NEH Grant to Amplify Access to the Archives of Women Scientists

By Bethany Anderson, Natural and Applied Sciences Archivist

Bethany Anderson, Mary Ton (Digital Humanities Librarian), and Kristen Wilson (Illinois Distributed Museum Coordinator) have received a $60,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create digital resources and the foundation for a network of partners that amplifies access to the digitized archives of women scientists, focusing initially on the domestic science movement. The 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. “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 notion of amplification is key to this project. To “amplify” means to “extend or increase…in amount, importance, dignity” as well as to “enlarge (a story or statement) by telling it more diffusely or fully, or by adding fresh details, illustrations, or reflections; to expand” and (in a scientific sense) to “make multiple copies of.” Taken together, these meanings inform the ethos of this project 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.

The project will create workshops, workflows, and machine-generated datasets for computational analysis, as well as develop partnerships around the collective goal of amplifying access to these materials. Anderson, Ton, and Wilson will be working 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. In collaboration with these partners, the team hopes to promote women in the history of science and their important contributions through enhanced digital access to their archives.