FWP Life History Project in the American South: Machine Readable Text and Metadata

License: GPL-2

The data is created from documents in the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) Papers, 1936-1940 held at The Southern Historical Collection at the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. From 1936-1939, writers were sent across the American South to record life histories as a part of the Southern Life History Project. Previously only PDFs, each life history has been transformed into a .txt file. The csv files include metadata about the life histories such as writer name along with their race and gender, interviewee name along with their race and gender, reviser along with race and gender, location of the interview, and year. The data was designed for a historical research project, so scholars made decisions about race and gender guided by their expertise on the era and the analytical questions driving the project. It should be noted that labeling people by race and gender is a complicated process and practice of power, so care should be taken when using these categories. The data only includes the life histories held at UNC-CH, so it is not a complete collection of all life histories conducted in the region. The data was created for the Photogrammar project with funding from an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Digital Extension Grant. As a condition of the funding, the data is made available under a GNU Public License (GPL).

Available files

Each life history is stored in a txt file, available in the directory text. Files are named according to "interview_XXXX_YYY.txt" where "XXXX" refers to the archival folder number and "YYY" provides the start page for the interview in the PDF filed (some folders contain multiple interviews).

The metadata files are stored as normalized csv files in the directory "csv". The following files are available:

• interview.csv contains one row for each interview, with columns such as the date, location, and title of the interview
• interviewee.csv contains one row for each listed interviewee, along with available information such as race, age, and gender; some interviews are linked to multiple people
• occupation.csv contains listed occupations mentioned in each interview
• writer.csv contains one row for each of the writers involved with the project
• reviser.csv information about editor that revised the interview before it was published
• interviewee_crosswalk.csv links the interviews to the interviewees
• reviser_crosswalk.csv links the interviews to the revisers
• writer_crosswalk.csv links to the interviews to the writers

The original archival material is held by the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Digital versions are made available at: Collection Title: Federal Writers' Project Papers, 1936-1940.

Citation

To cite this dataset, please reference:

Arnold, Taylor, Emeline Blevins Alexander, Courtney Rivard, Lauren Tilton,
and Laura Wexler. (2020). "FWP Life History Project in the American South:
Machine Readable Text and Metadata." (Version 1.0) [Data Set]. Zenodo.
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3865765