Tami Blog #7: Documenting the American South: First-Person Narratives Collection

First-Person Narratives Collection

Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes 12 thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.

Collection Principles

One of those collections, “First-Person Narratives of the American South," is a compilation of diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, travel accounts, and ex-slave narratives written by Southerners. The majority of materials in this collection are written by those Southerners whose voices were less prominent in their time, including African Americans, women, enlisted men, laborers, and Native Americans. "First-Person Narratives of the American South, 1860-1920" was a 1996/97 Award Winner in The Library of Congress/Ameritech National Digital Library Competition. This award funded the digitization of 101 texts.

Object Characteristics and Metadata

Each narrative contains a clickable table of contents, including the jpeg illustrations from the narrative and a list of subjects in which this narrative belongs. Most of the narratives contain illustrations of the book, spine, frontispiece, title page, and a list of illustrations contained in the narrative. Clicking on the List of Illustrations takes you to a table of content -styled listing of the illustration titles and page numbers. Click on the page number and you are taken to the illustration, which includes the name of the illustration, the page on which it can be found, and a list of additional subjects (metadata) that apply to this illustration. In addition, at the top of every page of the narrative is the title of the narrative, name of illustrator, author, publisher, and publishing year. You also have the option of clicking to the previous or next illustration in that narrative. The jpegs cannot be zoomed but are of good size and can be easily read. The transcribed text of the narrative can be viewed as either an HTML file or an XML/TEI source file. The only disappointment I had with this collection was the inability to search in each individual collection. You only had the option to search through all 12 at one time.

Intended Audience

While appropriate for all, these collections are particularly useful in a classroom environment. The site offers a variety of classroom resources, including a teacher’s toolkit, lesson plans, and guides to other sources. I spent quite a while reading the narratives in this collection and found it fascinating and engrossing. I believe these collections would also be useful to scholars of the South, slavery, and the suffragette movement. It was an interesting and controversial time and I feel that these collections do a good job of representing that era by letting you experience it through the words of the participants.