{"id":8375,"date":"2019-05-17T14:41:09","date_gmt":"2019-05-17T18:41:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.lib.purdue.edu\/news\/?p=8375"},"modified":"2019-12-03T09:18:52","modified_gmt":"2019-12-03T13:18:52","slug":"150-diversity-archives-exhibit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.purdue.edu\/news\/2019\/05\/17\/150-diversity-archives-exhibit\/","title":{"rendered":"New Purdue Archives Online Exhibit Aims to Expand Overlooked Areas of Purdue History"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Head<\/a>
Head of the Purdue Archives and Special Collections and Professor Sammie Morris (front row, far right) with her graduate students who compiled the “Voices, Identities, & Silences: Investigating 150 Years of Diversity in the Purdue Archives” online exhibit. Students are (back row, L to R): Narim Kim, Erika Gotfredson, Lee Hibbard, Arielle McKee, and E. C. McGregor Boyle III; (front row, L to R): Maddie Gehling, Elise Robbins, and Dee McCormick.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Every story has untold pieces. Purdue University Archives and Special Collections<\/a> contains millions of stories in the many papers, books, objects, items, and other memorabilia carefully preserved and stored there. Yet, it does not hold them all\u2014particularly those that may have not been “judged to be\u2026important,” as noted in the introduction of the new online exhibit, “Voices, Identities & Silences: Investigating 150 Years of Diversity in Purdue Archives<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

The exhibit is the result of a graduate course led by Purdue University Archivist and Professor Sammie Morris this past spring semester.<\/p>\n

The exhibit’s introduction notes that Purdue’s past, present, and future are comprised of much more than stories about feats associated with its engineering programs, its tales about athletic teams, or its strides in agricultural research and practice. It also explains why the student curators took on this effort:<\/p>\n

[N]ot all of this history is (or will be) preserved in the University\u2019s archive. Inevitably, some people and events are judged to be more important and thus more worthy of preservation. Our exhibit, then, aims to focus attention on elements of Purdue\u2019s history that have been otherwise overlooked, not in order to ‘correct’ that history but rather to expand it and (if our aim is true) change our understanding of what ‘counts’ as that history in the first place. \u2014 Voices, Identities & Silences: Investigating 150 Years of Diversity in Purdue Archives<\/a><\/p>\n

According to Morris, the idea for the course coincided with Purdue University\u2019s faculty and staff members’ preparation for Purdue’s Sesquicentennial<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs Purdue\u2019s 150th anniversary approached, I often found myself reflecting on how the history of Purdue is preserved in the Archives, but not completely. There are many hidden gaps or silences representing people in Purdue history whose stories have not been widely known,\u201d Morris said. \u201cI began thinking about ways to fill in gaps in Purdue history, while engaging students in learning archival research skills.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Erika<\/a>
During a private reception highlighting the online exhibit project, Erika Gotfredson shared her thoughts about the work she did for the “Voices, Identities, & Silences: Investigating 150 Years of Diversity in the Purdue Archives.” Gotfredson researched and composed “Title IX in the 1970s,” and, in her research, she found a Sept. 4, 1974, article in The Exponent<\/a> that shared news about how “the newly formed women\u2019s intercollegiate athletics program had released a female ‘insignia,’ or mascot, intended to represent the emerging female athletes,” Gotfredson explains in the exhibit. “Criticism of Polly Purdue emerged a single day after her drawing appeared in the Exponent. On September 5th, the Exponent staff published this piece entitled ‘Polly Purdue must go, insult to women’ in the ‘Opinion\/Viewpoint’ section of the paper.”
<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The course, too, coincided with Purdue Libraries\u2019 expansion of its teaching mission through the creation of the new “Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies.”<\/p>\n

\u201cWith digital humanities being one area the new school focuses on, the course offered the right opportunity to teach digital scholarship methods while providing students the opportunity to delve into Purdue\u2019s lesser-known history,\u201d Morris explained. “The overarching goal for students was to learn how to conduct archival research, but the broader goal was to benefit from the results of their research projects by highlighting diversity in Purdue\u2019s past. Students in the course were encouraged to consider the identity of Purdue and how their experiences as students today are preserved. Students learned how the records of their experiences (that are preserved in the Archives) become sources of study for scholars in the future.”<\/p>\n

\"Lee<\/a>
Lee Hibbard, a third-year Ph.D. student in the Purdue Department of English studying rhetoric and composition, said the title of the exhibit came about as the students “played with the theme of the course and our process of research, as well as what we wanted viewers to take away from the exhibit.”<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Students in Morris’ class each focused on an individual era and\/or topic in Purdue’s history, and the contents covered in the online exhibit are the result of each student’s work. For instance, Lee Hibbard, a third-year Ph.D. student in the Purdue Department of English<\/a> studying rhetoric and composition, focused on queer life in the 2000s at Purdue.<\/p>\n

“The work on the exhibit was entirely collaborative, with every person taking on distinct roles both on the front and back end of the exhibit\u2019s appearance and contents,” Hibbard explained. “To come up with the title, we took a portion of class time and brainstormed some ideas together. The title came about as we played with the theme of the course and our process of research, as well as what we wanted viewers to take away from the exhibit. The wording was especially important to us as Purdue students wanting to tell a coherent narrative that depicted our goals for the exhibit, as well as the things we took away from the course as a whole,” he added.<\/p>\n

“The three core pieces of archival work we focused on\u2014voices, identities, and silences\u2014became the first part of the title. The second half emphasized our process, which was very much a journey of going through the archives with an eye towards investigating diversity, rather than discovering,” Hibbard continued. “Discovery has an end point while Investigation is a process, and even though we all uncovered many interesting and fascinating examples of diversity, all of us felt by the end of the course that we had just scratched the surface of our areas, and could easily return to them to try and learn more.”<\/p>\n

Hibbard, who is also interested in archival practices, noted that he found this course essential to unpacking the complex ideas he had for his dissertation.<\/p>\n

“At the beginning of the semester, I knew I wanted to look at some archival things, but didn\u2019t have the tools to do so. After a spring of reading complex theory, getting hands-on archival experience, and learning the importance of selection and curation in an exhibit setting, I feel more comfortable with the prospect of working with archives for my dissertation and my future scholarship as a whole,” he said.<\/p>\n

Like his fellow students in the course, Hibbard chose to home in on a specific area of Purdue’s history because of his personal stake and interest in the selected topic and era.<\/p>\n

“As a queer person, specifically a transgender man, I am very interested in the way support and networks for queer students developed at Purdue during the time that I was an undergraduate (2006-2010) at a similar large Midwestern university (University of Nebraska in Lincoln),” he explained.<\/p>\n

Shortly before the end of the Spring 2019 semester, students in Morris’ course shared their personal stories about their work on the exhibit at a small, private reception held in the Archives and Special Collections<\/a>. Below are more photos from that reception.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Dee<\/a>
L to R: Dee McCormick, E. C. McGregor Boyle III, and Elise Robbins listen to Narim Kim (far right) as she discussed her work on the “Foreign Teaching Assistants in the 1980s” part of the “Voices, Identities, & Silences: Investigating 150 Years of Diversity in the Purdue Archives” online exhibit.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Maddie<\/a>
Maddie Gehling’s part of “Voices, Identities, & Silences: Investigating 150 Years of Diversity in the Purdue Archives” focused on “Women\u2019s Leadership in the 1890s.” In her archival research, Gehling found that Agnes Eugenie Vater served as the very first editor-in-chief of The Purdue Exponent “(the university\u2019s student newspaper), the first edition of which was printed in December 1889.” Vater was the only who woman who served on the board of editors for the 1891 edition of the Debris, Purdue University\u2019s now-defunct yearbook.
<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every story has untold pieces. Purdue University Archives and Special Collections contains millions of stories in the many papers, books, objects, items, and other memorabilia carefully preserved and stored there. Yet, it does not hold them all\u2014particularly those that may have not been “judged to be\u2026important,” as noted in the introduction of the new online […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[4828,13,64],"tags":[11749,54,3863,11746,11748,11747],"class_list":["post-8375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faculty_staff","category-general","category-spec","tag-archival-practices","tag-archives","tag-archives-and-special-collections","tag-diversity","tag-graduate-research","tag-graduate-students"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pT6ms-2b5","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/136"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8375"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8375\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9557,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8375\/revisions\/9557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}