Recently,  I added my Contribute page to the A Woman of the Century: A Crowdsourcing Project of the Nineteenth and Twenty-First Centuries site.  While I had mentioned contributing and noted these three options:

• Inputting information about a woman’s life into the field boxes on the form
• Tagging information about a woman
• Researching information about a woman in Chronicling America and other sources

on the A Woman of the Century by Birthplace and A Woman of the Century by Occupation pages, I needed to create a separate page.

Contributors now have the option of working on Neatline Maps and Timelines for the site.  I have made the Rhode Island Map and Timeline live,  but I am working on others and there are many left to create.

Another new option is to create pins on the Pinterest page for the Project.   I’m hoping that contributors who create items will take five or ten minutes to add images related to the women they are studying to Pinterest.  When I created the Pinterest page, I linked to the Project site and also reached out to friends and relatives on Pinterest.  Hopefully, the visually attractive Pinterest site will create additional audiences and contributors for the project.

I hope that whatever interests the contributors have, there will be something for them to do.

I did mention that contributors are welcome and encouraged to create exhibitions based on the women they are studying and any combination of women.  In addition to making the site richer for audiences, the contributors will have a place to make their work public.

Another addition to the site is Social Bookmaking at the bottom of the Collections and Items pages.  I thought about which social media sites to include in the main list and decided to include Historious (which I had not known about), Mendeley, and Slack, as well as the more popular social media sites.  The first thing that I did was to use the Social Bookmarking tools to add my site to my Pinterest page for the Project.

I’ve also been making decisions about my social media strategy, and I plan to add and link to several social media sites, in addition to Pinterest, in the near future.  I realized that updating my H-Net profile to include my site would be wise, so I did so.  I’ve been brainstorming about marketing and will continue to do so, even after this course is over.

I was in touch with Dr. Leon about adding Google Analytics to the site.  After going to the Google Analytics site and starting to create an account, I decided to wait until the site is more developed.

For this week’s Women of the Week, I decided on two women with April 10th birthdays:  Mary Helen Peck Crane and Fanny Lily Gypsy Davenport.  I did not know much about the accomplished woman known to her contemporaries as M. Helen Crane, and I was very surprised to learn that the youngest of her fourteen children was Stephen Crane.  Fortunately, partly due to this connection, I was able to find newspaper articles about her and references to her in both primary and secondary sources.  Like many women, she was involved with WCTU and knew Frances Elizabeth Willard.   Now I have reading Thomas A. Gullason’s Stephen Crane’s Literary Family on my list of books for in-between semester reading.  Since my master’s thesis was about nineteenth-century American Theatre, I certainly knew about Fanny Davenport  It was a joy to create her item and to search for items about her.  My favorite find was a Library of Congress map , Main Acting Routes of Fanny Davenport.  At some point soon, I am going to do an exhibition related to this map.  I also found a similar item, Main Acting Routes of Lotta Crabtree, for Lotta, another famous actress whose item was created by contributor Carla Morrissey.

Over the next week, I will be updating sections of the site, adding new women, and creating exhibitions.  I am keeping my personas in mind at every step and am working to create a site that they will enjoy using and contributing to.  It will be another busy, but very worthwhile week on the Project front.