This project is in development. When possible, a link to it will be made available here.
The Digital Scholarship Group is making data from a series of 19th-century US Catholic almanacs widely available and searchable. Each almanac includes a list of all the institutions in each of the country’s dioceses from that year–every church; every elementary and secondary school; every university and college; and every hospital, orphanage, and asylum that was under a diocese’s supervision. These almanacs record a bottom-up social history of Catholic people and organizations of all stripes.
Our job is to turn this dense list of institution names, places, and people into a searchable database, which will allow those small stories of regular people to reach more users than ever, all while making our grassroots knowledge of the past more complete. We want users to be able to search for individuals and institutions to see what the almanacs say about them and eventually to connect to other existing data about those people and organizations. We also want users to be able to visualize the almanac data at a larger scale.
To create the database and visualizations, there is some crucial and unglamorous transcribing and encoding work to be done. Luckily for us, we trained and now manage a team of outstanding BC humanities students who are hard at work extracting data from these amazing almanacs into a series of spreadsheets. They will be kept quite busy, as we have a run of almanacs from 1833 to 1895! Already we have over 700k datapoints encoded in 500 spreadsheets, each sheet holding one diocese in one year.
Students make many complex decisions about how to best record information from the wily almanacs, which are often inconsistent and sometimes outright erroneous. Students record what the almanac wrote and supplement that information with additional outside research into locations and individuals. For example, one student might record that a church was in Summit, New York in 1870; another student learns that “Summit” was really the name of the train station and the town is now called “Churubusco,” then finds a coordinate for where that church used to be.
Though each diocese is in its own spreadsheet, all the sheets are connected by many elaborate formulae, assuring that information that is updated in one year can be automatically updated across all sheets when appropriate. The formulae keep our coordinates consistent from year to year. They also help us identify individuals who appear in more than one almanac, allowing us to track an individual’s career. Sometimes these people appear in different dioceses over time, such as one John Bl. Keuhn, who served in the dioceses of Baltimore, Chicago, Rochester, and Erie in the same decade–and had his named spelled differently over the years.
So far, students are working in two chunks: at the start of the almanacs run (1833-43), and in the middle (1860-70). Eventually, they will meet somewhere in the 1850s. We look forward to sharing our project site with you in the coming months! In the meantime, write to project editor Ashlyn Stewart (stewarfu@bc.edu) if you are interested in doing some beta testing of our database.
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