Hello again, everyone! The last few blog posts have been chronicling my role as the DH intern over this past school year. The last blog post talked about my work with the Oral History collections.
For the next step in my research, I turned to the 1930-1939 Oklahoma State University (then Oklahoma A&M) yearbooks. The questions I hoped to answer were:
- How did students get around town?
- What did they eat?
- How did they pay for school?
- Were there student jobs?
- Where did the students come from?
- Where did they live?
These yearbooks are digitized and available on the Edmon Low Library website. I began by reading through each yearbook, taking notes of things that would answer any of our research questions. I made notes of pages that I wanted to print off or come back to later. I also took notes of what the women were wearing (because fashion history is really cool) and other things that would supplement our questions.
This project took me the rest of the semester, but it yielded a fantastic amount of information. Unfortunately, it gave me 50 new questions. I went and explored the collections in Archives, Maps and Spatial Data, and Government Documents looking for answers, but I think that answering them all would take quite a bit longer. The information that I did find became useful later when I wrote a paper about my project to present at the end of the Spring 2019 semester.
In December, I began working on a project mapping the restaurants and food stores around town. The backs of the yearbooks have advertisements for restaurants, grocery stores, doctors, and clothing stores. Through mapping these places, it could be useful for determining how college students got around town. Did they walk? Did they have cars? I created a spreadsheet with the advertisements and their addresses. This project was set aside for the time being, but I’d like to come back to it as a mapping project.
Below, I’ve added some of my favorite Yearbook pictures.