About the Project
In the first several decades of Framingham State’s history as a normal school, its students kept regular daily journals that documented their learning, their activities in Lexington, West Newton, and Framingham, and their travels around the state. The University Archives housed in the Whittemore Library holds a number of these journals, several of which have been digitized in PDF form.
This site and exhibit will highlight these crucial windows into the world of the students who trained at the first normal school in the United States, showing how women became educators, and interacted with broader social movements of the antebellum era, not least the growing abolition movement.
Students enrolled in DGHM 110 Introduction to Digital Humanities (Fall 2022) have begun this project by uploading and annotating with metadata all of the currently digitized journals in the Whittemore Library collection, which encompasses the writings of: Eliza Rogers Gould, Louisa Harris, Ann E. Shannon, Julia Ann Smith, and Lydia Ann Stow. In addition, they created an interactive exhibit that begins the process of uploading transcriptions and shows some of the potential for these documents as sources for analysis.
The project could and should last long beyond this semester, creating a base that Library and DH Center staff, interns, and students add to in the coming years.