Bethany Anderson, Mary Ton, and Kristen Wilson received a $60,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support the development of a portal of women in science. Anderson, Natural and Applied Sciences Archivist at the University of Illinois Archives, serves as the project director alongside co-project directors Mary Ton, Digital Humanities Librarian, and Kristen Wilson, Illinois Distributed Museum Coordinator. Their project, “No Longer at the Margins: A Digital Project to Amplify Access to the Archives of Women in Science,” received one of thirty-three Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Grants awarded nationwide. The grant supports institutions’ preservation and accessibility efforts of collections essential to scholarship, education, and public programming in the humanities. “No Longer at the Margins” was also selected to receive funding from the NEH’s special initiative, American Tapestry: Weaving Together Past, Present, and Future, which is awarded for humanities projects that address “contemporary social challenges, including strengthening our democracy, advancing equity for all, and addressing our changing climate.”
The project will initially focus on digitizing archival materials from the domestic science movement, including the Isabel Bevier Papers and records related to the Department of Household Science, and will develop workshops, workflows, and machine-generated datasets for computational analysis to facilitate access and engagement with these materials. Importantly, the project seeks to create a collaborative network to amplify access to these materials and the stories of women scientists by developing resources that can eventually be shared between several allied projects that promote the history of science and women in science. Anderson, Wilson, and Ton will be partnering with the University of Minnesota Archives, who will be digitizing their domestic science materials, and Science Stories, a linked data project that uses structured data from Wikidata and other machine-readable open data sources to tell the stories of women in science. The project’s interdisciplinary advisory board comprises a broad array of stakeholders in history, archives, and information science, and includes representatives from the Association for Women in Science, Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, History of Women Philosophers and Scientists, Lost Women of Science podcast, Rosalind Franklin Society, and Science History Institute.
“We are excited to be embarking on this project to create better access to the archives of women scientists, and are honored that the project was selected for special funding from the NEH’s American Tapestry initiative. We are especially looking forward to collaborating with Science Stories and the University of Minnesota Archives on the project and developing strong partnerships around the collective goal of amplifying access to these materials,” Anderson writes.
The NEH was created as an independent federal agency in 1965 and continues to support research and learning in the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals nationwide.
For more information on this project and the 238 humanities projects awarded NEH grants nationwide, please visit https://www.neh.gov/news/neh-announces-262-million-238-humanities-projects-nationwide.
The “No Longer at the Margins: A Digital Project to Amplify Access to the Archives of Women in Science” project has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom.
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