After a wonderful Saturday at THATCamp New England at Wentworth Institute of Technology, I returned home energized about DH and my project.  I had time on the train to make a list of what I wanted to accomplish this week, and I have been able to cross off a lot of things.

The first thing on my list was to find and add women for this week’s Women of the Week.  Early this week, I added a new page with three more fascinating women whose birthdays were in late March.  I look forward to searching each week and adding the new birthday women to be featured!

Another item on my list was to make the A Woman of the Century by Generation exhibition live.  I have been working on this part of the project for a while, so I added everyone with an item and made the exhibition public.  Over the last decade, I have presented papers and have curated an exhibition on the Massachusetts women in A Woman of the Century.   At some point soon, I will make that work public.  I’ve been able to analyze the Massachusetts women by generation, and the results have been fascinating.   I look forward to having more and more women from each generation to compare and contrast.

My challenge this week was the decision about quality vs. quantity. I want to get as many women as possible onto the site as items, but I also want to make the exhibitions that are already there the best that they can be.  Since I want users and potential contributors interested in both local history and women’s history to be able to locate the pages in A Woman of the Century easily, I decided to add page numbers to the women on both the A Woman of the Century by Birthplace and the A Woman of the Century by Occupation exhibitions.  As I have been adding the page numbers to the pages of the exhibitions, I’ve also been searching both my database and A Woman of the Century to add Available women to the pages.  In some cases, I’ve added new pages, such as the one for Canada.  While this part of the project is time consuming, it adds value to the site by allowing users to easily get to the pages of the women they are interested in.  If someone is In progress, the user also may explore the woman’s item.  It has been slow going, but I hope to add the page numbers for all of the women already in the exhibitions, and to add page numbers and basic information about many more, by the end of this week.  At that point, I’ll use these lists and add more items myself

Part of the reason that I have been working so hard to add women to the exhibition lists is that I am preparing to send a message to my Facebook friends about my project.  I want to send this message by the end of Women’s History month, which is tomorrow.  It has been a very busy week with teaching and other work, so I have not crafted that message yet.  It’s my project for tomorrow.  My project Facebook page is not out yet, but I do want to tell my friends about the project and invite them to participate.  I did reach out to a high school classmate who has an interest in women’s history.  She was pleased to see the site and said that she will work on the project.  I hope that many others will be excited to read about these women and will decide to join the A Woman of the Century 21st Century team!