 2015.

Building a conversation at THATCamp AHA.

In conversation at THATCamp AHA.

Perhaps because our conference CFP is due later this week, I spent a lot of time at AHA thinking about how conferences bring us together, and about how we can support each other and build audiences for our work. I spent much of my time on Twitter, like my colleague Shane Landrum, who argues, “Live-tweeting #AHA2015 is, for me, a way to turn note-taking into a tiny bit of professional service [and] make what we do more public and visible.” It is also a way for me to promote digital projects that don’t always receive attention (or funding).

So that’s how I found myself, for the first time, live-tweeting while seated as panel chair at Session 159: Can DH Answer Our Questions: Using Digital Humanities to Address the Concerns of Feminist Historians. To audience members unfamiliar with the ways of the #twitterstorians, it would have looked surprising to see a panel chair typing away during each speaker’s presentation, but in a meeting as heavily tweeted as AHA, I wanted the research of our three scholars — panel organizer Kathryn Falvo, Tamika Richeson, and Wendy E. Chmielewski — to be captured and shared as widely as possible. Indeed, the Storify that Kate Moore created to record our session serves as a useful tool for circulating the discussion beyond our conference room.

As the panelists made their remarks, I found myself scribbling down a new conclusion to my comments:

This panel convinces me more than ever before that we shouldn’t have to fear the loss or muting of women’s voices — both scholars and historical subjects — in the rise of digital history, but we do need to continue to be vigilant about getting our work out there. Over the weekend, I’ve been eyeing the digital workshop, sessions, lightning rounds, posters, and proposals coming in for Tuesday’s THATCamp, and I’ve been thinking critically about the digital projects drawing the most attention and conversation. Do they take seriously histories of women, of gender, or sexuality? There’s a reason you may have seen me tweeting during these presentation: We have to be researchers, digital historians, and promoters.

Michelle Moravec, who spoke at AHA about her practice of writing in public, made a similar point:

Screen Shot 2015-01-11 at 10.55.36 PM

In that spirit, I’d like to share just a few of the digital projects dealing with histories of women, gender, and sexuality that caught my eye at AHA this year:

If you have a project to share, or are looking for possible collaborators and conversation partners, I encourage you to submit to Women’s History in the Digital World this week, and to save the conference dates: May 21-22, 2015. I’m excited that the Greenfield Center can play a role in the work of promoting diverse projects in digital history; in the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing details on scheduling, registration, and accommodations. In the meantime, we welcome your ideas and questions — in the comments below, or via email to greenfieldhwe [at] brynmawr [dot] edu.

“Can DH Answer Our Questions?” Looking Ahead to AHA 2015

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aha 2015It’s finals week at Bryn Mawr, which means that campus is getting quieter by the day. But for historians like me, the December break also requires getting ready for the American Historical Association (AHA) annual meeting, held the first weekend of the new year. On Sunday, January 4, I’ll be chairing a fantastic session organized by Penn State graduate student Kathryn Falvo, featuring work at the intersection of women’s and gender history and the digital humanities. We’ll be joined by new University of Virginia Ph.D. Tamika Richeson, and Dr. Wendy E. Chmielewski, George Cooley Curator of the Swarthmore College Peace Collection. Set your alarm clocks: we’re scheduled for a 9am start, discussing topics central to the Greenfield Digital Center’s mission:

AHA Session 159: Can DH Answer Our Questions? Using Digital Humanities to Address the Concerns of Feminist Historians

Reflecting on her work on women who ran for office prior to 1920, Wendy Chmielewski questions the gendered aspects of digital research and presentation. Does digital research help scholars craft better or more complex questions about our historical subjects or create a different historiography? As a digitized medium becomes standard, questions of methodology, funding, and presentation are of the utmost importance. Tamika Richeson’s presentation will explore a DH project she has been working on that uses Omeka and Neatline to look at over 450 arrests of black women in Washington D.C. from 1830-1867. Tamika is concerned with placing these black women’s arrests in a larger digital narrative – one which can help historians access the lives of lower class black women in a way that traditional methodologies cannot. Similarly, Kathryn Falvo examines the lives of traveling Quaker women in the nineteenth century by using another mapping tool, ArchGIS. By tracing these women’s lives through their movements, we can better understand the role of female ministers within the Society of Friends and their lived experience as ministers. Here, too, mapping technologies facilitate an understanding of lived experience that more traditional methodologies cannot accommodate. Can DH methods accommodate the questions that feminist historians seek to answer?

digital iconOur session is just one piece of a terrific slate of digital history opportunities at this year’s AHA, and I’m looking forward to a long weekend of good conversation and learning about new projects and tools.The conference has a brand-new smartphone app that will guide users to all things digital (check out the snappy logo, left). And if you’re planning to be in New York, there are still opportunities to present and meet outside of the formal panels: one of the first receptions of the conference is the now-annual reception for history bloggers and #twitterstorians on Friday, January 2, and the AHA recently posted a call for Digital “Lightning Rounds” on Saturday, January 3.

But there’s more!

thatcamp

With the support of AHA Director of Scholarly Communication and Digital Initiatives Seth Denbo, and historian Claire Bond Potter at The New School for Social Engagement, at the conclusion of the meeting we’ll be gathering for THATCamp AHA on Tuesday, January 6. Along with co-organizers Dan Royles and Shane Landrum, I’m excited to welcome both digital history veterans and newcomers to The New School for a day of unconferencing that will include a handful of prescheduled workshops on topics ranging from social media to social justice. Slots for THATCamp are filling up quickly–register here!

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Speaking of conferences, we’re also busy these days on the receiving end of paper and panel proposals for the Greenfield Digital Center’s next conference, Women’s History in the Digital World, scheduled for May 21-22, 2015. The deadline for submitting a proposal is one month away — Friday, January 16 — so do contact the Center via email, leave a comment below, or catch me at AHA if you have questions or ideas (find our CFP, here). Can DH answer our questions? We’ll have lots of opportunities in the coming months to find out.

Evolution and Tradition: Learning from Digital Culture while Honoring the Past

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bmcMost of our past reflections on the relationship between our digital mode and the content we publish have been concerned with how different platforms influence the messages we craft. However, we haven’t given as much space to the equally interesting matter of how the culture surrounding digital tools resonates with aspects of our subject matter.

In September, Joshua Kim published an article in Inside Higher Ed entitled “Is Digital Culture Changing Academic Culture?” In the piece, Kim reflects on the contrast between “digital culture,” which he characterizes as rapidly-evolving and experimental, and the “solid and stable” nature of traditional academic culture. Each holds apparent value: the agile and non-hierarchical nature of digital culture allows for exciting collaborations to arise, stoking innovation, while the long-reaching histories of established universities lend “a foundation on which to build.” As digital scholarship percolates in institutions of higher education, conflicts (or at least growing pains) can arise, but Kim argues that despite the apparent incongruity, universities could reap great benefits by incorporating some of the aspects of digital culture that initially seem at odds with their tradition-oriented culture.

The article has stuck with me in the last few months as I’ve considered Kim’s point in relation to how schools address issues of social inequality on campus. Academic culture benefits from stability for many reasons, and tradition can be an integral and important part of educational experience (just ask a Mawrter). But there are ways that this constancy can feel like entrenchment that reach even beyond the domain of digital versus analog scholarship. Kim’s reflections on digital culture reminded me of current ongoing dialogues both in and outside of the academy on difficult issues such as race, gender, and sexual assault; issues in which rapidly evolving approaches to inclusion and identity run up against deeply ingrained societal problems.

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Bryn Mawr Teach-In on Race, Higher Education, Rights and Responsibilities

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Teach in crop

On Tuesday, November 18 from 7 to 9pm, I joined members of the Bryn Mawr community for a Teach-In on Race, Higher Education, Rights and Responsibilities in Thomas Great Hall. The Undergraduate Dean’s Office sponsored presentations and conversations around the following topics:

  • History of the Confederate flag and its current repercussions in U.S. society and politics, Sharon Ullman, Professor of History and Director of Gender and Sexuality Studies
  • Race and higher education, Monica Mercado, CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow and Director, The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education
  • Bryn Mawr’s history with regard to race and diversity, Florence Goff, former Associate Chief Information Officer and Equal Opportunity Officer
  • Navigating the rights and responsibilities of free speech, Mary Catherine Roper BMC ’87, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU Pennsylvania
  • Well-being, accountability, and living in a diverse community, Reggie Jones, Counseling Service Director, Student Health Services

updated 11/25/14

A recording of the talks has been made available online by the Undergraduate Dean’s office. [link to audio]

We have collected tweets from that night in our Storify account. [link]

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Margaret Hall and Bryn Mawr: On the Front Lines of the Great War

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Margaret Hall

Elizabeth in Special Collections

Elizabeth Reilly, Class of 2014, at work in Special Collections

Veteran’s Day is observed every year on November 11th to commemorate the anniversary of the end of World War I, one of the pivotal events of modern history. As a women’s college, Bryn Mawr did not send students or alumnae into direct combat in the early twentieth century — an era before women entered battle alongside men — but members of our college community were very much linked to the turmoil in Europe.

Recent Bryn Mawr College graduate Elizabeth Reilly spent the summer of 2014 researching materials related to World War I in Bryn Mawr Special Collections. As part of her work Elizabeth immersed herself in the papers of Margaret Hall, Class of 1899, who volunteered with the Red Cross near the front lines in France. Using a wide range of sources, including Hall’s correspondence, photographs, ephemera, a bound manuscript that Hall herself compiled upon her return, and other resources from Special Collections, Elizabeth created a digital exhibit, using Omeka, that captures Hall’s unique story almost a century after the fact. Elizabeth’s project is now available on the Greenfield Digital Center website:

“Margaret Hall and Bryn Mawr: On the Front Lines of the Great War“

By drawing on the full resources of the college archives, Elizabeth weaves together several stories and perspectives into a rich narrative. Her exhibit incorporates findings from alumnae files and records, personal correspondence, ephemera, and published sources to build a biography of Hall’s WWI experiences that also highlights the experiences of other Mawrters volunteering in Europe and at home on Bryn Mawr’s campus.

The Bryn Mawr "Patriotic Farm,"

The Bryn Mawr “Patriotic Farm,”1910s.

Elizabeth also reflects on what it means to research physical materials in an age of digital methods and tools. Calling for an incorporation of both approaches, she writes, “navigating and learning from archival collections online can be invaluable in our present digital information driven culture. But,” she argues, “they should be used alongside physical collections whenever possible.”

“Margaret Hall and Bryn Mawr” is the latest student-produced digital project published on the Greenfield Digital Center‘s website, combining archival research and digital writing methods. On both our main site and our blog, we strive to support and publish student work that interrogates the relationship between women’s history and the digital world.

Do you have feedback on this project, or suggestions for new areas of research? Leave a comment below!

Call for Papers: Women’s History in the Digital World 2015

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Women’s History in the Digital World 2015, the second conference of The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education, will be held on the campus of Bryn Mawr College on May 21-22.

We aim to bring together experts, novices, and all those in between to share insights, lessons, and resources for the many projects emerging at the crossroads of history, the digital humanities, and women’s and gender studies. Continuing a conversation begun at our inaugural meeting in 2013, the conference will feature the work of librarians and archivists, faculty, students, and other stakeholders in the development of women’s and gender histories within digital scholarship.

Opening keynote, Women's History in a Digital World, 2013 at Bryn Mawr College.

Opening keynote, Women’s History in a Digital World, 2013.

The conference will feature a keynote address by Claire Bond Potter, Professor of History and Co-Director of the Humanities Action Lab at The New School for Public Engagement.

Panels will be scheduled during the afternoon on Thursday, May 21, and on Friday, May 22; a projects showcase and digital lab will offer opportunities for unstructured conversation and demonstrations.

We invite individual papers or full panel proposals on women’s and gender history projects with a digital component, investigating the complexities of creating, managing, researching and/or teaching with digital resources and digitized materials.

All thematic areas, geographies, and time periods are welcome: this is a chance to share knowledge, network, and promote collaborations that locate new possibilities.

To submit a proposal, please send the following information by email to greenfieldhwe@brynmawr.edu:

  • complete contact information including current email and institutional affiliation, if any;
  • short (150-200 word) biography for each presenter; and
  • abstract (s) of the proposed presentation (500 words for single paper, poster, or demonstration, or 1,500-2000 words for panels of 3 papers)

The deadline for submissions is Friday, January 16, 2015.

For updates, follow the Greenfield Digital Center on Twitter @GreenfieldHWE and the conference hashtag, #WHDigWrld15.

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Women’s History in the Digital World is organized by The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education with the support of Bryn Mawr College Libraries and The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.