Our Project
Project Title: How the Other Half Lived in Worcester: Creating a Social History Digital Humanities Dataset from Local Archival Collections, ca. 1890-1950
Brief Description: Social historians are primarily concerned with the lives of non-famous people, especially those who left little written record of their own. Worcester State University is situated within the City of Worcester, which has many untapped stories of working class, immigrant, and socioeconomically disadvantaged residents (populations who historically have often lacked the power and resources to record their own history). Historical collections exist locally in the Worcester Historical Museum (WHM) which could help us better understand these populations through the tools and methods of social history. Those tools and methods approach such people in the past both as discrete individuals and by employing aggregate data about their lives from public sources, archival collections, and other records. In this multi-year digital humanities project, students will work with social historian Dr. Tona Hangen (History and Political Science Department) on two collections of archival social work casefiles.
Collection 1: The Edwards Street Temporary Home and Day Nursery Collection (THDN) comprises twelve fileboxes of handwritten casefiles and other materials related to a private charitable organization that provided a free or low-cost temporary safe house for women and children and free or low-cost child care from the 1880s through the 1950s. The Edwards Street home was contemporaneous with Hull House and other settlement houses in major cities designed to assist poor, medically needy, or immigrant families navigate life crises and personal challenges. The collection’s casefiles contain a wealth of information about the people served: home situation, workplace and income, ethnicity, religious affiliation, financial precarity, intersections with the criminal justice system, and medical concerns, among others. [Worcester Historical Museum, Collection 2004.04, see also Collection 2012.41]
Collection 2: Associated Charities of Worcester (AC), an umbrella organization emblematic of the “scientific charity movement” that helped fund and provide, among other services, a home for pregnant teens, foster care, poverty programs that predated federal welfare, visiting home nurses, and child abuse prevention in and around Worcester in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. [Worcester Historical Museum, Collection 2022.11]
Goals: The project’s longterm goal is to create and publish a public, open source, searchable, downloadable dataset utilizing the information in these collections. It could be used by historians, demographers, researchers in public health, urban studies, or public policy, or by teachers and students at any level.
By bringing in 1-2 student researchers on summer research grants, the project can be sustainably carried forward year to year, completing the THDN digitization and developing a workable dataset from the collection’s materials.
Student Responsibilities:
Continue processing images already collected, including rephotographing of any unusable images
Identify comparable projects and data applications
Construct, troubleshoot, and populate a database using data from the collections
Develop policy documents for data entry and for public use of the dataset
Participate in weekly research meetings
Maintain a digital research log for the group
Produce a report summarizing findings and offering a well-researched historical context narrative with bibliography of sources
On-site archival research and taking archival photographs will be conducted during open hours of the Worcester Historical Museum’s Library and Reading Room (Wednesday - Saturday, 10 am - 4 pm); the other work can be completed on an agreed-on schedule outside of the Museum hours.
Eligible students: Full-time at WSU who successfully complete Spring 2025 term and are registered for Fall 2025 term
What you'll need to provide to apply: contact information, 500-word statement of interest, 1-page resume.