No Longer at the Margins: A Digital Project to Amplify Access to the Archives of Women in Science

FAIN: PW-296856-24

Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois (Champaign, IL 61801-3620)
Bethany Anderson (Project Director: July 2023 to present)
Mary Ton (Co Project Director: March 2024 to present)
Kristen Wilson (Co Project Director: March 2024 to present)

A foundations project to develop a portal of women in science, starting with domestic science department collections held at the University of Illinois (UI) and University of Minnesota (UM). The work would include digitizing 21 linear feet of collections and creating partnerships, workshops, protocols, and machine-generated datasets for computational analysis.

No Longer at the Margins seeks to create the foundation for a network of allied projects that amplify the digitized archives and stories of women in science. As a collaborative initiative between the University of Illinois Archives, Science Stories, and the University of Minnesota Archives, this project will initially focus on select materials related to the field of domestic science and science education for women at land-grant institutions. By exploring ways to facilitate research on women in science and more fully tell their stories through access to digitized materials, machine-generated datasets ready for computational and pedagogical uses, and plans for workshops relating to the materials and datasets, this project builds on previous work by the University of Illinois Archives to understand how such approaches can address the challenges of identifying women scientists in the archives while shedding light on their contributions and the complex histories in which they are enmeshed.