The Suffrage Postcard Project

Reviewed by: Theodore Daniel Manning

Review started: February 13, 2023

Review last updated: May 1, 2023

Site Link

• https://thesuffragepostcardproject.omeka.net/

Data and Sources

• Suffrage era postcards, American and British (late 19th to early 20th cent.)
• Database of searchable terms based on collected metadata from postcards

Processes

• Began as finding and uploading postcards to Omeka, then tagging and creating metadata. New tags are added to the masterlist and then applied to all other postcards it may be relevant to.

Presentation

• Downloadable files which contain archives of photos
• Searchable files by tag with displayed photo results

Digital Tools Used

• Omeka

Languages

• English

Review

The Suffrage Postcard Project is a digitization of postcards from the United States and Britain during the women’s suffrage era. Information on how (in terms of grants, labs, etc) and why (in terms of passion project vs direction, etc) this project was created is unavailable, however it was created by Ana Stevenson and Kristin Allukian in Fall 2015. The project is ongoing, and seems to seek to provide as many examples of these postcards as possible for the further understanding of the masculine relationship to femininity through the lens of the suffrage movement and its opponents. The authors have presented this work at multiple conferences to date in the Digital Humanities realm, however not since 2019. As well, the project creators have an active Twitter account for the project, but don’t often post about their own work, rather retweeting the work of other scholars. As well, I think there’s more that could be done to disseminate the project further, however being primarily a student-led project I’m sure they’re busy.

While the idea behind this project is beautiful and fascinating, its presentation method could use work. The postcards are organized into collections. Collections are organized first by what appears to be, but is not explained, perhaps donated or found collections named after individuals or other collectives. The collection can be searched by individual collections or by tag.

Each image is tagged with both tags that analyze the document and tags that are directly from the text of the postcard. These tags are searchable using the provided ‘word cloud’ format in a ‘search tags’ tab, or browsable from beneath the tags on individual postcards within collections.

Images can then be downloaded from within their individual page, although some collections do not properly export to the listed file format.

The project’s navigation system is unfortunately difficult to use due to its navigation issues, downloading issues, and lack of clarity on some of the methodology. As well, the data could be interesting to see in a visualization, perhaps timelines showing progression, larger gallery view collections, a map visualizing place of origin, etc–however, it seems that this project is focused strictly on being archival as indicated on their Methodology page, so perhaps this is out of scope.