Session 1 Abstracts

City of the Big Solvers: Learning about the city through the lens of those making it a better place 

Sharon Bloyd Peshkin, Professor, Communication, Columbia College Chicago

Columbia College Chicago offers a first-semester freshman class called “Big Chicago” that introduces students to the city of Chicago as a place of inquiry and exploration. Each section takes the pedagogical angle of the professor who creates and teaches it. I am applying the framework of solutions journalism – rigorously reported stories that center responses to problems – to introduce students to Chicago through the lens of the people, organizations and initiatives seeking to make Chicago a better place for all its inhabitants. This course is meant to shift the narrative, centering the voices of those responding to problems in their neighborhoods, communities and the city at large. Students will learn to investigate and explain how those responses are implemented, find evidence of their effectiveness, identify what they are unable to achieve, and recognize insights that can be gleaned from them and applied to other problems.

Hidden Voices + Unexpected Sources = New Resources: Using Archives to Look at Information in New Ways

Janet Olson, Archivist
Frances Willard House Museum and Woman’s Christian Temperance Union Archives

 Our ongoing project, “The Black Women of the WCTU,” shows how archival materials can be mined for data that can be mapped and visualized, creating new resources to explore women’s networks. This research database will increase knowledge about Black women’s activism and social networks in Chicago and across the country. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the largest women’s organization in the US in the 19th century, empowered women to speak out about the social issues causing alcoholism. What is little known is that many WCTU members were non-white women—many of them Black—whose impact has been overlooked. The collections at the Frances Willard House Museum & WCTU Archives document their activism, but the information is difficult to access. This session demonstrates how, inspired by other digital projects, we are using our archival sources as data that will help researchers of all ages bring hidden stories to light