About
Our project deliverables and goals
The digital collection of The College News, a Bryn Mawr College student publication active from 1914 to 1968, is a valuable asset for studying institutional history over a crucial period of social change. The 2021 Digital Scholarship Fellows used this resource to create a corpus, two web-based visualizations, and a tactile visualization. The team executed these projects by using computational methods to extract names, places, and terms from the College News with the goal of simplifying access to marginalized stories.
Content warning: this website and the corpus our project analyzes include historical terminology for race and other material that may cause harm.
Collaborative Work
Exploring the College News
The College News
A student-run newspaper
Data
1,340 issues as text files
Letters to the Editor
A glimpse into history
Map
Locations mentioned in the College News
Political Topics
Issues between 1950-1968
Tactile Visualization
Concentration of graduated students from each state (1931-1949)
Individual Projects
Explore our secondary visualizations
Mentions of "Cigarette" and "Smoking""
Relative frequency in a bar graph
By Linda Chen '23
'Negro' and Related Words
View their frequency and context
By Marianela Luna-Torrado '24
Religions in the College News
Frequency and topics
By Al Nash '23
South Asian Keywords
interactive strip plot graph with context
By Aanandi Murlidharan '23
Place Names in Wartime Issues
Interactive map
By Avery Matteo '22
Wordclouds
By decade, 1910s to 1960s
By DSSF Team
Timeline
Our process between June 1 - August 6th
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Training
The Digital Scholarship Summer Fellows arrived with varying degrees of technological experience and exposure to digital scholarship. To equip each individual with skills needed to complete the project, the cohort spent the first three weeks primarily learning Python fundamentals with a focus of data analysis methods such as web scraping, data visualization, distant reading of the College News corpus, and other tools vital to the project.
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Research
In the early stages of research, team members spent substantial time exploring The College News to identify topics of interest for both collaborative and individual research projects. Fellows then began transforming their topics of interest into quantitative data through Natural Language Processing (NLP), topic modeling, keyword searching, and context searching. The team also decided upon a critical making project visualizing the concentration of Bryn Mawr graduates from each U.S. state. This data was collected by extracting place names in College News graduation issues between 1935 and 1968.
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Development
Based on individual interests, some team members exercised their newly acquired coding skills by supporting data analysis and visualization, while others worked on front-end website development. Throughout this stage, individual and collaborative projects were refined while website templates and features were evaluated for use.
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Publication
To present their findings, the fellows used Jekyll — a tool that transforms plain text into a static website — to find a fitting template, make appropriate edits, and deploy the Github-hosted project website. Team members also finished crafting their tactile visualization in Park Science Center’s Makerspace.
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Project Conclusion
OUR TEAM
The 2021 Digital Scholarship Summer Fellows Program
Alice McGrath
Project Director
Rosemarie Fettig
Research Coordinator
Stella Fritzell
Project Manager
Aanandi Murlidharan
Web Content Strategist
Al Nash
Lead Developer
Avery Matteo
Web Content Strategist
Linda Chen
Data Visualization Specialist
Marianela Luna-Torrado
Data Specialist
Special thanks to Allison Mills, Bronwen Densmore, and Molly Kuchler for offering their support as project consultants.
As one of our main goals for this project is to help raise awareness towards the lack of representation in Bryn Mawr history and providing platforms for underrepresented voices, we would like to recognize our positionality in the process. First, we would like to acknowledge that Bryn Mawr College operates on Lenape land. We would like to respect and honor the caretakers of this land, from time immemorial until now, and into the future. Secondly, we would like to raise awareness that the voices portrayed in the College News are primarily the voices of white students at Bryn Mawr College. We recognize that our data is missing the valuable perspectives of Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) students.