End-of-project reflection (Summer 2021)
When I first began work on this project way back in February of 2021, I had close to no idea of what the final product would or could look like. I didn’t even know what department would be able to host me for this fairly unusual and highly specific research project; I proposed it first as a symbolic-interactionist analysis within the sociology department, then a creative writing project culminating in a poetry chapbook with short postmodernist free verse in the style of Gertrude Stein. By the time I reached out to the library, I was far from certain that I’d be able to do this project at all.
But as it turns out, working in the digital liberal arts and archival library departments has been probably the best thing I could have pursued for exploring this strange pet topic that I’ve been fascinated by ever since I found a beat-up etiquette booklet that had once been leather-bound in my great-grandmother’s house (Etiquette: Good Manners for Everyone by Katherine Heisenfet, if you’re curious, featured in this collection and scanned in from the very copy I took from that house close to twelve years ago). Working with old commercial nonfiction, I’ve discovered, is a complicated task in that the texts themselves are often hard to find in original editions, or even to find at all, and furthermore many of them can be difficult to understand without significant prior research on their contemporary social context.
It’s because of this complexity that Burling was the perfect home for this project. By combining archival techniques for metadata extraction and text/subject preservation with modern digital scholarship methods, I’ve been able to examine the texts in the finished collection from the perspectives of a researcher and an interested reader, while also preparing them for potential future use in others’ projects. On their own, many of the collected texts seem archaic or silly; it’s only once they’re placed together, I think, that they become a true cultural artifact of the idealized home and family. I particularly enjoyed the work I did on optimizing the topic analyses in Gale Scholar Lab, mostly because it was so satisfying to finally get the parameters right for a coherent and interesting set of word groupings.
My apprenticeship in Special Collections was another unexpected opportunity to learn more about recording the most important details of obscure books and ephemera. The audit of the Salisbury House attic collection, an unlogged set of books with no clear underlying theme, was a fascinating look into archival research and preservation. I learned skills I hadn’t known could ever be useful, like finding all the basic information on a book when all I had was the table of contents, the body of the texts, and a spine so damaged it showed half of the author’s name and nothing else. I also found out what information is worth a hour-long Google search and what isn’t, in that same context, not to mention the skill of researching a barely readable autograph for a connection to the book’s original owner.
This project has been easily one of my favorite long-term study experiences at Grinnell, and I expect I’ll use the combination of practical and theoretical knowledge I learned this summer for a very long time. I look forward to potential future work on the website where the final archive is hosted, as well as the as-yet-unknown projects where the knowledge I’ve gained this summer will come in handy. I would absolutely recommend a MAP of this nature to any humanities student looking for a unique and fascinating study opportunity, and I would be thrilled to have the chance to continue the work I started here in the future.
-Eva Hill ‘22