The Black Women’s Diaries Project has been generously supported by the William & Mary Libraries Faculty Scholar Program and the William & Mary Charles Center for Undergraduate Research.
- William & Mary Libraries Faculty Scholar Program
- William & Mary Charles Center for Undergraduate Research
We are extremely grateful to the individuals and communities who considered our proposals and found something in them worth believing in.
With special thanks
There are many people we are grateful to, but some deserve special attention here. Brett Barney, Research Associate Professor at the Center for Digital Research at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has provided guidance throughout our project planning and continues to advise our work with TEI. His patience, generosity, and support were integral to the successful development of this project from proposal to publication. The creation of the website and our innovative diary viewer would not have been possible without the talents of Justin Dalton, William & Mary Libraries Head of Digital Infrastructure, Applications & Digitization, and Sudipta Banerjee, Library Web Developer. Designer Lola Babalola helped us realize our vision for the BWDP branding and website, providing her skills and creativity at just the right time.
Norfolk, Virginia
St. John’s A.M.E. Church
While working on the Florence Barber diary, Reverend Christian Savage welcomed our team to St. John’s A.M.E. Church in Norfolk, Virginia, and allowed us to do research in their amazing collection of church records. He helped us understand what it meant for Florence Barber to be a part of the St. John’s community in the early twentieth century. Members of his congregation allowed us to present our work to them and we were honored to hear them talk about their own family histories and memories. We are grateful to the people at St. John’s and hope we have done justice to the memory of their church and their community.
Our students
Our deepest gratitude goes to the students who have enrolled in the Digital Humanities Lab at William & Mary or have worked for the project in some other capacity, and have made invaluable contributions to the Black Women’s Diaries Project. They are:
- Jacob Brown
- Deanna Cena
- Fabi Corso
- Sapphire George
- Marlow Gilkey
- Josephine Halushka
- Micah Hutchings
- Chloe Jones
- Mia Hunt
- Ziz Kilmer
- Jennifer Otieno
- Alice Pancake
- Lila Reidy
- Ragan Tankard
- Kaitlyn Weathers
- Ava Wladar
We selected one student to lead the work on each diary–Ziz Kilmer (Florence Barber), Micah Hutchings (Mary Virginia Montgomery), and Sapphire George (Sallie Sanders Venning)--and are especially appreciative of their efforts and their commitment to the diarists, the diaries, and the Black Women’s Diaries Project.
From Jennifer Putzi
Finally, Jennifer Putzi would like to thank Carrie Cooper, former Dean of William & Mary Libraries and current Dean of University Libraries at Florida State University, and Lisa Nickel, Associate Dean of Research & Public Services at William & Mary Libraries, for their support and encouragement for this project and for making her feel at home at the library. She is also grateful to Arthur Knight, Claire Pamment, Kara French, and Suzanne Raitt, for facilitating her appointment as Faculty Scholar. For their patience and training, she thanks:
- Constance Crompton and Lee Zickel(Text Encoding Fundamentals and Their Application, at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, or DHSI)
- Elisa Beshero-Bondar and David J. Birnbaum(Processing Your XML/TEI With the XML Family of Languages, DHSI)
- James Smith(Agile Project Management, DHSI)
- Alex Alisauskas and Lily Demet(Spatial Visualization in/for Digital Humanities Research, DHSI)
- Shannon White, Jesús Delgado, and Katy Rossiter(Introduction to Geographic Information Systems and Spatial Analysis, Center for Geospatial Analysis, William & Mary)
William & Mary Libraries
Special Thank You
This development and founding of this project would not have been possible without the support of William & Mary Libraries through the Faculty Scholar Program.
W&M Libraries created the Faculty Scholar position in 2016 to support tenured W&M faculty working full-time to advance an open educational resource while furthering library and institutional priorities. The Faculty Scholar works closely with library staff for up to three academic years to advance new or existing research and make it openly accessible. Jennifer Putzi was selected as the third Faculty Scholar in 2024 to produce the Black Women’s Diaries Project. Members of the W&M Libraries staff who worked on this project are all listed by name on the Our Team page.
- 2016Program created
- 3Academic years, up to
- 2024Jennifer Putzi, third Faculty Scholar
Additionally, this website was specifically built with the guidance and labor of the William & Mary Libraries Digital Scholarship Projects Team.
Transparency
AI Disclosure Statement
The Black Women’s Diaries Team wrote and edited all of the essays and did all of the transcriptions, encoding, annotations, research, and editing for the diary editions found on this project website. AI was only used to transform the TEI-XML documents into HTML for the diary viewer and to write the initial code for the website. Any part of the website that was initially generated using Claude Opus 5.5 and Claude Sonnet 5.5 was repeatedly reviewed, edited, and approved by the BWDP Team and W&M Libraries Digital Scholarship Projects Team before the publication of this website.
- By the BWDP TeamEssays, transcriptions, encoding, annotations, research and editing
- AI-assisted, then reviewedTEI-XML to HTML conversion for the viewer and the initial website code
