Project Description

Documentary Focus

This archive aims to highlight women engaging in sports during the Victorian Era through extant photographs as concrete evidence of their active participation. 

Archival Practices

This archive attempts to employ a more "user-friendly" interface, straying from traditional finding aids and metadata-first organization, in accordance with Smith and Villata's principles for user-centered design in digital archives (2020). To serve a wide range of users, including users not familiar with archival practices, resrources are relatively quickly and easily accessible  with metadata listed after resource itself. Text is minimal, keeping the focus on the images or the resources themselves.

This digital archive also disregards traditional principles of provenance and original order, as the collections are topical and span a wide range of sources. However, a progressive take on provenance, such as suggested by Caswell et al., may view the community of American women as the body to which the records naturally belong (2016). The archive has been made by women, for women.

Because of our intention to create an intuitive interface for users less familiar with archives, the descriptions of these digitized items emphasize the context of the physical items to support understanding that the items are real, physical photos which exist in a physical repository. This understanding is especially important in today's digital landscape of disinformation such as the presence of AI-generated images created to imitate historical extant photographs. To create this understanding, the descriptive scheme includes original format, repository name, and the url of the holding repository, as suggested by Force and Smith (2021).

Selection Criteria

Our criteria for selection for the items within this archive involved multiple elements and required changes as curation continued. Though we understand the 'Victorian Era' is known to be from 1837-1901, we agreed to push our temporal coverage to images dated as far as 1910. Though the temporal coverage does go beyond the agreed-upon 'Victorian Era', it is within a close time following what could very much be seen as arbitrary dates. Part of our reasoning was simply availability of media, though the main reason for us to push our coverage was in order to diversify the records within this archive. Furthermore, the collection focuses on photographs taken in the United States, creating even more of an arbitrary sense of what is considered " Victorian."

In photograph selection, we prioritized on "action shots" to emphasize the active participation of women and girls in sports, and to show a more real and grounded visual of the lives of the women in this era. The photograph subjects include recreational, educational, and competitive sporting activities.

Users

This archive can serve a variety of users, including: students, educators, vocational and avocational researchers, activists, athletes, hobbyists, sports historians, artists, and much more. The archive can meet the needs of any user who has an interest in women's sports and/or the Victorian time period. 

Archival Perspectives

There is an obvious lack of diversity within this archive. The majority of the resources depict white women participating in recreational, competitive, or collegiate sports. This is largely due to the time period, since many sports leagues and activities were not yet integrated in the United States. Although some women of color did participate in sports, they were not as well documented as white women participating in sports during this time period. 

Our focus on collegiate women also reflects a perspective of women who were able and had the means to attend college. The privilege required to attend a college as a woman is reflected in the collegiate collection.

In attempts to find more depictions of women of color in sports, we pushed our temporal coverage to 1910. However, the archive is still not as diverse as we would like.