by Nahlah Abdur-Rahman
March 12, 2026
Scholar researchers-turned-coders transcribe and digitize every diary entry.
The coed-led Black Girls’s Diaries Challenge is making a digital archive of those inside writings from the Nineteenth- and early Twentieth-century eras.
Performed by a dozen students at The Faculty of William & Mary, the undertaking makes an attempt to digitize Black ladies’s historical past via this distinctive sector of diary entries. Listed as a one-credit Digital Humanities Lab on the Virginia-based College, BWDP goals to supply and archive these writings, getting an intimate take a look at Black ladies’s on a regular basis ideas throughout this tumultuous interval in U.S. historical past.
The digital archive is a multi-year effort, in accordance with W&M Information, with an anticipated debut of 12 diaries in October 2026. College students who initially stumbled upon the category have turn out to be champions of its mission, particularly because it sheds new mild on the livelihoods of Black ladies.
“Black ladies’s historical past is necessary to me — it’s my historical past,” shared school junior, Mia Hunt. “This has given me extra data.”
The undertaking will launch with its first archive on the 1902 diary of Florence Barber. Nevertheless, the concept first got here to life via the analysis of Jennifer Putzi, a Professor of English & Gender, Sexuality and Girls’s Research on the college.
Putzi was drafting her personal work on the diary of one other Black girl, Frances Anne Rollin, throughout the Reconstruction interval. Rollin was a author and scholar throughout this period, as Putzi’s personal investigation into her life led her to uncover extra journals by Black ladies of the time.
Along with the category, the staff works on the transcription and coding of every entry, cementing it in historical past after years of marginalization. Upon completion, web site guests could have entry not solely to the entries but in addition to extra sourced context from newspaper analysis and different paperwork.
“There’s no undertaking fairly like this,” Putzi mentioned. “Loads of websites cowl correspondence, however not diaries. We’re adapting code, inventing workflows and studying collectively.”
The undertaking doesn’t lack hurdles, nevertheless, as pure disasters or an absence of documentation make sourcing context for some diarists tougher. Nevertheless, researchers push via these obstacles to study extra about their realities.
BWDP additionally permits aspiring sociologists and historians to develop a brand new ability in coding, because the undertaking combines this technological self-discipline with the aim of digitally documenting Black historical past.
“What I’ve realized is that Black historical past flows via each area — science, sociology, schooling,” shared one other pupil researcher, Micah Hutchings. “I used to think about Black historical past as one thing separate, however Black historical past is in every single place.”
The diaries are sometimes small, as practically illegible cursive writing with pale ink makes the transcriptions tougher. Nevertheless, every profitable archive provides one other layer to Black ladies’s historical past and a deeper understanding of the struggles and triumphs they confronted.
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