Making the Jane Addams Papers Accessible to New Audiences

Abstract Scholars have been the only ones able to easily access primary sources on Jane Addams and her work for social justice, social work, woman suffrage, immigrants, and peace. Over the past 45 years, the Jane Addams Papers Project has been working to expand the audience for these critical papers. Whether through microfilm, print, or digital publication, the goal has been the same—to bring Addams’s words, ideas, and world to a large and varied public. With digital publication the project can significantly expand public access. It is developing tools to encourage creative use of the materials—lesson plans for middle school students, guides for National History Day projects, and crowdsourcing tools to enable the public to participate in the project. By making the data that underlies the edition accessible to digital humanities scholars, the project plans to develop datasets that can be used to analyze and interpret the papers. From maps that plot Addams’s correspondence and associates, to social-network visualizations and text analyses of her speeches and correspondence, the digital edition will encourage new questions and analysis that would not have been possible a short time ago.